“You’re the best, Paige. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Don’t worry, no one ever does, she said with her customary modesty.
“Of course not. Now, what do you say we go find out what’s so special about our smugglers’ unusual shipments?”
6
Back on Earth, there was a pastime called spelunking. Wherever the surface was rocky, there were caves, tunnels, and caverns eaten into the Earth by running water, and adventurous people sometimes explored these cave systems. I don’t know if one would call me adventurous, but what I was doing could be very closely compared to spelunking.
Left, Paige guided, though the map she overlaid on my vision made it unnecessary.
“Great,” I muttered, since left meant more cramped spaces.
The area in which the secret cargo transfer was being held was deep in the bowels of the ship, in unused space. While the FCS Nebula held a population the size of some of the largest Earthbound cities, the founders had great foresight and built it with room to expand. There were whole sectors of the ship that were empty and unoccupied.
Aft was an excellent, if frightening, example. The whole aft section of the ship had been left as room for expansion, until something horrible happened. Not long after the changeling epidemic, some sort of disaster, the nature of which has been