Transport

“Think about it Jake, five million credits man. That’s enough to start a life over, anywhere this side of the universe.” Dion was persistent in his offer, which really wasn’t much of an offer, all things considered. 

Dion pointedly was asking if I could overlook the registered docking weight on my transport shuttle’s manifest enough to not notice the slight discrepancy that would be caused by smuggling a male rhankylodon off of Panthalassa. Already being scheduled for a materials export, he knew this wouldn’t be largely problematic, technically speaking. What he was really asking was if I’d disappear from known humanity, or at least far from the reaches of the Interstellar Species Conservation Union, or ISCU as it's known, after doing the job. 

Shortly after human colonization efforts began branching past our galaxy, we bestowed it upon ourselves to preserve and protect native species on their ancestral planets. Thus the ISCU was born, and with it a mandate that strictly prohibited the transfer of any species outside of their natural habitat. Space colonization had a lot of unknowns, so playing zookeeper with the wildlife was pretty high on the forbidden list when it came to the conservation union’s mandates. 

“Besides man, you and I both know the Planetary Defense Forces have been looking for you. It’s only a matter of time before they find you or someone turns you in.” His tone had shifted with this last bit. The conversation was no longer that of one friend asking another to blindly smuggle a twenty ton megabeast off the planet, but instead a desperate and dangerous auctioneer trying to sell his last lot. 

“This is starting to sound less like a bribe and more like blackmail,” I said. I had known Dion a long time, he was as close to a friend as I had these days. He was there to help me abandon the Defense Forces, running off in the middle of the night to a rendezvous point that he set up to extract me off the planet forever. To bring it up now, after all this time, reminded me who Dion truly was. 

“It’s not like that and you know it Jake. I’ve got a good crew on this and they’re uneasy with me bringing you in, that’s all.” Dion tried to lace some sympathy in his voice, he needed Jake.

“Bringing me in?” Jake snorted the retort back, this was how it always started with Dion. He hooks you with a small ask then reels you in as an accomplice. “I thought I just needed to overlook my manifest weights. How exactly is this going to work, you know I can’t fly with extra crew onboard, it’ll raise too many questions from the station’s dock team.” 

“No need to worry about that, you're not docking at the station first. Two of our team will go up with you to monitor our pet during the flight. Once you get out of the atmosphere we’ll have the rest of the crew intercept you with a cruiser, offload our cargo, and disable your communications network. We’ll be out before the station response team can get to you. Once they do, it’s simple, tell them you were boarded and that we stole some of your cargo.”

“So in addition to the poor accounting behavior, you’d also like me to lie to the station’s security detail, who undoubtedly will hold me for questioning. Probably in a cell.” Jake was skeptical, but Panthalassa was a large and relatively unimportant planet. Predominantly water-based, it possessed several small landmasses, each disconnected from one another with independent and unique ecosystems. 

“It’s not going to happen man. Just fly the ship and my team will do the rest.” Dion was sincere in this. He thought of Jake like a little brother. Sometimes they’d go months, once even a few years, without hearing from one another. The universe always seemed to put them back in the same place together.

“And if it does. What then.” Jake knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear it. For everything Dion was, he was still Jake’s only friend, the only person he could trust.

“I’ll get you Jake. I always have, and always will.” Dion meant it, he hoped Jake knew that.

“When do we load?” Jake said.

—-------------------------- 

“What’s your cut?” She snarled. Looking to be in her late thirties, the blond haired woman seemed to be the more intellectual of the two. While they maneuvered the rhankylodon’s transport container into his shuttle’s bay, she was constantly barking orders to the younger gentlemen (if we can call him that) she was with. 

“Yo, are you deaf or something, she asked you a question.” Her partner, more brute than brains, stood a few drops over six feet and had the built of a man accustomed to heavy labor. Until now, the pair hadn’t spoken a word to him the entire time they loaded the creature onboard. Nor had they seemed to care that he skipped over most of his preflight checks, hurrying to get this over with. Where does Dion find these people Jake wondered. 

Against his better judgment Jake responded, “five million.”

“Five million!” She spat his words back at him. “Five million to fly this piece of shit far enough up until it floats. That’s more than the rest of us combined.”

Jake immediately regretted his answer. Unaware about the specifics of Dion’s business venture, he at least knew that the illegal species trade was profitable for those crazy enough to get involved. While the Conservation Union officially held that the market for extraterrestrial trading was small and largely unsuccessful, species of different origins would pop up from time to time in places they shouldn’t be. Most of the time they were dead, because some eccentric collector paid for the animal and not its habitat or natural food supply. 

The woman unfastened her harness and got up. Jake watched her angrily throw back the restraints, thinking to himself he should have made up a better answer. “What are you doing, you need to stay harnessed in while we’re in flight.”

“This isn’t my first trip, I think I’ll manage. I’m coming up for us to have a little chat on your credit allocation.” She quickly began stomping her way through the cargo bay, holding onto retainer straps and crate holds as she made her way. Just as she got towards the end of her parade, they hit strong turbulence and she lost her footing, sliding back to the crate containing the rhankylodon. This only seemed to anger her more. Jake uneasily wondered if she might just kill him and flick the shuttle on autopilot. He hadn’t input route coordinates for an autopilot but she could make him do it, or just keep the shuttle sitting at the edge of the atmosphere, forcing the rest of Dion’s team to work a little extra to retrieve their prize. Luckily for Jake the transport’s zero gravity alert squaked, they had broken past the planet’s atmosphere. This was their queue to prep the cargo bay airlock. Simple enough task, even in zero gravity.

“Prep the airlock, I’ll deal with the comms.” Without hesitating, her partner released his own harness and began executing her orders. She continued towards Jake. “Told you I’d manage handsome,” she sneered at him as she entered the pilot cabin. 

“I don’t need your help, I’ve already disbaled the shuttle’s communication network. Only thing still active is the internal chat system, flight navigation, and the emergency beacon.” Jake hoped this would be enough to entice her back into the cargo bay to help her partner. 

“No one is going to believe your shuttle was force boarded with nothing but missing cargo and an offline comm network,” she barked at him. Jake didn’t communicate his agreement with her, but she was right. Not that it mattered what he thought, a second later she began smashing his instrument panel with a hammer. She moved so fast he hadn’t even seen her pull it out. 

“What are you doing!” Jake was terrified at the lack of precision in her destruction. She recklessly hammered away at whatever she could reach. Any one of those blows could mar a critical component of the shuttle’s chief operating system.

“Giving you your cut,” she responded. And with that she dealt Jake a heavy blow to the side of his head. Still strapped into his seat’s harness, he sat there, unconscious. 

—--------------------------

Jake saw the light through his eyelids. He could make sense of some shadowy figures moving around him. He felt a terrible headache. “He’s waking up,” he heard a man saying. Jake shifted his attention to him, forcing his eyes open.

“Good afternoon, I’m Dr. Sturgeon. You’ve had some trauma to your head and we’ve kept you under for a few days to let your heal. Don’t try to move or speak too fast, it’ll take a little while for your brain to get back to itself.” Jake looked around the room, there were others there. A nurse, monitoring his vitals, a security detail outside the door (visible because of the large windows encompassing the room), and a woman dressed in a dark navy pantsuit. She stared at him with a faceless expression.

“This is Director Sarah Vital, she works for the ISCU,” the doctor said. Even with a concussion Jake knew this probably represented trouble. Chances are they knew who he was, his involvement, and were about to read him his rights. Which were probably very minimal at this point. He forced himself to sit up. 

“The doctor here tells me you're going to recover just fine, so long as you take it easy and rest.” Jake imagined himself rolling his eyes, seems like a stretch to send a conservation director here to make small talk. She quickly read his expression. 

“We’re aware that you were transporting a protected species as a part of your cargo transport. Normally we would have some questions for you since the shuttle’s manifest didn’t list the rhankylodon in your cargo hold nor is the shuttle an ISCU vessel.” At this the doctor and the vitals nurse quickly slipped out of the room.

“Normally?” Jake asked. 

“Yes, normally.” She said. “However under these circumstances, Agent Carter here was able to articulate the specifics of your involvement in the operation.” At this Dion entered the room. “I’ll leave Agent Carter here to fill in the gaps, he speaks highly of you.” The director left the room with the security detail in tow.

“What the hell is going on Dion. And who the hell is agent Carter?” 

“Carter is my actual name, and let’s just say I’m not in the smuggling business.” He seemed pretty chipper for a guy that just divulged to his friend a secret career identity that’s been entirely unknown until now. 

“For how long,” Jake asked.

“It’s been awhile Jake.”

“Before or after you got me away from the defense forces?” Jake was a little more forceful with this. He wondered how long had he been lied to.

“Before.” Dion’s tone was flat and expressionless. 

“So what now Dion.” Jake barely had the capacity to figure it out for himself. Each scenario he thought of ended with him in custody of the Planetary Defense Forces. “It's likely they took the time to match my former identity while I was unconscious here in the hospital. It’ll only be a matter of time before it gets reported.” 

“It already has been,” Dion blankly stated, quickly following up “but you’ve been granted a full pardon on behalf of the ISCU for your efforts.” 

“What efforts,” Jake coughed up. Still wasn’t fully functional, even sitting in the hospital bed. 

“That transport shuttle was the last piece I needed to get that entire outfit together for us to apprehend them.”

“You could have told me.” Jake stared blankly at Dion.

“You wouldn’t have believed me.” Dion was right about that.

“I guess my question still stands then,” Jake said. “Now what.”

“That depends, are you interested in a job.” Dion smirked as he continued, “the pay is pretty good but the hours are tough.”

“You still owe me five million credits,” Jake laughed. “And a shuttle.”