TK Special #7 - Return to the M'Verse: An Ooorah Anthology

Quantum Shift - by @RJGlynn

Typical Common incompetence.

Church unclipped her Ooorah's Special from her hip; flicked the volt pistol's stun setting to '2': temporary but nerve-searing immobilization. She'd introduce this crew to the only tech they were worthy of: Enforcement stunner and immobilizer cuffs.

She moved to the end of the corridor, to where faded yellow paint indicated the direction of the cargo hold.

Twenty meters to her goal—to the evidence she needed to prove guilt.

And, with it, her value to the Consortium.

Inside her helmet's face shield, intercepted data and ship security feeds flickered on her HUD. The heads-up display images revealed her targets and their locations—the closest, an elderly woman in the cable-strung rat's nest of Engineering. A filthy grey flight suit hung off a body bent with an osteoporotic stoop. Relying on thick corrective goggles, the white-haired engineer scowled at flashing drive warnings, yet to comprehend that a system hack suppressed the jump capacitors.

Church vetoed a confrontation. The woman carried no obvious weapons and her health status appeared to be a notch up from dead.

The rest of the crew sat strapped in for quantum jump on the ship's bridge. A pimple-spotted teen, gaunt enough to be a skeleton, hunched in the pilot's seat, eyes on the main viewscreen, its fluctuating drive stats. Perspiration beaded his brow. His chest rose and fell—shallow, fast. As threats went, he looked more likely to faint than fight.

In contrast, his long-legged captain reclined beside him, one tapered finger tapping beside her chair's armrest controls. Overly lean and clad in the same grimy uniform as her crewmates, she should've looked as pathetic, yet she appeared defiantly vivid on the camera image. Cropped poppy red hair. Gleaming gold eyes edged with dark ink. If there was any real threat on the vessel, she was it: wiry one-meter-eighty frame, an illegal electroblaster at one hip, and a cool sensuality designed to distract, if not outright dismantle brain cells.

The only other entity active onboard clunked about in the gloom of the cargo hold: a squat yellow GG9 loader bot supervising the ship's highly suspicious cargo.

Rows of large grey cylinders. Racked and stacked five high and strung with makeshift piping and monitoring equipment.

Eyes narrowing on that intercepted image, Church sidled up to the hold's hatch where it rattled in its track, protesting the ship's untuned engines. The Shakey Caboose's manifest and jump permit claimed the ship was delivering "locally unrecyclable" class U1 waste to Carmine Cross, an unaffiliated free-trade settlement outside of Consortium Space. But her data analyses had found an anomaly in the crew's supply ordering.

Extra oxygen. Way too much for a three-person crew.

Church eyed the racks of cylinders imaged on her HUD—the cargo jolting and shuddering beyond the door right beside her. Her pulse quickened, her educated hunch now a near certainty. Class U1 refuse, usually contaminated metals and polymers, did not need life-support pods.

Labor-unit theft. Church exposed her teeth, fingers tightening on her pistol. In trafficking their fellow citizens for profit, this crew had become traitors to the Consortium—economic parasites. And the ungrateful Common workers who no doubt made up their cargo were as good as thieves as well. The Consortium invested fifteen years of subsidized food, shelter, and education into every Common citizen. At age fifteen, every one of them had a duty to start repaying that debt. Only after no fewer than forty years of labor were they free to live life as they pleased.

But some tried to escape their obligations. And there were plenty of vultures outside Consortium Space more than ready to take advantage, happy to profit from workers someone else had paid to raise and educate.