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You let Fia take over the call and then disconnect from it. From experience you know conversations like these can get ugly quickly, with suppressed emotions and resentments coming to the fore. The last thing they need is a largely uninvolved witness.
You spend the next twenty minutes or so examining local traffic, particularly around Barter, trying to guess which of the voidcraft may belong to the Marchioness and whether it has already begun pursuit. Though something tells you that if it had, you'd be getting another call by now.
Eventually, the comm console indicates a dropped connection. After a few more minutes pass, you get up and head into the living space.
"Fia? You alright?" you call out.
"I'm in the kitchen," comes a muffled reply from above. "Don't come up!"
"Yeah, I remember," you assure her. "Just checking if you're alright."
"I'm... not fine right now. He... we both said some hurtful things. But I will be fine. I just need some time. Sorry."
"Nothing to apologize for. I'll be back in- actually, I'll be in cargo. But I'll be keeping the headset on me."
It's not like you haven't done your share of simply sitting around waiting for things to happen. But the way you see it, if there's something useful you could be doing with that time, then you might as well. Which is why you head into the cargo hold with the intent of turning it into something that was extremely difficult to come by during your time on Barter: a dedicated meditation and sparring space.
But what you actually start with is reading over the cargo manifest, which does indeed claim <span class="mu-i">Percheron</span> is currently carrying twenty-two crates of rebian silk. But after cross-referencing the manifest with the star charts you've purchased, you quickly realize that the destination is a recently colonized system focused on asteroid mining and processing with little need for luxury goods but plenty of tension between contract miners and the various corporations hiring them.
"How naughty of a boy have you been, Jay?" you muse, forcing one of the crates open -- only to be greeted by two rows of silvery, oblong cylinders plastered with chemical hazard warnings. "Very fucking naughty," you answer, your expression turning grim.
Xilfil azasate. Caustic gas lethal to 96% of all known carbon-based lifeforms. Its use was considered a war crime in any system that at least pretended to be civilized.
You check a couple more crates only to find them filled with the same silver cylinders. eight per crate, twenty-two crates... enough xilfil to depopulate a metropolis or two. Or a few dozen stations and mining outposts.
You reseal the crates and, taking great care as you do so, you secure them individually in the cargo racks, checking the state of the padding and shock absorbers as you do so. At least a third show excessive wear, requiring urgent replacement and another third are getting close to the point of expiry.
(cont)
