Lost Change

Chapter 90

"Have you inspected any ships in orbit yet?"

I blinked at the sudden question from Ivy. I yawned and lifted my head up from the sandy patch I was laying in. The heat radiating down from the lamp above me felt so nice, and I had been having the best time 'sunbathing'...

"Hm?" I mumbled the sleepy question back to Ivy.

"Good morning, sleepyhead. Sleeping in late today?" Ivy's teasing tone danced with laughter.

"Muh." It had actually been a long day. We had finished our schedule and gotten ready to go home when another ship reported a potential crawler sighting. We hurried over to where that ship was docked, waited while everybody was unloaded, checked the entire ship and found nothing, and then checked it again when the ship's crew begged us to.

Minna's father had watched me search that ship with a look of disapproval I had found very frustrating.

Just to show him, I had ended up following all the odd scents I could pick up. And there were more than a few of them. It had been well into the evening when I had managed to track a subtle scent to an extremely fuzzy spider-like creature that turned out to be a pet of one of the passengers. Apparently it had broken out of the pet carrier it had been shipped in and decided to hide in some of the dark crevices that could be found in the cafeteria, and one of the ship's crew had mistaken a brief glimpse of it for a crawler.

We spent another twenty minutes or so chasing the thing through the ship before Minna finally managed to catch it with that weird netted pole she carried, then we had delivered it to the crew. It had been a phenomenal waste of time. And the weird creature had eyed me the entire time Minna was carrying it away. With all twelve of its creepy little eyes. I couldn't tell if it was hoping I would help it or trying to figure out how to eat me.

Still, it had been good to see how happy the Kymari kid was to be reunited with his lost pet. Even if he did have some really creepy tastes in animals.

I sent Ivy an image of my sandy surroundings and the pleasant warmth of the heat lamp. "Long day."

"Aw." A memory of somebody bumping Ivy's side and draping a wing over her came through the mindlink.

I smiled at Ivy's mental 'hug'. "Thanks. What was the question again?"

"Have you gone into orbit? We've all had to search a few cargo ships that weren't able to deal with a planet's gravity, but visits from those ships are still rare, and Trenil wasn't sure if you've left the surface before. Have you had to go into space to inspect any ships?"

"No. All of them have landed at the spaceport. Why?"

"Trenil and the others are trying to figure out how much help we can get together. There's a really big cargo ship that's supposed to be on the way."

I tried to think. "I thought you were able to handle all the cargo ships that came through?"

"This one is supposed to be big. Trenil tried to explain it to me, but none of us really understand the Kymari system of measurements; as best as we can tell it's about twice the size of the big ocean freighters that used to sail between countries."

I blinked. Okay, that was... huge. "Wow..." Something that big could hold a lot of stuff, which... kind of made sense, now that I thought about it. The Blood Memories said the Kymari had a very large territory, with lots of settled worlds. And other aliens had large territories with just as many planets. It would make sense that they would build ships that could carry a lot of the products created on one world and deliver them to another world, just like it had made sense for countries on Earth to build them. A large grouping of people would want a lot of things.