6: Transfers, Tremors, Treasure, and Transports

Ema came back to her room—she never called it a cell—only to find it empty, which was strange. One of the things about prison life you could count on was the routine. For the most part, you always knew where people were going to be.

Ema’s roommate, Leef, should have been asleep in her bunk after her shift in the mine. She was not.

Leef was part of the Diggers, which was technically a gang, but really just those who favoured taking mining duty watching each other’s backs. A lot of Hopat and Draxon drones were in it, but so were other species.

Leef was from a minor species in the Void, the kind who made it to space and then kinda got lost in the galactic shuffle, not really standing out in any way except within their own small region of space.

She had pale green skin and spoke GalCom reasonably well, but the two of them just hadn’t had much in common, and their schedules didn’t overlap, so they’d never been friends. Nevertheless, right now, Ema felt her absence.

It had been a rough day for Ema. After meeting with Tat and the Physician, she’d taken it upon herself to do a bit of investigating of her own regarding what the Brotherhood were up to, and got noticed doing it. She’d barely squeaked out of that mess, but it meant she was now on their radar, and that was never a good place to be.

Now she’d come back here and her roommate was gone. She hoped she was alright.

“Transferred?” said Aballa.

Jenna seemed equally perplexed. “Who gets transferred to another Segment?“

“It happens,” said Ema. “Just usually there’s a reason for it.”

It was the talk of the lunch table that the three of them had come to see as their own. The next day, Ema had gone to see Stat the Tat and had learned some disturbing things. Aballa and Jenna had done some research of their own and now they were comparing notes.

First, Leef had been transferred to Segment 20.

Second, so had four other people.

Third, three of the transfers were Diggers, while the other two worked in the mines regularly but were unaffiliated.

Stat didn’t have much more to add to that, but seemed to think the Physician knew more about it than he did. Only the Elysian never talked unless he wanted to.

There was little more to go on, but Ema was up late that sleep cycle trying to figure it out.

That’s probably why she felt the tremor.

It was subtle, similar to when a freighter landed in the hanger, but Ema knew this was different. Deeper. It made her think a piece of the planet had given up.

She was right.

The next day, news spread quickly. There had been a collapse in the mines at Segment 20. Forty people confirmed killed.

This time, the lunch crew—as she’d started calling her and her friends—were even more concerned. This didn’t feel like a coincidence, something that Stat soon backed up.

Turned out all five of the people transferred from Segment 17 to Segment 20 were among the dead. What was more, Stat had gotten word that other parts of the prison had also had people transferred to Segment 20 the other day. While he couldn’t confirm how many were transferred or how many of them were in the collapse, one thing was clear—this was no coincidence.

When Ema returned to her cell for the next sleep cycle, she noticed something sticking out of her mattress. A piece of paper. She pulled it out and found a crude map drawn on it, which seemed to lead from here to some place on the outskirts of the common area, but she couldn’t be sure.

The only thing she was sure of was the two words written in GalCom at the bottom in Leef’s handwriting…

Good Luck.

“I wish she’d stop acting like this was a treasure hunt,” said Jenna.

Aballa could empathize. The one thing she’d notice about Ema was that she was… odd. She’d been here a year, yet she acted like she was hanging out in a resort more than a prison.

On the one hand, it made things feel a little less horrible during their off hours. On the other, willingly ignoring reality was not something Aballa was capable of long term. She wouldn’t have become an activist if that had come easy.

Back in school, she’d seen how others would be concerned about the big issues, but tune it out as soon as some kind of distraction became available. A show, a game, a concert. They wanted to see change happen. They signed the petitions, they gave their credits… and then they moved on.

That was something Aballa had trouble doing. But right now, she envied Ema’s ability to live in a different reality than the rest of them.

“Okay, if I’m reading this right, we go down this hall until we reach a dead end, then go left,” said Ema.

She’d collected them at lunch and brought them back to her block of cells, showing her the map Leef had left, and getting them to help her track down what was at the other end.

When they got to the next intersection, Ema had Jenna stand watch, make sure nobody interrupted them.

“If I’m reading this right, it should be down here,” she said.

Aballa had no idea what it could be. This was just a maintenance wing with only one locked door at the end that required a guard’s ident to enter.

Then she noticed something at about the same time as Ema. Dirt. There was dirt on the floor. Given the light grey surfaces, plus the general lack of dirt unless you were in the mines, this seemed odd. Ema noticed where it actually came from, and pointed up.

An air vent.

This seemed doubly strange, since air vents were known for moving, well, air, and not dirt.

Ema hurried over and removed the vent casing, which wasn’t bolted in like it should be. She stood on her tiptoes for a look, and Aballa joined her.

There was a lot more dirt in the vent. For a moment she wondered if it had collapsed, tied to the cave in three Segments over. But then she noticed a bunch of dark brown caps up there.

“Fungus?” she asked.

“Mushrooms!” said Ema.

While the biology differed from world to world, fungi were something commonly experienced in the galaxy both as a necessary offshoot of decomposition and enabling the transition of water-based to land-based life.

“I don’t understand,” said Aballa. “Why would Leef lead you to this?”

Ema smiled. “Don’t you get it? This could be worth a fortune!”

Aballa suddenly understood. “The Physician?”

“Exactly. I bet if these are dried and ground up they’d make an excellent spice.”

Aballa reached up to pick one out. “Should we try one?” she asked.

Ema’s eyes widened. “Are you joking? Even if that was a Nubran mushroom, which I seriously doubt, do you have any idea how many of those are poisonous? You probably shouldn’t even be touching that with your bare hands!”

Aballa looked down at the mushroom in her hand in horror.

Ema shrugged. “But hey, you’re not convulsing or foaming at the mouth yet, so you’re probably okay.”

In the end, they decided to study up on it in the library before deciding what to do next. Fortunately, Aballa was already slated to cover for someone there that the Physician had need of elsewhere.

They learned it was a fungus of Senob origin, which made it valuable due to the high proportion of Senob prisoners present. It seemed to be what the Physican would call a Class-B spice—incompatible with non-Senob lifeforms, but not fatal, either.

Against her better judgment, Aballa went along with Ema when she said she wanted to show it to the Physician to see if he was interested. She feared that someone like him might either force her to reveal the location of the rest or have someone follow them when they went to collect later.

But it seemed this was how business was done. People who worked the mines would set up little plots in tapped out branches using night soil (easily obtained if you know what it started out as) and harvested later. The claim jumping she was worried about tended to happen among miners, not the Physician’s men.

Turned out this was the real reason the Diggers had organized as a gang. The downside was they also took their cut from those getting protection. Maybe Leef had set up her stash up here instead of down there to avoid that?

During her break on her next shift in Manufacturing, Aballa noticed something strange.

It wasn’t the fact that a transport had landed on the pad outside the far window. Those came and went frequently.

It wasn’t the fact that it was taking on cargo from Segment 20. They had probably kept on making doodads after a five-second period of mourning.

It was the fact that the ship took exactly forty large containers.