Sin and Grace - 26. Grace (Patreon)

Evander had what I can only describe as a nerd's holiday with the offer. What he sent back to me was so ruthless I actually had to reign him in a little bit. I didn't need the Freeport to soak the cost of all our consumables, fuel, and fresh entertainment downloads. I am a man of business, but holding Romulus to that agreement would just get weird and uncomfortable. I actually did want to have a good working relationship with him. Sin's presence on my ship was my foot in the door and I wasn't about to jeopardize that because Evander wanted to knife Romulus in the fine print.

I was going out of my way to not ask what history those two had. This all seemed personal somehow and I did not want to get in the middle of it any more than I already had.

Evander thought I was being a wuss and told me so, but I was okay with that.

While Evander was revising the agreement, I spent the afternoon supervising the verminator protocol. Everyone had taken some time to pack their grav trunks and secure anything that could fly away, while leaving all the cabinets open so there would be no pockets of atmosphere left for our little skittering friend to hide in.

Sin had already been by that morning to do checks on our turkeys. Romulus tried to hire another driver to do it so he could keep monopolizing her attention and try to convince her that full-time station life was amazing, but she was the one who our insurance agents had signed off on and I didn't exactly want a stranger poking around the inner workings of our business.

The livestock was fine and healthy and still suspended. They'd all been moved to a secure holding facility with one of the auxiliaries embodied in a rental bot to oversee their care. I'd last seen it perched on top of the biggest cryo unit and waving it's little servos to shoo off anyone who got too close.

Not for the first time, I wondered if the auxiliaries had names. I was pretty sure they did not. That seemed to be something Sin reserved for when they became sapient.

Once Cassandra was prepped, we cleared the slip, retracted the boarding tube, disconnected the shore feeds, and remotely triggered all the airlocks. All the atmosphere aboard my ship escaped a faint shimmering cloud of ice crystals as the comparatively warm and humid air hit the cold vacuum of space. Per protocol, we left it that way for several hours before sealing the locks again and reattaching the lines for shore power and air.

Eventually, after the hull finished re-pressurizing, the portmaster sent in some of their own specialized bug-killer bots to check the interior for anything that had survived and remove the bodies of anything that hadn't.

They didn't turn up much. Just a few frangi; an invasive interstellar pest that looked sort of like a oversized bright orange caterpillar of old Earth with little black nubbly feet and sparse, stiff bristles poking out from its back. The liked dry, slightly cold places and ate the microscopic skin and hair particles shed by larger organisms. They were an annoyance for every mammalian space-faring species because frangi didn't really care about whether their meals came from creatures from within their same biome. They'd be a beneficial pest, except they left nasty slime trails all over and liked to build their nests in delicate wiring. Their nests were made out of hardened saliva and were near impossible to remove. It was easier just to replace the bulkhead and the components underneath, which was expensive.

"Looks like you caught the infestation early," one of the dock workers commented to me while the bug-killers laid out their catch in front of us. "Lucky you."

"Odd," I muttered, as I squatted down in front of the frangi bodies. The thing I'd seen had seemed bigger with jointed legs and a round body, but I'd only caught a glimpse out the corner of my eye. Had I been imagining things?

I pinged Amanda in the feed. She picked up after a while with an annoyed, 'What?'

I sent her a picture of the frangis. "Does this look like what you saw in the corridors?"

She was quiet for a second before reluctantly replying, "Not really. Frangis wouldn't be moving around in public spaces. They'd be in the bulkheads where it's quiet and dark. The thing I saw had articulated legs."

I'd been afraid of that answer and sent the bug-killers back in for another, more extensive sweep.

It took hours, but they didn't come up with anything else so I and several of the dock workers went in with biosensors to do a third sweep. We even got into the storage unit I'd rented to hold our other cargo to scan in there.

Nothing.

"There's a good chance that whatever it was scuttled off when you were offloading," the driver responsible for the bug-killers told me. "We didn't see any evidence that they'd gotten into your stores and your cargo hasn't been disturbed. It probably went looking for food and it'll be our problem, assuming it hasn't been exterminated by one of my patrols already. My bots do constant sweeps of the docks for exactly this scenario."

"I suppose so," I agreed, again with reluctance. My gut wasn't happy with the situation, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why.

I lost the rest of the evening to supervising cargo bots as they reloaded all our cargo and supplies. They really were 'semi-autonomous' and took verbal direction just fine.

Taj came and dragged me off for dinner after a certain point. We stopped at the hotel for a shower first and then went to a Venusian noodle place that I'd had my eye on since we arrived.

Venus was too close to the sun to make terraforming it worth the investment, but there was a small orbital platform there that supported a crustal mineral mining operation that supplied the Sol sector with things like basalt, nickel, and titanium. They'd ended up with a unique cuisine centered around hydrofarmed dulce, miniature prawns, and bivalves that soon spread to other orbital communities who relied on closed-loop aquaculture for their staple food source.

This place claimed to make their own handcut udon on-site and, given the line out the door, I believed them.

I want to say that I didn't lose track of my worries in the face of a bowl of prawn and sea vegetable udon soup, but between the good food and Taj's ankle hooked around mine, I'd forgotten the mystery of the strange critter by the time our second round of drinks arrived.

Well, it was probably dead already anyway.