He said he had been terrified after the doctor started talking about his funeral.
Sepha objected that she had never discussed his funeral.
Hamish reminded her of the formal mourning posture of her head fins.
The girl almost smiled.
Then she asked why the famous human had been able to survive when her mother could not.
Hamish did not try to make the question easier.
I was lucky, he said.
Your mum deserved the same luck.
Vela stared at him for a moment, then returned her attention to the diagram.
She told him that skithra eggs were not supposed to travel through medicine routes.
Hamish asked why she had mentioned eggs.
Her mother had found shells in a container labeled medical refrigeration equipment.
Sepha pulled up the freight map and highlighted the twenty-three docks.
Imani enlarged the route through the wildlife preserve and compared it against the official flight restrictions.
Every ship had made an additional stop at a station listed as a harmless fuel depot.
The depot was registered to a subsidiary called Bluehaven Cold Storage.
Hamish recognized the company name from a freight contract he had refused the year before.
Bluehaven had offered him three times his usual rate to transport a sealed refrigerated unit without opening it or recording intermediate stops.
He had turned down the job because the contract prohibited him from helping injured crew members without written permission.
That sort of thing tends to bother me, he said.
Imani asked to see the route specifications.
Bluehaven used an unusual class of refrigeration vessel with independent temperature controls for each cargo compartment.
The technology was expensive, but it could keep living specimens at several different stages of development without requiring an external laboratory.
Sepha explained that skithra embryos required precise temperature changes during gestation.
A container transporting eggs would need almost exactly that kind of compartmental control.
The possibility was disturbing enough, but another detail concerned her more.
The antivenom shipments and the wildlife shipments had been assigned different legal classifications, allowing inspectors to examine one without being authorized to examine the other.
Someone had designed the transport documents so that the most dangerous cargo remained invisible behind the most compassionate one.
Hravik arrived with the security director and a representative from Helix named Lorren Voss.
Voss was tall, elegantly dressed, and equipped with a facial expression suggesting that every room was waiting to benefit from his presence.
He expressed sorrow about the recent deaths and offered the consortium’s complete assistance.
