Return to Project Valkyrie Index
The text will reflow, so adjust the browser to a comfortable reading width and enjoy.
Project Valkyrie
Chapter 8 - Expected Complications
It turned out that finding the cargo loaders was more difficult than Thyra had anticipated. She made another pass through the ship looking for the four that supposedly existed and didn't find them.
She went back to the bridge and checked the deck plans, and didn't find any place that looked like they could be located. The lower and middle decks were fully enclosed, and the upper deck wasn't big at all. Not really. It was more like an add-on to give the ship just a little bit more cargo-carrying capacity.
That said, all she could do was see the inside of it, and it was closed off pretty well by the containers that filled it. What if it extended a little further forward than what she could see from the inside? It seemed like an odd design choice to keep the cargo loaders outside the ship, but if one were unloading things, it would have to be done from the outside when the ship was full, wouldn't it?
The easiest way to access the area was to climb into the cargo shuttle and open the loading hatch at its rear. That would let her out directly in front of the area she wanted to examine. Thyra retrieved the filter mask from the airlock so that it didn't seem odd that she was outside without one, snugged her jacket for camouflage, climbed up into the cargo shuttle, opened the rear hatch, and stepped out onto the top of her ship.
She had quite the view from up here, and the spaceport looked like a busy one. Ships were taking off and landing, and there was even a freighter hovering along behind where she was parked, having just come in and not yet settled into its assigned parking location.
Satisfied that nobody was paying her any mind, she turned her attention to the upper cargo enclosure. Like the rest of the ship, its hull was painted light gray. Judging the enclosure by what she remembered of the inside, she felt that she was on pretty solid ground when it came to her guess about where the cargo loaders were, because the forward part of the upper cargo area was a number of meters longer than it should be.
Also, the large hatch at the front of the enclosure was another big clue. It was easy enough to trigger from where she stood, and it revealed four half-ton cargo loaders with specialty tines made to work like a forklift, though they had special catches at the ends that would allow them to hold onto cargo in a zero-G environment.
They looked like they'd been through the wringer a few times but seemed intact. Just like every other robot, they were shut down and awaiting attention. She wondered if one of the other robots had come out to turn them off in mid jump because it seemed kind of ridiculous to wipe the information out of the cargo loaders when they never spent much time aboard the ship.
No matter. It was what it was.
Thyra walked into the enclosure and was about to open up the first of the cargo loaders when she noticed that the rear of this particular compartment was shallower than she expected. It should be about three meters deeper.
Doing some mental calculations, she realized that the area between the cargo loaders and the cargo compartment would be approximately ten displacement tons. She might have just located the smuggler's hold, and it was in a very good place because getting to the top of the ship wasn't exactly an easy affair.
First things first. She opened up the first of the cargo loaders and found its power switch where she expected. Flipping it on, she stepped over to the next one to start the process over again while the first one came to life.
It only took half a minute for them all to come fully online and report their readiness. When she queried them, she was unsurprised to find out that they had no memory of any events before they were shut off.
What surprised her was that the loaders had advanced brains. Oh, they weren't nearly as advanced as they could be, but they were a lot smarter than they needed to be. Also, they had long-range capabilities for delivering cargo much further away than just taking it off the ship.
If she wanted to send them carrying cargo to other locations on this planet, that wasn't out of the question, with them capable of reaching 300 kph and having 18 hours of endurance at that speed. Not that she was going to do so because that was disallowed, but in other locations it might prove useful.
With them fully operational, she verified they were connected to the ship's net and then turned her attention to the paneling behind them. It looked solid enough, but if she were going to put a concealed entrance to a smuggler's hold somewhere, it wouldn't be with the rest of the cargo. That would be the first place someone would look. This wasn't accessible from the inside of the ship and made much more sense.
After spending a minute closely examining the bulkhead, she found what she was looking for. There were no obvious cracks in the paneling, but there was a tiny communications receiver built into the metal. It wasn't transmitting, but it was listening. The question was whether she knew enough to activate it.
Her communications systems were encrypted, and she had to assume that she had full access to everything aboard the ship, so she simply sent an instruction for it to open up and waited to see what happened.
After a moment, half the left side of the bulkhead recessed a little and then retracted to the right. Inside the area behind it were five two-ton cargo containers. That was the rest of the concealed cargo.
Strapped to the side of one of the containers was a handheld. She turned it on. It was immediately apparent that its contents were heavily encrypted. That made sense because one wouldn't want to leave critical information about their illegal cargo for just anyone to find. Even so, one did need to keep track of it.
Thyra used her encryption module to send a pulse to the handheld, and it accepted the signal from her and unlocked itself. After scanning the manifest, it became clear that the cargo was made up of illegal cybernetics. Fourteen displacement tons in total. There was no buyer listed, but there was a long alphanumeric code.
She considered it for a moment and decided it was probably an encryption key. Part of a public and private pair, most likely. The buyer would contact her, and she would need this to make sense of the message.
Interestingly, the bill of lading indicated that a price had already been agreed upon and that four tons of the delivery would be in exchange for other products and services that were not listed. The ten tons that remained would bring in six hundred and twenty-five thousand credits per ton. Six million, two hundred and fifty thousand credits was a significant amount of money, and it meant that she needed to follow through with her end of the bargain because that would allow her to do more than just haul freight.
It seemed they were here to fulfill their part of a previously agreed arrangement. Though she had no part in setting it up—not that she recalled, anyway—she didn't need to make enemies, so she would do what she needed to do to fulfill it. She could only hope that the cargo itself wasn't too harmful.
The bill of lading indicated that she was carrying fourteen tons of TL14 experimental prototype neural mesh with cortex-links allowing real-time data integration with electronic systems. This was the kind of hardware that required implanting in someone's skull to link a biological brain with electronic systems.
She was uncertain what made these illegal, but it was possible that someone equipped with this kind of neural mesh could hack into computer systems more easily than someone not so equipped, and in a world with a dictatorship, they might not take that very kindly. Also, the fact that these were prototype materials could mean that they were stolen.
Thyra considered that and mentally shrugged. She should probably have standards that kept her from doing this kind of thing, but she had to admit that she found the concept of bypassing the law at least somewhat exciting.
Perhaps not what she wanted to do all the time, but the old man had equipped this ship to take advantage of those kinds of opportunities, and who was she to ignore them?
She downloaded the information from the handheld and shut it off before placing it back on the container. Then, she closed the smuggler's hold and made her way back out onto the surface of the ship. Leaving the cargo loaders active, she closed the hatch and went back into the ship.
Just as soon as she was inside, a chime sounded in her mind, and she immediately realized that it was an incoming call being forwarded to her by Mimir. She accepted the call and was immediately confronted with a prompt for a code.
Well, it seemed that she might have found this information just in time.
Thyra set up a virtual space that was identical to the bridge, with her seated at one of the consoles, looking down at the visual pickup. Then she entered the code, and the connection cleared, showing her a suave-looking man with a neat beard and dark hair.
"I'm glad I caught you so soon after you landed, Thyra," the man said. "If you could get Dubois on the line for me, we can settle our business."
She gave the man a virtual shrug. "I wish I could, but I'm afraid he died yesterday."
The man's expression froze for a moment, and then his eyebrow slowly rose. "That is inconvenient, and I don't like change. You will fulfill our deal, I assume."
"I will. With this change, I need to verify that I understand the specifics of how the delivery is to take place in case you discussed something about that with him outside of my presence. Or, perhaps his death has changed things. In any case, I don't believe going over everything would be amiss."
That made him nod. "He and I had discussed some of the specifics of delivery, but he did all the negotiation without you, so I can't expect you to know the details. I'm expecting fourteen displacement tons of merchandise to be delivered to a location of my choosing during an after-hours timeframe. If we could make this happen at about two in the morning local, I think that would be best, as I understand that you can't deliver it all at the same time."
"That's correct," she agreed, though the ship's boat could have done so. If he had been told differently, then she would roll with it.
"So long as you aren't discovered, that's perfectly acceptable to me. I will not put in an appearance until all the materials are there, though one of my associates will be present throughout the entire process to verify each load as it arrives. Nothing will leave the location until the final exchange takes place, and that is when I will put in an appearance. Is that acceptable?"
She didn't know this man, though she would begin going through the net looking for identification when she felt comfortable doing so.
"Cyrus spoke highly of you and your arrangement, so I see no reason to change anything," she said evenly. "That said, you need to understand that I don't know you and I'm concerned about being double-crossed. I will hold up my end of the deal, but if you attempt to shaft me, that won't be an opportune outcome for either of us."
The man's smile widened just a little. "I don't make deals with people that I think might betray me, and I keep the agreements I make. The word of Linh Ae Sorensen should not be one that causes you any concern. Cyrus has acquired a number of things for me over the years, so I will extend the same courtesy to you that I did to him. You are trusted, Thyra, and our agreement will be honored."
"Then all I need is an address," Thyra said. "I'll be there promptly and make certain that I'm not being followed."
"See that you do, and I will do the same." He rattled off an address that she didn't need to jot down. Then, without another word, the man disconnected.
This was a complication, but at least it was an expected one, even if she wished she had more time. The old man had had a plan for getting the cargo to where it needed to be, so she needed to discover what it was or come up with a new plan.
In any case, this left her with plenty of time to take care of other work before she had to take a chance on bypassing all the security measures with her highly illegal cargo. With as much as she had on her plate, that was a blessing.
She should probably be concerned, but she found herself a little excited. She would go armed and ready for trouble. If this man or his minions double-crossed her, they would regret it. Briefly.
If they dealt with her honorably, she would have enough funds to finance doing a lot of trading going forward. There was a good bit riding on this particular deal completing cleanly. Also, being captured by the locals and thrown into prison for some indeterminate amount of time, where she couldn't recharge, would be bad.
With that particular task accomplished, she dismissed the virtual space, stored her filter mask and jacket, and began going through the ship and reactivating every droid. She would query them to make certain that they had no instructions to do anything harmful to the evidence she was seeking or the ship itself, but it was time to have all the capabilities of the ship working the way they should have from the beginning.
Then she could head toward the port master's office and start settling her affairs. She needed to stop by the local Traveller's Aid Society and see what she needed to do there, too. Contacting the local Trader's Guild office would also be a good idea.
It seemed that this evening and tonight were going to be very busy.