"Any idea what I can use to track this stuff?"

  Jonathan was sitting next to the big pile of commercial goods from his home planet. His first instinct was to put it all in a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, when he tried to power up his laptop, he found it was already out of batteries.

  "Raider ships are known for using all sorts of tech from lots of different places. The executive clearly knows about a lot of Earth stuff — I bet he can help charge your thing." Buddy posited.

  Jonathan was still a little worked up from their spat and didn't want to interrupt whatever Rex and Craig were doing, so he decided to do a visual inspection first.

  "If I review these out loud you guys should be able to keep a running list, right?"

  "You don't even need to say them out loud." Buddy added.

  Jonathan still decided to do so, to avoid having a stray thought get misinterpreted.

  He got about halfway through before deciding to check the storage room to make sure nothing was missing.

  Opening the cargo hold, he noted the same stuff from his tour earlier — but decided to give everything a closer examination. When he focused on the "NUTRIENT BLOCK" a little more carefully, an actual item description popped up:

  Item Name: Nutrient Blocks

  Description: It's food… Or it will be once appropriately decompressed and prepared. Recommend mixing with FLAVOR BLOCK (not included) for best results.

  Created by: Aloha Foods: Say "hello" to the essentials.

  "Before you ask, I have no idea what 'Aloha' means. The same company in my last body was called 'Saltaru Foods.' Saltaru was some kind of greeting."

  "Aloha means hello in a different language from my planet. Can you see what the original name is?"

  "I can see it, but if I say it it'll just get translated by your Pal. I'll try to work on that long term, but for now I don't have full control over that."

  "That doesn't make any sense. You can tell me what the other guy saw, but not what the actual name is?"

  "I told you not to think too hard about translation."

  Jonathan put it behind him and checked out the rest of the storage. There were considerably fewer Flavor Blocks than Nutrient ones — it appeared the Aloha people used similar packaging strategies to hot dog companies on Earth.

  Other than that, there were some emergency supplies, a futuristic fire extinguisher, and a large box made out of what could be the space equivalent of cardboard:

  Item Name: Craig's Stuff

  Description: Keepsakes. Please do not pry.

  The box was open, but when Jonathan took a peek, everything inside was literally blurred.

  "Nothing worth looking at in there, bud. Let's move on."

  Buddy could apparently see what was in there and chose not to relay it. Jonathan agreed.

  In the back of the cargo bay was another door.

  PRESERVATION ROOM

  The door looked a little thicker than the others. Buddy spurred Jonathan onward. "Let's check that out — there's something I want to see."

  Jonathan opened the door.

  The first thing he did was shiver — this room was akin to a walk-in fridge. The second thing he did was jump a foot in the air, hit his head on the door frame, and make an embarrassing sound when he saw the body of the guy who had nearly killed him.

  It was sitting on a hand cart, covered in a tarp. The body was too long for the cart, so its legs were just sort of dangling off the end.

  Jonathan recovered quickly, which he attributed to his friends helping to mellow out his mental state — and potentially harden his skull. Appreciated, but still not comfortable thinking about.

  "Lift the tarp so I can have a look."

  "Do I really need to?"

  "It's just a body. You're going to end up seeing lots and lots of 'em, so might as well get started now."

  Buddy was the king of comforting thoughts. Jonathan held his nose as if that'd make a difference, and pulled off the tarp.

  Item Name: Corpse of Kurkuril

  Species: [SPECIES NAME: 1c]

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Status: Somewhat fresh

  Description: It's a dead body.

  Jonathan took a probing smell and put his hands down. Kept quite cool in here — which was good.

  He wondered why the species required payment when Craig's didn't.

  "Buddy, don't you know?"

  "Nah, never asked. Not one of the common ones."

  Jonathan was spooked, but not freaked out — he'd already spent a great deal of time with this body after all. It did bring back some uncomfortable memories, but he had a job to do.

  "Huh… Kurkuril." Jonathan wondered why the name wasn't translated, but guessed it was because there's no need to translate the name of a dead person.

  He looked the body up and down.

  "Okay, so they obviously did a bit of a rush frisk job on this guy. I know for a fact he's got some goodies hidden under some of that carapace — looks like they just took his man-purse and moved on. You can lift up those plates."

  The plates Buddy was referring to were chitinous plates on the hips of the body.

  Jonathan was a little icked out by this, as it felt to him like lifting up the thing's mini skirt. He also knew that if this was a horror movie, this would be the perfect time for the body to miraculously come to life and grab his wrist.

  That didn't happen.

  He checked himself and got to it.

  There were a couple things of note — some sort of communicator listed as "Unknown Communication Device," and a device about the size of two sticks of gum sandwiched together, appearing to be made out of the same material as hard drive platters.

  Item Name: Credit Slip

  Status: Locked

  "We're in luck! I'm literally the only… well, the only one alive who can unlock this. Just focus on it for a second… And done!"

  Item Name: Credit Slip

  Status: Unlocked by Infiltrator Jonathan Rivers

  Value: 2,813 credits

  "Oh, fuck me!" Buddy yelled out — the thinking equivalent of yelling out, anyway.

  "Were you expecting more?"

  "That's not the problem — it's a decent chunk. The problem is that I'm not the only one who saw you open it. Hang on a sec, I gotta gaslight the other guy into thinking it was always unlocked, or we're going to have to answer some questions."

  Status: Unlocked (It was always this way)

  Status: Unlocked by previous owner

  Status: Unlocked through normal means

  Half a dozen more statuses flew past until it settled to…

  Status: Unlocked

  "My bad on that one — sharing takes some getting used to. I'll keep working on it. I wanted to keep it as a just-in-case, but looks like we'll be donating it to the cause."

  "I guess it must be really hard to steal from your employers in this economy."

  "Not as hard as you'd think, but yeah."

  "Any idea if this slip could make a difference?"

  "Like I said, it's a decent chunk. Not enough to buy a ship, but likely enough to book a trip somewhere and eat for a while. Though don't think about trying that — if Pal thinks you're breaching your contract, bad things can happen."

  "What kind of bad things?"

  "Literal termination. I have no idea how it's done, so I can't guarantee I can protect you from it."

  Pal chimed in. "I am HR, jury, and executioner!"

  "Uhh — can he hear our conversations?"

  "Technically there's no conversation to hear, but the answer you're probably looking for is that I can't fully shut him out. Thoughts bleed through, but I control the narrative."

  "You do? Because he just said 'I am HR, jury, and executioner.'"

  "Well ain't that some ominous shit. I'll look into it."

  Jonathan was seriously starting to doubt Buddy's capability of not getting him inadvertently murdered.

  "Look, just don't do anything against the contract and you'll be fine."

  A quick summarized list of things to avoid doing flitted across Jonathan's vision.

  Jonathan sighed, and got back to work cataloguing.

  Sometime later, Jonathan headed back to the briefing room to join a conversation already in progress.

  "…As far as I can tell it's more trouble than it's worth anyway. When would we possibly use it?"

  Rex was trying to get Craig to see his way, with minimal success.

  "I can think of at least one situation."

  "Well, you certainly didn't need it for dispatching its last owner… Oh. That one."

  Craig nodded solemnly.

  They were talking about Kurkuril's acid spammer — one of the strongest weapons Craig had ever seen, and certainly one of the most expensive. Which said more about how many weapons Craig had seen than about how significant the weapon actually was. It was only half-decent on a universal scale.

  Jonathan thought it was certainly scary from a war crime point of view — but was it really much better than regular guns? For some reason the P90 submachine gun came to mind. He cursed that he wasn't a Second Amendment enthusiast.

  They went back and forth in a circular argument until Jonathan piped up.

  "I've finished the inventory."

  Rex stared at Jonathan for a moment. His eyes seemed to flicker.

  "Great! And looks like you found a little something extra!"

  Jonathan wasn't surprised they could access that information so easily, but it was still disconcerting.

  "In the future it might be easier for me to do stuff like that if I can use my computer — but it's out of charge. I also have a lot of extra stuff on there that we might be able to sell, or use… for educational purposes."

  Jonathan trailed off. He didn't want to come off as too easily bored. Growing up with his father, having time to be bored meant having time to do more work — and he wasn't sure an automated executive understood the value of downtime.

  "Great idea! Even better — I bet you've got all sorts of stuff on there to stop yourself from getting bored during the long, oppressive tedium of interstellar travel. I was plugged into the internet for some time, so I've already got all the information I need to fabricate an adapter for you."

  Jonathan could already tell Rex had internet access at some point, given his various references — and the fact that he knew what crypto was, and was able to get a lot of it very, very quickly.

  "About that. Are you familiar with the specs for WiFi, ethernet, or anything like that? How difficult would it be to connect the laptop to the same data we have in the briefing room? Since there's more than one of us now, there would be times where we'd both want the data simultaneously."

  In truth, Jonathan was just addicted to the internet and the briefing room feed was the closest thing to it — but life had taught him it was always a good idea to appear selfless when asking for favors.

  Rex transformed himself into a blue jumpsuit and a big red wig — some kind of soccer mom. He suddenly had a Yooper accent.

  "Oh well lookitcha already thinkin' ahead there! Such a great can-do attitude, ooh I could just pinch your cheeks donchaknow!"

  Jonathan wasn't sure if Rex did this to ingratiate himself, entertain himself, or keep people off-balance. He suspected a combination of the three.

  Rex got serious for a moment — then changed into a budget version of Shatner.

  "Jonathan, that find was quite significant. Assuming Earth really pulled through, we'll need every bit of it to continue our… Trek… Among. The stars. If we can manage to still shift some of our inventory, there's a chance we might be able to get away with NOT selling the acid gun."

  Craig's eyes lit up. He made a clumsy thumbs up.

  Jonathan assumed his Passenger had coached him on what the gesture was supposed to look like.