01/08/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

Starting to come together.

A ‘nap,’ he says. Hah. More like a nightmare you can’t remember afterward.

A corporate team found a working deepsleeper about seven years ago on a fun little Yellow-class hellhole called 172-F-004; I’d reproduce the name the inhabitants used, but I don’t have a watermelon and a power saw handy. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t designed to be a sleep replacer, but that’s what it seems to do to our heads. One hour is worth ten ordinary hours’ worth of sleep, with no brain cancer! It’s a great gadget, as long as you don’t mind all the yelling and twitching by whoever uses it. But then, that’s why they invented soundproofing.  And it works. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when the meeting started.

It was a small meeting, even for an operation in the Tomb Worlds. There was me, Greg wearing his ‘project head’ hat instead of the ‘merchant adventurer’ one, and Makena, representing the corporation. I felt most worried for Maki: if the Council jackwagons came down on anybody for anything, it’d be somebody from the corp. Oh, and there was Nur from the supply depot, but he wasn’t there to do anything except give us numbers when we needed them.

“All right. The good news is, anything iffy we can get into the shuttle in one go,” Greg said. “The bad news is, we can’t fly the stuff to wherever and get the shuttle back without the Council ship tracking the trip. We need an excuse for the return trip.”