Tales from the Inbox: The Fugitive of the Zenith Treader

2954-05-27 – Tales from the Inbox: The Fugitive of the Zenith Treader 

It is interesting to me that this account appears to be completely candid; it displays the submitters in a less than glowing light. Their judgement and mechanisms for solving problems are checkered at best, and they seem to know it, despite also insisting their ship’s reputation is clean. 

The biggest example of this rather frank self-reflection is the relationship between the skipper and her helmsman, and it is for this reason more than any other I believe that the submitters are the people they claim to be, and that their decision not to anonymize the account was deliberate. I am afraid I don’t think it will be good for business. 

Gareth Glass and Ellia Kossner found that Cabin number nine, the one at the far aft of the lower deck, which had the gently curved hab-space pressure hull as one of its bulkheads. Being out of the way and having the view out its viewports blocked by the extensible reactor heat-sinks much of the time, it wasn’t even used as a guest berth for passengers. Gareth hadn’t ever seen the inside. 

This time, it seemed he wasn’t going to see the inside either. The door controls emitted a flat buzz when either of them tried to open it. Even when the skipper used the command override, the door refused to open; it repeated the sound and displayed a numeric fault code on its tiny display. 

“Well then.” Ellia sighed. “Let’s get the techs to open it. Guess we’re finding out which of them is double-timing pretty quick.” 

Gareth held up a hand, then looked down the corridor towards the stairs to make sure nobody was within earshot, then took Ellia by the arm and led her away from the locked cabin. “It’s Lowell. But we don’t want to open it.” 

“Oh?” The skipper arched one eyebrow. 

“We’re a full day from the holding orbit. No knowing how long after that they’ll make us wait. When Lowell knows she’s busted, do you think she’ll accept fate and go quietly?” 

Ellia tapped the side of her head and smiled. “Remind me why I’m in command again, Gareth?” 

“Because you own the ship, Ellia.” 

“Right.” She sucked on her teeth for a few moments, as if pondering the situation. “I think you’re right. But we’re going to have a devil of a time keeping this quiet after a patrol ship is visible out the viewports. And if they do make us wait...” 

Gareth nodded. “I’ll put our belly toward the military ship when it arrives. Open the cargo bay. Can’t hurt to make it clear we’ve got nothing to hide. Maybe there are one or two things we can do to keep her distracted, too.” He’d thought of at least one, in fact, but he hated it. 

“Think you can get them to accept that we’ve got someone and something to turn in?” 

“Probably not. We annoyed them too much as it is. Once we’re in range for immediate two-way comms tomorrow, maybe.” 

“In that case, your shift ends now. We both need to be on duty four hours before rendezvous.” With that, Ellia went up the stairs to the upper deck. 

Gareth stood there, frowning, for a few seconds. He had an inkling that the Skipper knew what had occurred to him, and was freeing him up to put his thoughts into motion, without sanctioning it directly. She normally let him come up with all the bright ideas, and think the worst of people, but Gareth knew from long experience that she was capable of taking on this duty if she needed. Perhaps she knew, too, that Gareth would refuse on principle, if he was asked to do what he was now contemplating. 

With a sigh, Gareth checked the shift roster. Lowell was finishing her personal-time shift and headed into a sleep shift in a couple hours. She’d be on leisure-time as the rendezvous approached, and no doubt she’d be nervously checking every indication allowed to her that might spell trouble. But if for some reason she were not to sleep during her sleep-shift, she would then be obligated to ask (and be granted by her obliging Captain) a change of schedule, which would put her on duty (and easily dispatched to some intensive task deep in the ship’s innards) during the rendezvous. 

That was where Gareth’s terrible idea came in. He needed to give her something more interesting to do than sleep, something that would put her off thinking about her smuggled cargo, whatever it was. 

“Fine, fine.” Gareth said to himself. After dashing off a heads-up to the skipper to approve any schedule change requests Lowell might send in, he set off up to the main deck to see where she might be. 

It turned out Lowell was in the lounge, the broad compartment just below the command deck which projected from Zenith Treader’s ship’s upper bow. She was wearing tight-fitting exercise attire rather than her uniform, and her hair was coming loose from its tight bun. A food-fab beverage of some sort in hand, she was gazing out the window, ignoring Sung, who was reading on his slate in the nest of lounge-chairs at the back of the space. 

“Evening, Sung. Lowell.” Gareth waved to each as he approached the food-fab and ordered a coffee. 

Sung raised an eyebrow – she knew the crew schedule by heart, and would know Gareth was supposed to be on duty – but said nothing. She didn’t much like Gareth, but she knew well enough that he wasn’t one to shirk his duties. 

“Isn’t this still your work shift?” Lowell asked. Evidently she’d mastered the schedule, too. 

“Theoretically.” Gareth shrugged. “Skipper sent me off-shift early.” 

Lowell frowned. “Why?” 

“Didn’t say, but I can guess.” Gareth pointed up to the command deck over their heads. “She’s probably going to call in a favor to get us docking clearance faster.” 

Sung frowned at this. Ellia Kossner was not above the back channels, of course, but it was strange to hear such a thing spoken openly aboard. Given that she and Estrada hadn’t socialized much with the rest of the crew on their first run aboard, Lowell probably didn’t sense that something was out of place. 

“Oh. That’s... good, I suppose.” Lowell took a step closer to Gareth. “Isn’t it?” 

“For the timetable, it is. But we’ll pay for it later I’m sure.” 

Sung muttered something about needing to get ready for her shift and left the lounge. Lowell watched her go, then turned back to Gareth. “She doesn’t like you.” 

“Nope.” Gareth smiled. “Never has. But she’s good at what she does, and I’m good at what I do, and we work on opposite ends of the ship.” 

Lowell laughed a little at this, then finished off her drink and tossed the bottle into the receptacle just as Gareth bent to collect his coffee from the machine. “You know, I don’t think we’ve been off-shift and awake together once this entire voyage.” 

Gareth nodded. “That’s how the schedule worked out. Sorry it put you on duty with Sung while the skipper and I are asleep.” 

“I don’t mind the quiet, mostly.” Lowell shrugged. “But it does get a little lonely sometimes.” 

Gareth nodded. “I can imagine. But hey. For the next...” He checked his chronometer. “Two hours and five minutes, I’ve got nothing planned. Got a favorite holo-drama that’s about that long?” 

Lowell brightened and nodded. “I think I do.” 

Gareth grinned, but inwardly he suppressed a cringe. He hated to be getting to know the woman under these circumstances, but then, it was for the good of the ship, and the rest of the crew. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Treasure of the Zenith Treader

2954-06-03 – Tales from the Inbox: The Treasure of the Zenith Treader 

Gareth Glass slipped out of the bed as quietly as he could and hunted for his uniform tunic, glad for the sound camouflage afforded by the Tranquility Wave music warbling in the overhead speakers. 

Patricial Lowell, still asleep, groaned contentedly as she rolled over into the space he had just vacated. 

Gareth winced as he found his trousers and snuck into the sanitary cubby, sliding the door shut before he turned on the light. He ran the cleanser only briefly, then dressed and killed the light. He didn’t open the door until his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and then he peeked out to make sure the woman was still where he’d left her before he snuck out. 

There was no way to kill the corridor lighting, and the harsh glare falling on Patricia’s face would certainly wake her. Gareth wished he’d thought about this eight hours earlier, and it took a few moments to devise a solution. He withdrew a spare blanket from the cabinets and held it out in front of himself, backing up into the door alcove, and hooked it into the tie-points for the decorative bead-curtains some spacers preferred to use in their cabins. After feeling to verify it covered most of the opening, he hurriedly palmed the control, hopped out, and activated the hard-lock. 

“How are we doing, Ellia?” He asked into his comms earpiece, hurrying along the corridor. 

“They’re still mucking around over there. The idiots probably think they’re making us sweat.” Ellia Kossner, skipper of the Zenith Treader, replied. “How’s our suspect?” 

“Secure.” Gareth tried to keep his tone professional. Obviously, his boss hadn’t asked him to do anything like what he’d done, nor even asked what he was doing, but she was certainly not ignorant. “Have you killed her systems access?” 

“Hours ago. Then Sung and I got a look into cabin number nine.” 

Gareth stopped and scowled. “That was not a good idea.” 

“I disagree. Come on up to command.” 

The ship not being particularly large, Gareth stepped through the doorway onto Treader’s command deck ninety seconds later to find Kim Sung and Ellia Kossner both seated there at the auxiliary consoles. The view forward and up, relative to the A-grav axis, showed only the bright blue orb of Sagittarius Gate, but most of the screens showed feeds from the ventral cameras, all locked onto the blocky, weapon-studded silhouette of a Confederated Navy corvette. 

Kossner gestured to Gareth’s usual seat at the helm station. “Sit down, Gareth. Sung, show him precisely how his new girlfriend has shafted us.” 

Sung snorted and tapped a few controls. The screen above her switched to show a recording apparently taken from the door of cabin number nine.  

Gareth was relieved that his shipmates hadn’t gone any farther than that, but his relief ended as soon as he saw the polymer habitat enclosure, and the chitinois, oblong creature within it. “Oh, hellfire.” He’d been expecting narcotics, or illegal weapons, or even maybe exotic, hard to find foodstuffs. “Is that a shardspinner? How did it get on board? That cage would barely fit through the hatch!” 

“She had to have connections in the Maribel the service yard.” The skipper sighed. “That means a syndicate. Why they want one of those things on this side of the Gap, who knows, but this thing is an inter-empire incident waiting to happen.” 

Sung changed the display to show a clear still-shot of the animal. “Shardspinners are a protected species native only to-” 

“Jack-of-Clubs. Yes, I know.” Gareth waved the screen away. “Closely guarded Hegemony monopoly. Illegal to take them off world.” As a teenager, he’d worked for his uncle, a jeweler. The exorbitant prices assigned to spinner stones, and the reason for the cost, was only too well known to him. “And here we are on the other side of the Reach with one aboard.” 

Sung changed the screen again, showing the vast distances between Jack-of-Clubs and Sagittarius Gate. “Tensions on the Strand border aren’t particularly high right now, with the Navy fighting out here on the other side of space. Somebody relaxed too much, and something slipped through.” 

“And we need to figure out how we’re not going to pay for it.” Ellia shook her head grimly. “The Hegemony is going to demand heads. More than one lone smuggler. And here we are-” 

“Conveniently holding the bag.” Gareth nodded. “As witnesses and independent contractors, entirely expendable to settle the situation without need for an in-depth investigation.” 

A long moment of silence fell. Gareth wondered whether they could kill the thing and destroy all evidence of its presence before the cutter’s boarding crew got its act together. Probably not. “What’s the call, Skipper?” 

Ellia Kossner reached across her terminal and tapped a control. “I’m not going down quiet.” Her voice was cold and hard in a way Gareth hadn’t heard before. “They want to make a mess go away? They need our cooperation.” 

Gareth glanced at his controls and saw the comms antenna active, as it would be during an exchange of routine traffic with the local datasphere. “Did you just-” 

Another indicator lit up. Sung turned to her console. “Cutter is hailing. Priority comms.” 

Ellia took her seat at the command station at the center of the command deck. “Main display, Ms. Sung.” She set her jaw. “Both of you keep quiet and look as confused and frightened as you can. If this doesn’t work, you might be able to plead out individually.” 

Gareth shook his head. “Ellia-” 

“Shut up, Gareth.” Kossner gestured to Sung to continue. “Look nervously busy.” 

This is the part that gives me pause about this story. Obviously, there hasn’t been any indication of such a sensational scandal in the media. Perhaps the identity of the cargo has been altered, but given that I can find nothing else about this story that has been changed to salve the egos or the reputations of the participants, that’s a little bit hard to believe. 

A shardspinner escaping tight Hegemony reputation this catastrophically, syndicate involvement or no, would be, as the account suggests, a vast controversy. Even if the government were hushing it up, I find it hard to believe we wouldn’t hear rumors – or that Naval Intelligence would simply permit me to publish it in this way, if it were true. 

If someone has the answer to this puzzle, send it our way. 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Deal For the Zenith Treader

2954-06-10 – Tales from the Inbox: A Deal For the Zenith Treader 

This is the end of the account provided. The participants are promising that they will never speak of the events again, yet it was submitted to this embed team, and has no obvious textual indications of being altered for privacy (changing the nature of the cargo or its resulting security breach, for example).  

None of my contacts could come up with anything that it might refer to in the Navy’s records, but of course, if it is true, the Navy would have locked any records behind every layer of secrecy clearance it has. 

The Navy officer that appeared in the main display wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his fury. “Zenith Treader, desist from communicating with the station at once, except for regular traffic.” He leaned forward, glowering. “Our inspection party is assembling now.” 

Ellia Kossner sniffed dismissively. “There is no section of the Law of the Spacelanes that prevents personal comms traffic during an inspection stop, and that cutter’s not carrying enough gear to jam us anyway.” She arched one eyebrow. “My crew and I have nothing to hide, Lieutenant. Do you? Send them over without delay.” 

“In times of war, comms discipline-” 

“Are you accusing us of espionage, sir?” Ellia absently tapped a few controls on the side of her command chair. “I will inform the station constabulary of the need for a tribunal. My legal counsel can be reached-” 

The man’s eyes flashed. This interaction clearly wasn’t going the way he’d intended. “I am not accusing you or your crew of anything yet.” He said slowly. “But you are acting quite suspiciously.” 

“By communicating with my business partners on the Sprawl?” Ellia shrugged. “It would be more suspicious if I did not explain the delay. Do send your inspection team.” 

In a flash, Gareth Glass realized what all the obfuscation, the refusal to explain, and the needless delay were about. Hurriedly, he tapped out a text message to send over to the skipper’s display. He didn’t dare glance over his shoulder to see if she noticed it. 

“These things take time.” The lieutenant growled. “Your schedule is not my concern.” 

“But yours is.” Ellia chuckled. “I can afford the wait.” 

Gareth winced; they couldn’t, not really. Sure, Ellia’s credit reserves were robust, but they weren’t robust enough to time out a whole contract delivery and miss out on the return cargo as well, especially if the station inspectors found something on Treader that needed overhauling before they went back across the Gap. That, of course, was the least of their problems right now. 

“You are making your situation worse.” The Lieutenant gestured to someone out of view. “You will be lucky to still have a single hull panel still attached to that miserable hulk when we’re through with it.” 

Ellia nodded, tapping on her controls again. “My panic would make your job that much easier, would it? If you actually did any of that, right under the nose of the Sprawl, you’d be scrubbing the heads on a prisoner transport by next weekend. Sure, I’d be dead, but you’d wish we’d swapped places before long.” She tapped the side of her nose. “I know what’s got you so twitchy, bud. What you really, really don’t want on the record. I wonder how many of your ship’s crew know?” 

The officer’s face darkened. “Know what?” 

“I know what you think we have. What you Navy dolts let slip this far. And if I were worried about going down for it, I’d be shaking in my little boots, but lucky me, I’m not your smuggler.” Ellia leaned back and held up a finger. “One button press, and all of Sagittarius knows. Unencrypted, emergency band broadcast. It’s all set up, all I have to do is hit this little red button, unless...” 

Gareth hunched his shoulders, half expecting a cloud of railshot to cross from the cutter to Zenith Treader and perforate its unprotected hull in that instant. No hail of death came, however. 

“I’m listening.” The officer scowled. “Make it quick.” 

“Smuggling is bad business.” Ellia held her hands up, away from the controls. “Especially smuggling of the sort you’re looking for. I’ve got a neat little package for you, as well as a full set of our datalogs so you can try to back-trace it in Maribel. Turning over criminals, that’s free. Transparency is our policy. But secrecy? That’s expensive.” 

The lieutenant considered this for a long moment. “Is that so.” His jaw tightened. “Hold one.” 

With that, the screen blanked. Again, Gareth expected weapons fire, but once again, he was disappointed. Ellia cracked her neck and stood up, pacing back and forth in front of her station. 

“Is this going the way we want?” Sung sounded little less nervous than Gareth. 

“Hells if I know.” Ellia chuckled nervously. “Got to bank on them not committing an atrocity in full view of the station. In any case, I’ve changed our emergency broadcast, in case we’re fired on, so he loses if he shoots.” 

“Assuming secrecy really is this important.” Gareth shuddered. 

“We have to assume that too.” The skipper nodded. 

Less than a minute later, Sung announced that the cutter was hailing again. Ellia took her seat, propping one leg up on the arm of the big command chair, and waved for the transmission to be put on the main display. 

“What does your silence cost?” The lieutenant asked. He’d apparently calmed down a little; his face was far less red than it had been. 

“We dock at the station and hand over what you want, plus a convenient culprit and all the data we have. The Navy makes good the late-fees we are currently building up.” Ellia held up a finger. “After that, we will never speak of any of this again as long as we never hear of it.” 

“You expect me to take your word for this?” 

Ellia shrugged. “Yes. I’m sure you’ve seen my psych-profile. Do you really think I’m in the business of breaking contracts?” 

The lieutenant clenched his jaw. “And what’s to stop me refusing?” 

“We will cooperate fully with your search, of course.” Ellia spread her hands. “But its object will be announced to station officials, and its progress transmitted to legal counsel, as is my right.” 

The officer nodded stiffly. “We can do it your way, Zenith Treader. We will send you a course and a docking berth shortly.” 

Gareth released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding when the screen blanked again. Ellia, too, slumped into her chair. 

“Good show, Skipper.” Sung got up and went to a locker at the rear of the command deck, and produced two handguns. “Come on, Glass. We need to get your little girlfriend ready for her big show.” 

Gareth looked at Ellia, who waved toward Sung wearily. With a sympathetic nod, he took a gun from his shipmate and followed her down to his cabin. 

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