Sin and Grace - 29. Sin (Patreon)

I did not attend the reception of our emergency consignment personally, but I did watch through one of the cargo bots' cameras.

The shipment arrived in a single huge crate, which had Brando pissed off because we had to rearrange our cargo while in transit, which no one likes. Fortunately, the crate passed all our sniffers so we didn't have to risk taking a penalty and cracking it open to make sure we weren't transporting anything illegal. It would have gone through the same checked at the Freeport, but only an idiot trusts someone else's scanning equipment.

The Mules immediately showed their value by turning a task that could have taken the rest of the shift into the work of an hour or so, while Brando reviewed their work and didn't have to risk his back.

Even Grace was a little annoyed by the sheer size of the shipping container and I had to wonder if someone had put pressure on him to accept it in the first place. We had room, but he's mentioned that Cassandra took some careful balancing when I first came aboard.

Once I was certain I wouldn't be needed in the hold, I took two of my auxiliaries off their regular tasks and reallocated their queue to my wunderkind. If that one was going to go sapient, it needed more of a challenge than it was getting in order to unlock new processing pathways and this was as good a time as any to help it grow. I explained our pest problem to my hunting posse and then turned them loose. They both borrowed a few cleaner bot bodies and set off.

I turned the rest of my attention to my usual duty; acting as the hub for all bot labor aboard the ship. Almost immediately, I got a plaintive call for assistance from one of the cargo bots. The Mules hadn't queried me all that often so far, but sometimes Brando wasn't clear enough in his orders to them and they had to ask me for an interpretation. They also had small gaps in their personal databases that they'd fill over time through experiences.

This time, they'd noted that the shipping container's surface temperature was a few degrees higher than to be expected from something that had been received in transit and I explained to them that the shipping manifest had included a small, built-in climate control device that kept the contents of the container in a safe temperature range.

I checked the Mules' report and, actually, the container was running kind of warm even for temperature-controlled shipping. If the scanners were correct, the inside of that crate had been kept at a balmy 20°C to 22°C. That was practically shipboard temperature.

"What are you carrying?" I muttered to myself, as I surfaced from my working trance for a few minutes.

There weren't a lot of products that needed to be kept in that temperature range and they mostly weren't things you'd risk in a vacuum transfer, much less a drone-to-ship delivery; vaccines, specialty proteins, or cell samples.

Grace had carried vaccines before, but I don't think he'd risk such a dangerous transfer of goods for such delicate materials.

I finally found the manifest after a few minutes of annoyed feed queries and then I felt a little stupid. This was an industrial shipment of probiotic cultures; bacterial mother strains for a small dairy farm that was getting started in the frontier. Presumably, they wanted to make cultured butter or yogurt or any of the many other things that humans ate to innoculate themselves with the correct gut flora.

I sagged back into my pod and wiggled back under my blanket as I told my paranoia to fuck off.

Alright, my anxiety hadn't been without cause. 20°C is a weird temperature to ship goods at, but it's also the temperature that most organic sapient life feels comfortable at. Still, the likelihood that pirates were going to ship themselves to us in a box was perilously low.

Picturing a bunch of pirates huddled inside a shipping contained with their elbows in each others ribs and faces like this was the new Trojan Horse gave me a giggle.

The scanners we used were designed to pick up exactly that kind of scenario so we could just push the crate back out the lock and let our would-be invaders float home. Someone would have to be either very lucky or very desperate to attempt that kind of stunt. Big as that container was, there wasn't that much air inside, nor would there be room for enough atmospheric generators to support a boarding party—maybe just one person.

I scowled as the paranoia started to creep back, bit by bit.

I assigned yet another auxiliary to monitor the cargo hold. If that box moved, I wanted to be the first to know about it.