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.