Draft 2

Month 1, Day 30: 20:00 hours. Charon Outpost Black Market. POV: Claude

Claude Kinskey halted his anti-gravity cart to avoid a dripping puddle of iridescent blue slush.

The subterranean maintenance tunnels of Charon Outpost were offensive. The air was thick with the stench of sulfur and vented plasma. The flickering lumen-strips cast a yellow glow over the corroded pipes lining the walls.

Claude adjusted the cuffs of his white lab coat. He despised this moon, the unwashed ice-miners, and their inefficient frontier living. But true wealth required temporary discomfort.

He pushed the hovering loader-cart around the puddle. Its quiet hum was the only civilized sound in the tunnel.

Ahead, the corridor dead-ended into Auxiliary Pump Station 42, an abandoned sector far off the Omni-Corp customs grid. Standing by a blast door were three men. Two of them were heavily muscled mercenaries holding magnetic shock-rifles.

The third was Rusk.

The smuggler looked dreadful. His cybernetic left eye whirred erratically, and his hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his thermal coat.

Between the men sat an Omni-Corp agricultural transport crate. It was rectangular, and stamped with the company’s green leaf logo. But Claude knew the crate was merely a shell.

“You’re late, Kinskey,” Rusk said.

“I am precisely on time.” Claude brought the cart to a smooth halt. “It is not my fault your internal chronometer is as poorly maintained as your hygiene. Open the casing. I need to verify the integrity of the containment seal.”

Rusk hesitated, glancing at his two mercenaries. He stepped forward and punched a code into the crate’s side panel.

With a hiss of depressurization, the metallic wall of the crate retracted, folding downward to reveal the true container nestled inside.

It was a Level-5 Bio-Stasis Cylinder. Standing eight feet tall and constructed of reinforced, three-inch-thick hyper-glass, the cylinder was heavily frosted over. Plumes of freezing vapor rolled off its base, pooling on the floor. Thick, industrial coolant hoses wrapped around the glass like veins, pumping high-pressure, freezing gas into the chamber.

Inside the frosted glass, the stasis medium wasn’t a liquid, it was a swirling storm of amber-colored cryogenic vapor. Through the fog, a hulking, dark silhouette was barely visible in the haze.

Claude stepped closer. He felt genuine excitement. Magnificent.

“The biometrics are stable?” Claude looked at the cylinder’s base.

“They’re holding.” Rusk stepped back from the freezing vapor. “But the price isn’t. I’m adding a twenty percent markup to our agreed sum.”

Claude turned his head away from the cylinder. He looked at the smuggler with mild annoyance. “We negotiated a sum of twenty-five million untraceable credits. I do not renegotiate, Rusk.”

“Things changed.” Rusk spat, gesturing toward the frosted cylinder. “My acquisition team pulled this . . . this thing out of a subterranean cavern on an uncharted rock just past the Kaelen system. I sent six men down there. Two came back.”

“An acceptable mortality rate for black-market fauna retrieval.”

“They didn’t just die.” Rusk pointed a trembling finger at the pod. “That thing wasn’t fully under when they loaded it. It spit something. Acid. Melted through standard poly-armor like wet tissue paper. Dax died screaming while his chest dissolved. It took three doses of neurotoxin just to get it in the chamber.” Rusk shook his head. “It’s cursed. Whatever it is, it ain’t natural. I want the twenty percent hazard fee, or I vent the cylinder right now and walk away.”

At Rusk’s signal, the two mercenaries moved forward, raising their shock-rifles. They were trying to be intimidating. Claude found it quaint.

Claude didn’t flinch. Instead, he looked down at the floor, specifically at a small puddle of chemical runoff leaking from the station’s pipes.

“Rusk. Are you familiar with the chemical properties of unrefined Charon ice-slush when it reacts with the alkaline residue from your boots?”

Rusk’s cybernetic eye zoomed in and out. “What?”

“I am a Chief Science Officer for Omni-Corp.” Claude clasped his hands behind his back. “I possess an intimate understanding of molecular biology and hazardous chemistry. For instance, I know that if I were to drop the ionized power cell from my datapad into that puddle you are standing in, it would create an immediate, localized cloud of highly concentrated hydrogen sulfide gas.”

The mercenaries shifted uncomfortably, glancing down at their feet.

“The gas would sear your corneas instantly. Following the blindness, the gas would strip the lining of your respiratory tracts. You would essentially drown in your own dissolved lung tissue in seconds. Long before you could pull those triggers.”

The tunnel was dead silent, except for the low thrum of the bio-stasis cylinder.

Claude stepped forward, looking directly into Rusk’s organic eye. “Furthermore, the encrypted Omni-Corp orbital clearance codes that allow your little smuggling ring to bypass customs? I am the one who generates them. If you attempt to extort me, not only will I liquidate you and your muscle right here, but your entire operation will be grounded and raided by corporate security within the hour.”

Rusk swallowed hard.

“So.” Claude pulled a datapad from his lab coat pocket. “I am going to transfer the twenty-five million credits. But first, you and your men are going to help me load my property onto this cart. Do we have an understanding?”

A moment later Rusk signaled the mercs to stand down. “Yeah. We have an understanding. Get it on the cart, boys. Quickly.”

Rusk reached out and punched a sequence into the crate’s side panel. With a hiss of pressurized air, the metallic walls folded back up and locked into place, sealing the frosted cylinder and the swirling gas safely out of sight.

Even with the anti-gravity cart lowered to the floor, it took all three smugglers grunting and straining to physically shove the transport crate onto the cart’s loading bed. The cart’s suspension took the weight, and the magnetic locks engaged.

Claude stood safely out of the way, watching them with an approving smile.

“Excellent.” Claude tapped the screen of his datapad.

A moment later, Rusk’s wrist-console chimed with the confirmation of the deposit. Without another word, the smuggler and his hired guns practically sprinted back down the corridor.

Claude was alone.

He stepped up to the hovering cart and patted the side of the metal crate. It was a perfect disguise. To the dockworkers, it would just be another piece of classified botanical equipment.

He turned the cart around and began the long walk back up to the Persephone, his mind already calculating the logistics. Cargo Bay 4 was perfect. He had already spliced the microcontrollers into the secondary grid. He would wire this cylinder directly into Humidifier Unit 7B’s power supply. The enormous energy signature of the bio-dome’s terraforming kits would completely mask the power draw of the cryo-pod.

His plan was flawless. The apex predator would sleep peacefully for six months. When they arrived at Tartarus Colony, his private buyer would be waiting. He would be richer than the Omni-Corp board of directors.

Claude thought briefly of the Persephone’s crew.

Captain Mitchell was already drowning in corporate stress, isolating himself on the bridge. Helen, the brilliant but insecure engineer, was distracted by her husband’s distance. They were so wrapped up in their little domestic drama that they wouldn’t notice a thing.

If the stasis seal somehow failed in the Dead Zone . . . well. Claude patted his breast pocket, feeling the small vial of synthesized antidote he had developed from the creature’s initial genetic profile. He was protected from the paranoia-inducing spores.

If the crew succumbed to the spores, or if the creature woke up hungry, it made no difference to him. Claude Kinskey was a man of science, and to him, the crew of the Persephone were nothing more than acceptable collateral damage.

He pushed the cart into the shadows, smiling.

A looping video of Claude, smugglers, and the monster.