Getting proof wouldn’t be hard, I thought. Humans always think they’ve covered their tracks and deleted their data, but they’re wrong a lot. So … maybe I should do that. I could go to Milu and take whatever data I collected and send it to Dr. Mensah, either to wherever she was staying at Port FreeCommerce or to her home on Preservation.

I picked up the hub feed again and changed my queries to search for transports to Milu, but there was nothing on the public schedule for this transit station. I widened my search, checking other connected transit stations. All I could find was an old transportation advisory, tagged forty cycles ago, when the news said the terraform facility had been declared abandoned after the local transit station had registered a lengthy period of inactivity. It said the cargo routes to Milu were discontinued, all except for the route originating at HaveRatton Station, which was on the edge of the Corporation Rim. I couldn’t get any updated information about transports going to Milu from HaveRatton, except some vague reports that some had still been in operation at some point.

I might not be able to get to Milu without my own ship, and that wasn’t going to happen. I have a training module for hoppers and other planetary aircraft, but not shuttles or transports or anything. I’d have to steal a ship and a bot pilot, and that would just be getting too complicated, even for me.

But HaveRatton was a main hub for transports heading outside the Corporation Rim and I could choose hundreds of destinations from there. So even if the Milu plan turned out to be a bust, it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.

The next transport leaving directly for HaveRatton was listed as cargo and passenger, and that’s how I ended up with Ayres and his bunch of contract-labor-bound idiots.

*   *   *

After breaking up the latest fight in the mess, and trying to end my short-lived career as a relationship counselor for desperate humans, I went to hide in my bunkspace. When we came through the wormhole and started to approach HaveRatton, I picked up the station feed.