Blue Plague, Red Redemption

Chapter 2: Alessandra Silva

Ali was anxiously waiting in the passageways, afraid someone might come by and she'd have to quickly pretend to be walking somewhere in particular and not staking out the stairs to the cargo bay fifteen meters away from her. It was mostly an irrational fear as the decks of the new fusion ship have been eerily empty for most of the time that she's been on board. 

It was the second leg of RSS Melville's shakedown cruise heading back from its roundtrip to Mars and was coasting Earthwards to pick up its first official load of nearly two-thousand VIPs. But for now, there were just two dozen crew and a handful of passengers aboard, who were likely on the main deck one level below. She had seen Wei Lang climb up into the interior cargo hold nearly forty minutes ago and needed to see if he was taking something out.

About a year ago a Mars-based data analyst at the Red Sled Shipping Company had found an odd pattern in fuel expenditures of their rocket-powered spaceships—chembuckets they called them now that fusion-powered ships were being flown. They'd gotten pretty good at modeling the precise propellant needs for each trans-Earth trip, but some of the trips persistently burned more propellant in an amount that suggested there was an excess of a hundred kilos of mass onboard. The pattern was too consistent to be a coincidence. Somehow, someone was getting cargo on the ships that bypassed both the inventory system and pre-flight weigh-ins. 

So they brought Ali on to investigate, lest a ship needed to make an emergency burn one day and found itself short on propellant. Nobody wanted to leave a crew coasting through space at twenty kilometers per second with no hope of rescue and a slow death from starvation as their ship drifted in a long ellipse around the solar system.

Within a week of the Red Sled Shipping Company hiring her, Ali ruled out everyone but Wei. She had figured out that he was the only person present in all but one cruise with the fuel anomaly. After a painstaking review of the interior security cameras from each cruise, she caught him on multiple videos going into the interior cargo bays several times on each trip but not bringing anything in or taking anything out, or perhaps nothing bigger than his pockets. She managed to convince the shipping company to put her on a roundtrip cruise with Wei in the hopes of getting some hard evidence, which wasn't a cheap ask as each way cost more than she made in a year. If she came back empty-handed, she'd probably lose the gig, and with the hit to her reputation, probably end her recent career as a private investigator. So now, she needed a smoking-gun.

Ali was starting to feel a burn in her legs from standing so long in the full-Earth gravity, nearly triple what she was used to. She was relieved when she finally heard the muffled footsteps, barely in time for her to start walking toward the stairs. Ali still wasn't used to the walls and floors here, which were made of what they called bevlar, a kind of structural fabric that was supposedly light, strong, and able to block more of the cosmic radiation than the old steel and aluminum ships. It was so quiet to walk on--unlike the echoing stone that she was used to on Mars--that she almost missed "bumping" into Wei Lang.

"H-Hey Ali," stuttered Wei as he emerged from the stairwell. It looked like he was almost pleased to see her, except that he was wincing in pain.

"Oh, hi Wei. Is everything okay?" asked Ali, pretending to be surprised that another person was around, though really, she felt frustrated that she didn't find a way to bump into him just now so she could have felt his pockets for something incriminating.

"Yeah, everything's... fine," he reassured her in a tight voice. "Except...," Wei said as he looked down at his leg, "I may have sprained something."

Actually, she got lucky. She probably would have missed him entirely if he wasn't limping clumsily down the steps.