Bingo!
There it was—a third hole. A little larger than the previous one.
I waved Stryder over. “Come look at this. There’s a hole here, and in that wall, and finally in the security system on the side of the pod. The other day, we ran into the meteor field. I think a tiny piece of meteor poked a hole in our hull and passed through multiple walls until it stopped… Lodging itself in the security module on the human female’s pod. It must have shorted the security system and shut it down.”
Stryder followed the trail of holes and shook his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. What are the chances?”
I shrugged. “About the same as it striking anywhere else on the ship. It could have just as easily have blown a hole through our heads. Did no one notice a hole in the hull?”
“I believe they were patched up, Captain,” Stryder said.
“And no one thought to check for other damage deeper inside the ship?”
Stryder had no answer for me. “I’ll have to look into that, sir.”
“Do it, and make sure they patch up the other holes too,” I said. “I don’t want a repeat of this in future.”
“No, sir.”
“Station someone outside the shuttle bay and have them replaced every few hours,” I said. “We don’t want her making another escape attempt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And have the shuttle bay searched. She might have sabotaged a shuttlecraft or planted explosives or…”
I shook my head. I had to remember this was a human I was thinking about. The girl would have woken up and found herself on an alien spaceship. She wouldn’t have understood what or why this was happening.
Unless…
I stored the idea away for later.
“We’ve set up sentries at key intersections and drones patrolling the hallways,” Stryder said. “It won’t be long before we find her.”
“We shouldn’t have to find her at all!” I bellowed in Stryder’s face. “She should be in her pod! And if there was a malfunction, we should have discovered it within minutes of it happening!”
Stryder stood there taking my shit. He’d taken a lot of it over the years. “We’ll find her, sir,” he said calmly.
I ground my teeth and regained control of my temper. “We have three days before we meet her master. We must find her by then. If we don’t…”
Stryder nodded, understanding the implications. Our credibility would suffer. Bad reviews traveled faster than light. It would be difficult to get further contracts. We were suffering from getting work as it was. I wasn’t sure our credibility could suffer this one too.
“Once you find her, report to me,” I said.
Stryder saluted. He was the only former soldier among the crew. At least, the one who admitted it. Some of the others handled themselves so well with their weapons they had to be former Special Forces. We were all former fighters. Dishonorably discharged, a lack of discipline, or with nowhere else to go, we were all outcasts in one form or another, or else none of us would be smugglers in the first place.
The moment the doors slid shut, they opened again. A tiny figure entered in Stryder’s wake. She was so small, we had to alter the direction of the motion sensors to let her in. Before, she had to jump in place, waving her arms to get the motion sensors to notice her. But she was getting too old for that now, and lacked her youthful vigor.
Her tiny feet shuffled forward, and she clasped her hands in front of herself. Maisie was a human female that’d been abducted long before I arrived on the ship. She was quiet, solemn, and the best cook this side of the Quazar solar system.
“You wanted to see me, Captain?” Maisie said.
“Yes, I did,” I said, massaging the bridge of my nose, feeling the sickness sweeping over me again. Sometimes it was so painful I could barely breathe.
“Take a seat, Maisie,” I said.
When she sat down, her feet couldn’t even reach the floor. The seats were built for the much larger and bulkier members of the crew. Maisie looked even more fragile than usual.
I spoke softly. “We’ve had an escape. Have you heard?”
She nodded. “I did hear something about it, Captain.”
She wouldn’t look at me. She kept her head down, eyes on her hands in her lap. But that was nothing new.
“It must be difficult, seeing our most recently acquired cargo in the pods,” I said. “Young human females.”
“They are from my home planet, sir,” Maisie said with a nod. “But I haven’t been young for a while now.”
I smiled. “How do you feel about us abducting other human females?”
“I… don’t feel anything, sir,” she said.
Her eyes looked everywhere but at me.
It did bother her—the same way it bothered me every time we were tasked with shipping one of my species. Sometimes I came down to the cargo hold to look at them, wondering if they felt the same way about our species I did. I always felt conflicted, what with there being so few of us left.
“We think a small shard of meteorite pierced our hull when we entered the meteorite field and it sliced through the walls until it met the security panel on the side,” I said. “It’s your job to clean in here. Make sure everything’s running smoothly. Did you notice the pod was empty?”
Maisie’s hands wrestled each other. “I haven’t been in here since the last human was delivered, sir. That was three days ago now.”
The guilt was written plainly on her face, in her body language. She helped the girl. Perhaps not to escape, but she helped her after that.
The fire that burned in the pit of my gut was a mix of anger and the sickness. They twisted my stomach, making me feel like I was riding too close to a black hole. I could have crushed Maisie like a bug between my hands,
