June followed Captain Konrad into the spaceship. As soon as they had entered, the bulkhead closed again with a soft hiss and a satisfying clunk, and the ever-present hum of the space station subsided. June let out a sigh of relief and felt her cramped neck relax, just a little. There was still so much to worry about. Then she realized that it was not just the hum, but the feeds as well. Her connex tried to ramp up transmit power briefly, then gave up.

The corridors were much tighter than June had imagined. The only ships she had ever been on had been corporate, all shiny, spacious, and soulless. The TORI felt different, not tight and shabby but lived-in and cozy, where things that were used had polished handles and the walls were decorated with more graffiti.

The captain led her into a room with a big table where someone was already waiting for them. A small person with long, iridescent hair, wearing oversized, baggy clothes covered in patches and logos June could not recognize. A stark contrast to the tidy captain. As soon as they entered, June got an introductory feed packet from Marga, who sat up and stopped biting her nails.

"So how does this work, exactly?" June sat down and set her backpack on the table. "I give you the data, and you let me join the cooperative?"

"Something like that." Captain Konrad smiled. "We'll take you to co-op space either way. If you can stay there or on the Tori, is up to you. For now, Marga would really like to see the data; you were pretty stingy with details."

"Here goes nothing." June sighed and emptied the backpack onto the table, producing dozens of paper notebooks. Another load off her shoulders. Literally.

Marga's eyes bulged.

"Paper?!?"

2/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June sat next to Marga at the big table in what seemed to be the ship's common area. She had sorted the notebooks chronologically and recognized the glint in Marga's eyes as she leafed through the notebooks, indicating that she was recording what she saw. Captain Konrad was watching them with an unreadable, but not unfriendly face.

"Please don't digitize this." June laid a hand on Marga's shoulder. "If this leaks I'm dead."

"Don't worry." Marga gestured around the room. "This part of the ship is caged and gapped, we're on a private node."

June was surprised when a feed for a workspace opened for a shared database with the transcribed entries. In her old lab no one would have done that without payment, orders, or a subpoena.

"Yeah, that's above my paygrade." Captain Konrad stood up and headed for the door, then looked at Marga. "You let me know." Marga nodded absent-mindedly.

June checked the data and was surprised how much of it was already processed and annotated.

"You are very fast." She looked at Marga, whose eyes had the unmistakable glaze of someone deep in a feed. "And very thorough."

"Got a little help." Marga smirked without looking at June. "Explain this to me."

Tables and plots popped up on June's feed and the two of them spent the next hours pouring over the data, until Marga finally closed the workspace and looked at June with big eyes.

"Well I'll be damned."

3/X

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The rest of the crew had joined June and Marga in the meeting room, and together they were looking at a big screen showing a star chart with a destination marker. Although she found it interesting that they were not using a feed instead, June was not paying the screen much attention; she was much more interested in the three new people she had not met before.

Bjorn, apparently the second in command, wore the same brown, not-quite-uniform, as the captain. With his clean shaven face and tidy haircut he looked much more like he belonged on a spaceship than the others. He had asked lots and lots of questions. Good questions to build a mental picture, while accepting her expertise. June liked that.

Then there was the one called 'Rip'. They were bald, tall, and massive – a mountain of a person – but had come wearing an apron and bearing fresh cookies of excellent quality. Their genuine smile, when June had praised the treats, stood in stark contrast to the crooked nose and scars all over their rugged face.

The last person staying in the background and observing with a stoic face was Ada. Her long, black hair was bundled in a ponytail and her simple, but elegant clothes matched her demeanor. When June asked what she did on the ship, she had said: "They get in trouble and I patch them back together, and in return, they keep me out of trouble."

"Listen up." Captain Konrad's voice pulled everyone's attention. "Marga still wants to cross-check details, but it looks like June has actually found a new fold-gate."

Attention silence turned into stunned silence. June remembered the first time she had accepted that what she had found was not an artifact in the data or a mistake and smiled.

He tapped the marker on the screen. "And it is sublight reachable." A series of waypoints appeared on the display. His face grew stern. "This does not leave the ship."

Ada was now standing next to June, staring at the display with a smirk.

"So you come bearing trouble."

4/X

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June watched the shared feed as Marga put the finishing touches on the data. Cleanups, annotations, and references appeared all over the place with extraordinary speed. Unease started churning in her stomach, and a cold, calculating part in her head began going over her contingency plan.

"I thought we were on an island node?" June leaned forward and studied Marga's face while she sent out stealth probes to scan the perimeter of the feed.

"We are." Marga kept staring into infinity. "But we do have a powerful neural subsystem." She blinked and looked June in the eyes with a gentle sadness. "We don't lie to you. If we need what you have, we take it."

June's probes were terminated.

"I want to send these queries out on the global. Can you check if they're vague enough?" A series of documents appeared on the feed, and Marga stood and stretched. "I'll get us some drinks." She took the last cookie and left.

The unease in June's stomach was replaced by something else. A deep loneliness.

5/X

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Captain Konrad was studying the projected route to the new gate while slowly shaking his head and grumbling dissatisfied.

"Who made this?" He looked at June.

"Uh, me." June blushed. "I couldn't really go to nav control and ask for a route. What's wrong with it? I had to kinda learn starnav on the fly."

"It's technically fine." The captain rotated the view on the screen and zoomed in on a slightly blurry part close to the beginning. "It'll take a couple months, if all goes right." The projected path went right through the unsharp blob. "You know what this means?" He pointed at the aberration.

"It said unreliable sensor readings." June sighed. "It's not, is it?"

"It might be, but if we look at the surroundings, it looks like a very good place to play hide and seek from." Captain Konrad looked at Rip. "Far enough to make it impractical to attack, close enough to work as a base." He highlighted some darker spots. "Asteroids to mine."

"Pirates?" June's eyes widened.

"Maybe." The captain connected to the screen, and several alternative routes appeared. "Or some con hiding a secret." The routes shifted, and some vanished again. "Or something else." Only a handful of routes remained. "Taking a detour would add weeks." He looked at Bjorn. "We'll add 'finding out what that is' to the list."

"Oh, I have something else for the list then." June said. "I'm loanbound; I cannot leave the station."

Captain Konrad groaned.

6/X

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"So, how much do you owe?" Bjorn asked and paled when he received June's latest statement. "How? Did you buy a planet?" He gasped.

"Some of it is inherited; my parents weren't good at playing the corpo game." June shrugged. "But I used most of it for my clandestine operation." She nodded towards the star map on the screen. "You can't hide anything from the corps, but you can disguise and distort it enough to pass for something else."

"So someone there might piece this together as well?" Captain Konrad looked concerned.

"There's a slight possibility." June said while chewing her lip. "I did my best to hide it in legitimate deep space research and made sure to produce enough output so I wouldn't draw attention and get more funds." She looked at the notebooks. "The most interesting stuff is only in those, but they have all the underlying data."

"So they must not get suspicious when you leave." Bjorn nervously thumped his fingers on the table. "We'd have to buy you out."

June nodded. "Only way out of a corps is via cash or corpse."

7/X

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