Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Misdirection

 

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Misdirection

We continue this week with the third of four installments of this account of smuggling illicit war material out of Anonga from Sacha T. I still have no good read on when this took place; it references scavenged battlefields on the Frontier but he was careful not to name any of them and thus give the reader a specific time-table.

I also suspect that he is lying about having been a luxury goods importer in Sol. Most likely given how easily he fell into notoriously untrusting smuggling circles, he was a narcotics dealer or a black marketeer there, too, and the comments about palling around with Earth’s high society are probably just part of how he anonymized this account.

[N.T.B. – Even if he was a drug pusher, those parts of the story ring true for me. Sol-based high society has always had a bit of a dark side, and avoiding this sort of company is a big reason I never bothered to climb Everest or complete any of the home-world’s other famous wilderness treks.]

 

By the time Sacha T. had completed a leisurely stroll through the station’s dingy concourse and was on his way back to his ship, he’d mostly reached an arrangement with the man from Malone. There was still no talk of what the cargo was, but that was normal; Sacha really didn’t want to know what it was. It was something the Malones had pulled off a battlefield on one of the worlds of the Coreward Frontier, and that made it both illicit and valuable.

Discussing business with walk-ins without getting into the messy complications of face to face meetings was something Sacha had kept from his heady days as a luxury goods importer on Earth. Though he’d clinked glasses with clients in some of the most expensive restaurants on that world, the cost of business that way had meant that his take-home income was really quite low. After a decade in that business, he’d had barely fifty thousand credits of savings, so he’d sold the importer company to the first idiot who had seemed interested and headed out toward the Frontier.

That had been only a few years ago, and he’d already made back the high cost of starting in a new line of work and set aside profits of more than five hundred thousand credits. There was danger, sure, but not much of it. This sort of business wasn’t exactly legal, true, but neither had been some of the things Sacha had done to streamline the customs problems around some of the goods he’d been selling on Earth. As long as nobody was getting hurt, he tried not to bother with the moral implications.

The basic gist of the Malone man’s problem was that his cargo was too hot to move with the organization’s normal transporters, but it didn’t have a terribly long shelf life and needed to reach its end customer before that shelf life expired. Sacha’s arrival on the station had been something of a stroke of luck for them; he was a known entity in the business, but so heavily associated with enemies of the Malones that most, even inside their own ersatz family, would think him unlikely to move their cargo.

Fortunately for them, Sacha had no particular loyalty to the organizations for which he normally moved goods. If he wanted to join them, he could have long ago; independence was part of how he maintained high profits and minimized risks. After extracting a few more thousand credits out of the representative, he remotely opened the airlock and let the two men go. By the time Sacha returned to his own ship, they were long gone. He knew he would not see either of them again; their cargo would arrive quietly via a go-between some time in the next hour.

Still, Sacha didn’t board his ship; he walked past the docking hatch to see if anyone was poking around, still disguised as an off-duty local. Whoever the Malones were worried about was not yet watching Sacha or his ship, a very good sign.

Requesting departure clearance would of course draw too much attention, so Sacha stopped in what was once a nicely upholstered viewport lounge area to call up a station schematic and find the backup control system for the docking clamps holding his ship in place just outside the docking ring. Normally, these panels were in off-limits areas and one needed local maintenance staff credentials to use them, but that would be no problem. He was heartened to see that the panel was placed within five meters of an airlock and a locker full of maintenance vac-suits; this simplified his job even further.

Accessing his ship’s systems remotely, Sacha spent a few minutes booking a two-day, one-night trip to the planet’s surface. From what he’d heard, Anonga was a wreck both culturally and environmentally, but there were still a few places near the spaceport catering to tourists and advertising reasonable prices. The cost of these bookings wasn’t refundable, but that was fine; the sunk credits would make it look like he was planning to meet a contact anonymously planetside.

As soon as his fictitious schedule was in place, Sacha pulled a security scrambler out of his pocket and went back out to the docking ring, wandering aimlessly until he spied an out-of-the-way maintenance access point. It took the scrambler only about thirty seconds to penetrate the hatch’s antiquated security program and slide it open. Now hidden from the prying eyes of the main station security system, he hurried back toward the control system for his ship’s docking clamp.

A moment before he arrived at the console, his ship’s security system pinged his comm. A trio of figures had arrived outside his ship’s cargo transfer hatch. Two were men in station cargo-master uniforms, and they flanked a young woman in an unmarked jumpsuit carrying two metal valises. This was no surprise; though the cargo capacity of Sacha’s ship exceeded fifteen tons once external cargo pods were loaded, the cargo he moved was usually not larger than a single crate.

Sacha set his scrambler to work on the terminal and remotely opened the cargo hatch just wide enough for a single person to step inside. Opening his comms through the ship’s sound system, he did his best to sound bored and distracted. “Just, ah, drop them just inside and I’ll get to them later. Payment is transferred.”

The young woman walked through the hatch just as the scrambler dinged; it had defeated the terminal. Sacha quickly set up the command to release his ship from the clamps, left it on the final key-press, then dashed down the narrow maintenance corridor to the space-suit locker. If everything went according to plan, he’d be out clean within two minutes.

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Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Escape

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Escape

Sacha T. shrugged on a vacsuit so old that it probably belonged in a Core Worlds museum and not the equipment locker of a spaceport, wondering how long it had been since it had been inspected, let alone used. Luckily, the suit’s pressure-safety wasn’t entirely necessary; the pressure-sealing failsafes and atmo-reserve present in even the most basic set of shipboard fatigues would be enough, and Sacha’s clothes were several grades above the most basic. Mainly, he needed the suit for its built in maneuvering thrusters; jumping out of the airlock and aiming for the side of his ship carried an unacceptable risk of tumbling out into the darkness, never to be seen again.

Carrying the suit helmet under his arm, Sacha returned to the console and his scrambler and transferred the security feed from his now-concealed cuff to one of its displays. He was just in time to see the two men retreating out of the range of the security cameras, but there was no sign of the girl.

It might have been reasonable to expect that she had departed first and the men had waited until she was gone to leave, but Sacha hadn’t made his name in the trade by making reasonable assumptions. He switched to the ship’s internal security feeds and cycled through several, until he found her sitting cross-legged on the catwalk on the upper level of the cargo bay, eyes closed and two cases full of valuable cargo stacked neatly in her lap.

Sacha gritted his teeth. This was not how to conduct business smoothly. If the Malones didn’t trust him alone with their cargo, they shouldn’t expect him to move it aboard his ship. He jabbed a few buttons and started a warning klaxon in the cargo bay, hoping to scare the girl off, but she barely flinched at the sound or the accompanying flashing lights.

Briefly, he debated stripping off the suit, going down to the cargo loading dock, and dragging the unfortunate syndicate lackey out by her hair, but that would make a scene bound to draw unwanted attention, and keep him in dock far too long. If the Malones really were dodging BCI, he couldn’t take that chance. Neither was he willing to incur the costs and risks of coming all the way back to drop her back off.

In the end, Sacha decided to just put up with it, do the job, and drop her wherever the cargo was going.  With a sigh, he closed and sealed the cargo bay doors. He could pass her meal-packs through the accessway and never let him into the main part of the ship. If the Malones had expected him to provide a more comfortable voyage, they should have paid the extra fee for passengers Sacha normally levied. If she made trouble – and he almost hoped she would – he’d be able to evacuate the cargo bay and deliver the cargo in peace.

Jamming the old suit’s helmet into place and locking its seals down, Sacha glanced down the narrow accessway toward the airlock, estimating that it would take him about four seconds to get there without tripping, and another three to blow-cycle the airlock. The docking clamps holding his ship in place would take about fifteen seconds to release, and the autopilot would wait perhaps ten seconds after that to kick in the maneuvering thrusters and push away from the station. Those would take a few more seconds to accelerate the ship to a point where he couldn’t hope to catch up to it with suit thrusters. He had less than thirty seconds to be holding onto the outer hull of his ship, or this was going to be a very short and painfully embarrassing journey.

Fortunately, Sacha had done this a few times before, and had practiced it dozens of times more at a friendly dark harbor. Half-turning toward the airlock, he picked up his scrambler and pressed the override for the clamps.

As klaxons began to blare and red lights began to flash in the maintenance passage, Sacha saw a figure appear in an intersection past the airlock, then turn and shout something unintelligible over the alarms. This was a surprise; he hadn’t figured the station crew at a place like Anonga would discover his breach for at least ten more minutes.

There was no time to second-guess, however, and the figure had already caused him one precious second. Sacha started moving casually forward, waving one hand and tapping the side of his helmet as if telling the figure to switch to a different comms channel.

The figure reached for a sidearm, then paused, confused by Sacha’s casual demeanor. The pause lasted only a second or two, but by the time he overcame it, Sacha was within range to dive the last meter into the airlock and slam the control to seal it and initiate an emergency blow-cycle.

As air roared out into space around him, Sacha saw the man through the airlock door’s tiny, triangular window. He snapped a quick salute, then turned around as the outer doors irised open. It would only take the man a few seconds to override and shut them, so Sacha jumped out headfirst, his stomach lurching as he passed over the boundary of the station’s gravitic system and into microgravity.

Correcting his tumble, Sacha could tell from the chronometer in his helmet that he was precious seconds later than he’d intended, but that he still had time to reach his ship. The clamps had almost finished their travel, and his ship was already drifting lazily away from the rotating docking ring. The boarding umbilical had already parted, and now the only way aboard was his way.

Putting the suit’s thrusters at maximum, Sacha sped across the open space toward the lower aft hull of his ship, which happened to be closest. It would be an annoying climb up to one of the hatches on the dorsal crew space, but he could do that after the station was far behind.

A few seconds before impact, Sacha flipped the thrusters around to the front and put them on maximum, slowing himself down. This was the most stomach-turning part of the whole process for him – if he’d timed something wrong, or decelerated too hard, he’d lose too mant seconds and be forced to watch the ship shove off without its skipper.

Fortunately, this time, Sacha didn’t mistime or misjudge the braking burn. He hit the ship hard enough to set off warning lights in the suit, but not hard enough to bounce off out of A-grav range. As he slid down the hull under simulated gravity, he grabbed two of the handholds that studded the hull of almost any starship to slow his movement, then clipped a safety line to a third.

Almost as soon as he’d clipped in his line, the maneuvering program started, and the stars and station spun around Sacha’s head. Inside the ship’s A-grav, he felt none of the acceleration, but the visual effect was enough to disturb the equilibrium of his stomach all the same.

Only when the station began to shrink into the distance did Sacha breathe a sigh of relief. Opening a channel to the helm, he set in an outward course to the jump limit, dismissing automated warnings about departure and flight plan clearance sent by the station’s traffic control. Anonga had no system defense force worth mentioning, so he was clear, as long as the alert they sent out didn’t match his ship the next time he came into dock.

Interestingly, Sacha avoided mentioning in his account who the girl was, or why she had been put aboard his ship by the criminal syndicate he was working for. He ended it with a perfunctory note about the rest of the run being fairly standard, probably to conceal a few more tricks which he doesn’t want to put out there.

It seems he sent this in to us because this sort of unauthorized departure has been widely copied; I found more than thirty reports of ships (none of which are likely to be Sacha’s) blowing their way out of a spaceport in roughly this manner in the last sixty days, and I was just searching the Coreward Frontier and Farthing’s Chain. Perhaps he is hoping to see the practice leave common use by bringing it to the attention of the community, or perhaps he is claiming to have invented this trick and thus this being published solidifies his credibility with the underground.

[N.T.B. – I think our friend Sacha may be having this published as a way of covertly calling out his employers. I asked around; the Malones are really a syndicate really believed to be working in salvaged and stolen war materiel from both sides. By naming them in the public eye and detailing some of their methods, he’s taking the money out of their hands that they took out of his by not paying him for passenger freight for their cargo-minder, and establishing a convention that those who don’t deal fairly with him can’t expect the usual secrecy he treats their cargoes.]

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Tales from the Service: The Pale Tree

2951-04-26 – Tales from the Service: The Pale Tree 

Sagittarius Gate is a strange place. 

There are no worlds here. That means that no matter where your ship is, no matter what direction you look, there’s nothing green to look at. Spacers used to arriving at a port and seeing a green (or at least brown) planet dominating local space might find the main port here quite unsettling; it’s just floating out here, without even a large asteroid in the vicinity. 

As has been hinted at in this feed and covered by other people, the spaceport here is unique in other respects among military facilities. It grew out of a civilian installation and still has a number of civilian trade-station features, including a sizable population of civilian residents and refugees living aboard, not all of which is human. 

The admiralty has taken pains to construct a large low-gee garden habitat pod aboard the spaceport. Though the greenery is not fully mature (and some specimens may not be for nearly a decade), the facility remains a staple of the limited shore leave available to Navy spacers here. 

Unfortunately, this facility’s rapid construction means that its collection of plant specimens is as non-standard as the rest of Sagittarius Gate. Many sections were populated with xenobotanical specimens harvested before the war on Sagittarius worlds, and not all of these are fully understood. While most were generally regarded as safe, this account of events only a few months ago suggests that at least one supposedly benign species proved itself to be a source of unending trouble. It was removed from the public garden shortly afterward, and yes, the names and postings of the miscreants in this account have been scrambled to protect them from embarrassment.

Director Roland Vang glanced between the two red-faced spacers sitting in his office. The one on the left, a man who the station’s computer identified as Petty Officer Ogden from the fleet tender Annette Gabler, kept his eyes fixed on the window looking out over the steam-wreathed foliage of the station’s botanical garden. The woman on the right, one Technician Aritza from the cruiser Angeljay, was performing an in-depth study of the patterned carpet covering the office’s deck plating. Both were wearing botanical staff coveralls, though neither had any business doing so. 

“Where did you find them?” Roland looked up to the botanical technician who had brought them in, who was still holding his pruning hook. Perhaps, he considered, it was time to reconsider the rule that precluded his subordinates from carrying side-arms while on duty. 

“Sector Five, Terrace G.” The technician sneered at the backs of the pair of miscreants. “Put ‘em out an airlock, boss. They trampled almost half of the Ulora Sweetlilies.” 

Roland winced. He had no authority to perform summary executions, and the technician knew it, but the destruction of several dozen of such a rare and difficult-to-propagate xeno-specimen would certainly be felt for some time. Replacement seed-bulbs would have to be brought from Hegemony space, on the other side of the Reach, then shipped across the Gap, then painstakingly planted and encouraged. Terrace G would not be the same for nearly a full Terran year. 

“I’ll take care of them.” Roland waved to the botanical tech.  

The man tossed his pruning hook over one shoulder and went out. Within seconds of the door closing behind him, an autonomous vacuum detached itself from the wall and began collecting the clods of muddy dirt his boots, and the boots of the two troublemakers had shed. 

Roland clasped his hands behind his back and turned around, knowing this would further discomfort his already uneasy guests. “Did you know that our little garden was recently designated a war-critical facility?” He kept his tone carefully neutral, without a hint of the disgust for these spacer heathens. He’d spent nearly two years organizing the greatest Sisyphean task ever imagined, the construction of a living leisure-garden hundreds of light-years from the nearest safe planet, and all it would take was a few dozen idiots like these two to pull it all down around his ears. 

The man remained silent, but after a long pause, the woman dared to speak. “Can we go?” 

Roland shrugged. “If you are content that my report on this incident uses the word ‘sabotage’ for your behavior, Miss Aritza, then yes. You may leave.” 

The implications took a moment to sink in. The punishment for sabotage of a war-critical resource was decades in lockup, and as Navy spacers, both had only the stern mercies of a scowling drumhead tribunal to plead their innocence to. In that sort of court, intent meant very little, if not nothing. 

“Now wait a damned minute!” Petty Officer Ogden stood up from his chair, his stolen botanical-tech coverall stretching around a frame several sizes too large for it. “We’re not saboteurs!” 

“Oh?” Roland looked over his shoulder for just a moment, then turned back to study the art print mounted to the bulkhead behind his desk. The print was of a painting that had once hung, in original, in his father’s office in the Xianping Arboretum. “What other explanation is there for stealing uniforms? Entering unauthorized areas? Destroying valuable specimens? Attempting to flee from my staff when confronted?” He paused for a moment, but not long enough to let either formulate an answer. "You will forgive me for seeing no other motive.” 

“No other-” 

“Hans.” Aritza interrupted her erstwhile partner. “Sit down. Let’s just tell him about the tree.” 

Roland finally turned around to face the pair. The man, scowling and folding his arms, at first looked ready to protest, but he seemed to deflate and sat back down. 

Roland barely paid the man any attention as he flopped back into his chair. His eyes were on the woman. She was not yet twenty-five, and rather pretty, with dark hair, long eyelashes, and light-bronze skin that suggested an arid-climate upbringing even trillions of kilometers away from any natural climate. 

What had his attention wasn’t her looks, though. It was the way her face was flushed. It wasn’t mere shame that had reddened her cheeks and spilled color down her neck past her collarbone where it vanished into her baggy stolen coverall. No, this was something else. Something more complicated than miscreancy caught in the act. It almost seemed like – dare he think it – arousal. 

Roland pulled his chair out from under the desk and sat down, perching his elbows on the desk and steepling his fingers. “Do elaborate.” If the pair had wanted a simple tryst, there were hundreds of better places to find privacy on the sprawling station than the botanical garden. Only the most drunken spacers would try to find the privacy for sexual contact in the hydroponic terraces, and these two clearly hadn’t been drunk. 

“We’re sorry about the flowers.” Ogden muttered at length. “We were trying to get close to the tree behind them.” 

Roland called up the inventory system and pulled up a specimen map of Section Five, Terrace G. There were three tree-like specimens planted behind the Sweetlilies, positioned to arch overhead while the flowers dangled over the side toward the pathway. One was a weeping mulberry all the way from Earth, another a Red Zipthorn from Maribel, and the third was an unremarkable local Sagittarian specimen which had no name, only a botanical catalog number. 

“This tree, here?” Roland pointed to the unnamed species in the hologram. “The one with light bark and brownish foliage?” 

“Er... Yes.” Ogden nodded, still avoiding Roland’s gaze. “It's a nice tree.” 

“And?” 

“A really nice tree.” It was Aritza who answered, her blush deepening. “It has something of a potent effect... It kept us busy almost two shifts the first time.” 

Roland didn’t need it spelled out any more clearly. “Are you trying to tell me that tree emits some sort of aphrodisiac?” 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Midnight Visitor

2951-05-03 – Tales from the Inbox: A Midnight Visitor

I have gotten many questions since last week’s entry about life and leisure aboard the Sagittarius Gate spaceport, and thought that I might answer a few of the most common before introducing this week’s entry.

The station’s name, officially, is Centaur Hub 2, but colloquially it’s known as the Sprawl. Centaur Hub 1 is an industrial facility built by the same firm just before the war started, and the other habitats in the system bear more standard designations.

The Sprawl is, as has been noted in these pages, home to populations of multiple Sagittarius-native sapient species, and many, many exotic pests. The Yixhari are the most common of these, but a tall, square-shouldered, lumpy-skinned humanoid known to Reach spacers as Cutters (they use scars as a form of self-ornamentation, hence the name) are perhaps the most interesting. I do hope to interview one of their more prominent representatives at some point; contact with their kind was lost in the flood of news surrounding the Lost Squadrons and I fear most of our audience has not heard of them. Their home-world is allegedly occupied by Incarnation forces, and they seem to want the Navy to help them liberate it.

 The food aboard the Sprawl is mostly the same as it is aboard ship, with a few exceptions courtesy of the gardens and a large hydroponic habitat that has been built in-system. In short, getting a salad is easy, getting a good Periclean ribeye is impossible.

The staff of the botanical garden does not, as a rule, permit poorly understood sapient species to enter their domain. This is not because there have been problems; they just don’t know whether any of their plants poses any threat to these beings. Strangely, the Nuisance (who do a good job of pretending not to know the meaning of off-limits most of the time) seem to avoid the place voluntarily. Perhaps something there really is poisonous for them.

The original main concourse of the station is actually rather small, owing to the fact that the Sprawl was never designed to grow as big as it currently is. A second concourse ring that isn’t much bigger than the first is the de-facto main area for commerce aboard, and the original has become something of a seedy locale, and despite military authorities doing their best to limit unsavory trades in Sagittarius Gate, black marketeering and other illicit activities seem to gravitate there.

Finally, yes, Sam Bosch is still with Seventh Fleet. Where he seemed destined for an Academy rotation after the Lost Squadrons were relieved, he ended up back in command of a cruiser after only a brief return journey to the Core Worlds. His new ship is the Cameron Hauer, a heavy cruiser much larger than his prior command but also much older. In fact, the ship is significantly older than Bosch himself, launched in the late 2890s. I have reached out and asked if he would like to give an interview, and he has not yet responded.

This week's entry (which we will continue for at least two successive weeks) comes from a reader back in Maribel aboard one of the civilian habitats in the outer system. Though Maribel has been raided several times, few of these habitats have been much threatened, since they are not terribly useful military targets and most of them are inconveniently placed for a marauding cruiser to perform a hit and run without subjecting itself to strike-craft harassment for a long period of time. The names used in this account have been anonymized by the sender, for reasons that may not be clear until next week's entry.

Noxolo L. blinked at the man who had been leaning on the door-chime for the last few minutes. He was tall, broad shouldered, and with that unmistakable air of officialdom which she’d learned not to have anything to do with under any circumstances. The dimmed night-cycle lighting cast his face into long shadows.

With a scowl, she hugged her robe closer to her body and slapped the door control. “Come back with a warrant. At a reasonable hour.”

The man put one huge arm in the path of the closing door panel, then used its brief hesitation to shoulder his way inside, having to duck under the regulation two-meter lintel to do so. Noxolo darted backward, emitting an effeminate squeak that would probably sound harmless and terrified. Even as she did, she flicked the safety off the stubby scattergun she’d pulled out from under her bed before answering the door. Whoever this was, whoever he worked for, would be the coroner’s business shortly.

The door hissed shut. Noxolo spun around and leveled the scattergun, bathrobe flying open. She’d never gotten the hang of pajamas, so the man would get one good look before his cranium was radically reorganized.

The man froze, hands raised. The butt of a gun protruded from a holster under his arm. “Noxie, it’s me.”

Noxolo knew that voice, even if it didn’t match the man’s stoically rectangular face. Her finger loosened its pressure on the trigger, seemingly of its own accord. “Damien?”

“I need your help and there isn’t much time.” Without lowering his hands, the man crossed one hand over the other wrist and tapped at a glowing marker on his cuff. His face shimmered, and the familiar angular, hawk-nosed features of Damien Falkner appeared there. He had a scar above his left eyebrow that hadn’t been there two years ago, and one cheekbone was puffy and discolored as if still healing from a recent bruise. He was doing his best – which had never been very good, even when Noxolo was mostly clothed – to maintain eye contact.

If Damien had expected Noxolo to drop the gun and rush into his arms, then he had never known her as well as she thought. Damien represented many pleasant memories, but also several painful ones. Instead, she lowered the weapon to point to the deck, then quickly grabbed the corners of her loose-hanging robe and held it closed over her otherwise naked body. “Stars afire, what lunacy brought you all the way out here?”

“That’s a story I’ll have to tell later.” Damien glanced meaningfully at the gun. “You’ve been practicing, I hope?”

Noxolo raised one eyebrow. “Of course.” Business had been good lately and she had gotten a bit lax with her practice sessions, but she knew she could still ace a Marine-style marksmanship drill.

Damien nodded, gesturing to the table and two chairs in the tenement’s front room. “Mind if I sit down?”

Noxolo glanced to the table, then back to Damien. One corner of her mouth tugged downward as she considered the question. After a few seconds, she shrugged and released her bath-robe to extend a hand, palm up, ignoring the fact that the garment flopped open all over again. After all, there was nothing underneath Damien hadn’t had the luxury of inspecting before, on quite a few occasions.

Damien frowned, trying to keep his eyes on her hand with extremely limited success. “My gun? Really?”

“You said there isn’t much time.” Noxolo wiggled her fingers. “So if you’re going to do the bruised ego dance, do it quickly.”

Damien sighed, then slowly pulled the gun out from his holster with two fingers. “I’ll need this back.” With one step, he crossed the distance between them and dropped the weapon into her palm.

Noxolo tucked Damien’s gun into the pocket inside her robe, then gestured with her own weapon toward the table. “Start talking, Damien, dear.” She leaned against the bulkhead, pressing one bare foot against its cool metal in a way that ensured her bare leg protruded from the opening of her robe. “I’m very curious why you think I would help you.”

Damien, his eyes not leaving Noxolo even though they took a leisurely tour of the dark skin not covered by her bath-robe, sat down at the table. As he did, his shoulders slumped, and his head drooped. “I wouldn’t have gotten you involved if there was any other way.” He paused and drew in a long, slow breath. “Everyone on this station is in danger, and I probably only have a shift or two to do something to stop it.”

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