The Great Galactic Score!

27

27

The shipping container, much like the wheel, had an ageless design. Like the wheel, technological improvements had occurred. Unlike the wheel, a shipping container would not leave you stranded upon some windswept motorway, miles from the nearest service station, cursing the day you decided to use the lug nut wrench for prising open the shed door after you had lost the padlock key. In the dog. On a drunken walk at three in the morning. Not that that happened to anyone. Ever.

The basic design remained the same. Large enough to carry practically anything, but small enough to move around without the need to pack, unpack, repack in ever more sneaky ways to conserve space and then have a partner sit on the door until the zip could be fastened. Unlike luggage, shipping containers could hold it all with little fuss and only minor niggles involving industrial cranes and lorries stopping in the middle of motorways for want of a tire wrench.

They were also incredibly adaptable. Some had fashioned collections of shipping containers into serviceable homes, others into almost unassailable walls, while still others had converted shipping containers into structures that could store things, which wasn't that much of an adaptation, but people thought they were clever for thinking it, anyway.

What Demi had not seen a shipping container used for was the site for an ultra-beyond-secret facility that stored the most sought-after, dangerous, experimental technologies the galaxy, and, indeed, DWAIt Corps didn't want in the hands of anyone until they had figured out the best way to charge customers the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of a small solar system for. And they would. Because greed was not only good, as one philosopher once espoused, but necessary.

The shipping container was locked by a very basic padlock and she didn't have a dog handy to relieve itself and produce a key. She gave the padlock a tug, anyway, before realising that it was, in all probability, not the actual lock that Friss had brought her along to open. She gave the padlock another tug and a rattle, just in case. When it still didn't magically unlock, she decided to chance turning on her implant, cringing her eyes closed in anticipation of the blinding headache she expected to suffer due to the technological interference.

When it only gave her a mild tingling sensation, she released her breath in relief and then doubled over in agony as the delayed pain hit her full force, like a cosh at the back of her head, if the cosh was the size of a family saloon spaceship. Through the tears, however, her mind connected with something. It came automatically, as though some kind of technology waited for such a connection. A technology safely secured underground and not suffering from pain like an elephant tusk, being handled by a gorilla that thought itself a neurosurgeon, digging into her brain.

She tried, and failed, to ignore the pain, but soldiered on anyway, sending her thoughts back along the labyrinthine conduits and wires and fibre optics and wireless connections until she found the actual locking mechanism for the shipping container, far, far underground. The locking mechanism felt more than a little grumpy at being disturbed at an unscheduled time, but allowed Demi to begin the process of breaking through. A fresh batch of new encryption breaking protocols were now in her mind, ready to take on, perhaps the most secure, insidious and, frankly, unwelcoming lock she had ever connected with.

Things were going well, swimmingly, in fact, and, if she had managed to unlock the shipping container it would have been one of the greatest achievements of her entire life. Something she could feel great pride in. Something she would dearly want to relate to children and grandchildren, should she ever decide to ruin her entire existence by having them, while sat in front of a blazing Repli-flame fire. Probably in a rocking chair with a blanket over her knees.

None of that would ever happen, however, because the door of the shipping container opened and a large crab sidled out, sideways, clacking its claws in an unmistakably annoyed fashion.