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Rush Job
On the polished-white perspex desk by the holovid, the tiny grey printer chattered. The little stream of paper it was sending out into the dim room was no more than a handsbreadth across, and in the blue light of the sleeping screens the paper glowed cerulean blue.
Jamie Evans leaned back in her moulded desk chair, waiting for the printer to finish. The warm scent of the ink clouded around her and she drummed her fingers on the desk, impatient to see what the orders would bring.
The printer chattered on.
Jamie glanced up at the holoscreens that towered from her desk surface right up to the roof, wrapping around her in a glowing blue semi-circle in the small, dark control room of her shuttle. The screens continued their sleep, though, devoid of any new information.
Out of habit, she checked the navsystem: all clear, everything still on track, the shuttle scheduled to arrive at the space station Aphelion in a little over two hours.
Jamie drummed her fingers again as the printer continued its chatter. Damn thing never was fast enough.
She stretched languidly in her chair, briefly considered that she should maybe grab something to eat as her stomach rumbled, then decided against it as memories of her last visit to Aphelion surfaced.
Aphelion’s marketplace was famous throughout the entirety of clean space, with every kind of food—and every kind of human—in attendance. Along with a fair few other things, including everything you usually had to travel to Clan Space for.
Jamie’s lips quirked. Last time, she’d come away with a lifetime love for pecan cheesecake, a pocket scanner that should have taken two months and four thousand bucks to source if she’d done it legal, and a voucher for a dinner at Maxador, rumoured to be the best restaurant in not just this quadrant, but the entire galaxy.
Even the Witch Clans, it was rumoured, couldn’t do better than Maxador.
She stretched again and sighed. It was fifty-fifty whether she’d have time to cash in on that dinner on this trip. It all hinged on that strip of paper now trailing over the edge of the desk from the little printer.
The printer beeped, green light flashing.
Ha. At last. You’d have thought, Jamie mused, that in this day and age someone could invent a cryptron printer that was faster.
Jamie leaned forward, tore off the strip of paper, and turned it over. Arcane-looking symbols covered it in neat, diagonal lines. She squinted. She’d been receiving her orders in cryptron for eight years now, and despite the fact that it was designed to be an infallibly uncrackable cipher unless you had one of the patented and heavily legislated readers, some days she felt she was getting the hang of it. That series of markings there, for example.
Her heart sped up.
Unless she was highly mistaken, that little cluster meant a job with a tight deadline.
Jamie spun the chair around, tapped the control panel on the other side of desk to wake the reader, and fed the long slip of paper into the slot in the interface.
A portion of the screen at the lower left lit up, white code streaming past on a blue background, designed not to provide any actually information, but merely to make it look like the machine was doing something useful. Jamie knew. She’d copied all the code down in her first year and broken it. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… It was all nonsense.
She drummed her fingers again.
The scent of warm spices curled around her.
“Hello-Alex?”
“Hello, Jamie,” the ship’s AI responded in soothing, neutral tones.
“Why can I smell yellow curry?”
“It is thirteen hundred ship time. It is time for you to ingest sustenance.”
Jamie sighed. Forgetting to reschedule the automatic meal system wasn’t the worst thing in the world. And if this really was a rush job the cryptron reader was presently decoding, maybe it was better to eat here first.
The lower-left screen flashed green. The torrent of nonsense code gave way to a series of runic markings on screen—Cyrillic, a millennia-dead language revived explicitly for this purpose when cryptron was invented, because there was no point having an unhackable cipher if you also had a machine that could simply translate it into Standard. There were legislations around ownership of the readers, sure, but it would be stupid to assume that in the whole history and use of cryptron, no one would ever illegally procure a reader. Or crack the code.
Cyrillic, though, Jamie could read no problem. The gist of the situation was this: in about nine hours, a deal was going down somewhere in the marketplace on Aphelion, probably Sector Q. Maybe P.
A rare—and priceless—stolen item was being traded. The government needed the item back. Jamie was to retrieve it.
There were more details, of course: general description of the item, possible parties involved in the trade, blah blah, etc etc.
Jamie stopped. Squinted at the page. Reread it, just to make sure her Cyrillic wasn’t off.
The item she was supposed to collect was a spherical, gelatinous object about two feet in diameter. It was listed as organic, virtually indestructible, and preferring vacuum for long-term transport.
Jamie squinted again. “Hello-Alex?”
“Hello, Jamie.”
“Read this.” She held it up toward one of Alex’s many camera eyes set around the room, their lenses no more than an inch across. “What does this sound like to you?”
“Item category best fits that of a space egg.”
Jamie’s stomach flipped. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
There were still a few surviving species that did space eggs of that size, shape and colour. It was plausible—and probable—that this was no particularly big deal, just a species the IGP wanted their hands on. This was not the 2600s. Surrofish had died out over 400 years ago.
It was not a surrofish egg, because that would be stupid—and disastrous.
Jamie chewed at the inside of her lip.
A century or two after humans colonised space, they’d realised they weren’t alone. There were other creatures out there in the black, not sentient, but smart in their own ways. These creatures lived in the vacuum, a complex, delicate ecosystem built on living particles similar to tardigrades—single-celled and nearly indestructible.
They formed the bottom of a food web as complex and varied as the one built on plankton. And for the most part, these creatures of vacuum were about as dangerous to humans as ocean creatures were—keep out of their way and they’d keep out of yours.
Then the Witches, a group of superpowered and highly xenophobic humans, had found the surrofish, whose eggs could support the bacteria the Witches used to maintain their superpowers—and which sent normal humans fatally insane.
A surrofish egg could survive vacuum indefinitely, and at only two-feet in width, they were nigh undetectable to radars attuned to larger threats.
And loaded up with Witch bacteria, they could seed the terraforming of an entire planet, letting loose a pathogen that would destroy any clean humans on the planet within months.
It was the galactic equivalent to all-out nuclear warfare, and it only ended when the IGP—Inter-Galactic Police, the enforcement arm of the united government of clean-human space—had engineered a gene drive that sent the surrofish extinct.
A tiny, possibly concerned beep. “Is anything wrong?” Alex enquired.
Jamie shook her head, hauling herself out of the dark well of her thoughts. “No. I’m being absurd. Alarmist. Like the plague, you know? Mention a rat infestation and people’s minds still go back to the great Earth plagues of the 1400s.”
“I am aware of this connection.”
Jamie sighed. So she had to retrieve a space egg. There were plenty of species that laid space eggs. Totally no big deal. And if she worked fast enough, she could still spend some time with Nathaniel, like she’d been planning.
She checked the navsys again. One hour and forty-six minutes to prep. Plenty of time.
Right after she ate that curry.