Scavenger Hunt
By Gazza-N

Part I

When I stepped through that airlock, I stepped from a starport into Heaven.

Big whoop. Nothing new there.

I’m sure that there’s an unofficial rule somewhere that states that cruise starliners must attempt to make their entrance halls as impressive as humanly possible. The logic is that if first impressions are the ones that last, then an eye-popping atrium should provide enough impression to cover up any of the more glaring problems on the ship (i.e. toxic food, parasites in the ventilation, or showers that are either way too hot or way too cold). Call me a cynic if you like, but I’ve star-hopped on enough liners (i.e. experienced food poisoning, fought off reactor-mutated cockroaches, and had my skin seared off/frost-bitten in the aforementioned showers) to consider myself an expert on the matter.
On the other hand, as a premier luxury starliner, the Elysian Fields has a reputation to uphold, and so the massive shiny pearl, glass and gold atrium that I stepped into made one hell of a first impression. With fifty decks of gambling, theatre, movies, VR, sport, parties and luxury accommodation, I suppose that the marketing folks felt that they might as well flaunt it as much as possible. It also makes for great souvenir pictures to show off to family and jealous friends.
I crossed the atrium and made my way to the silver reception counter to check in for my week of paradise. I smiled at all the rich idiots littering the atrium (trying to impress all the other rich idiots), who smiled back because they thought that I was a rich idiot too. The ridiculous irony of it all was that I wasn’t even paying for my little joyride. I was here on business, and my client had quite generously offered to fork over the credits for a ticket in exchange for my rather specialised services. A good Scavenger Hunter is hard to find, after all…

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Most people don’t even know what a Scavenger Hunter is, never mind what we do. This isn’t so much ignorance on their part as it is caution on ours. Given the nature of our work, public knowledge of our existence would be suicide for our careers.
This then is the anticlimactic history of my humble profession - as Humanity spread through the Galaxy, so the number of potential customers for essential products expanded accordingly. After all, why sell your product on a single planet when you have several thousand to choose from? The net result was that the owners of these businesses, blessed with the profits from a thousand worlds, became rich beyond anybody’s wildest dreams.
But what could a multi-quadrillionaire do with all his supposedly hard-earned cash? Buy an island? Buy a planet, perhaps? An entire solar system for the weekend? These guys did all of that and more, so much so that eventually there was close to nothing that they didn’t own. But no man can own everything. There was always some rare, valuable item floating around that somebody would like to add to his or her personal collection.
Which is where enterprising individuals such as myself came in. Whenever a wealthy person caught wind of a rare object that would suit their collection, they would call a Scavenger Hunter. Our job is very similar to the children’s game of the same name. We research the rumours that our clients have heard, determine whether the item exists or not and where it is located, then follow the clues and go out to retrieve it. Whether it already belongs to anybody or not is irrelevant, but for the most part the people whose property we manage to “retrieve” view it all as a rather excellent game, and will joke about it with our clients at the next polo club meeting. That’s if they don’t sick their private armies on each other…
As you can imagine, our targets are seldom just left lying around for the taking, so we work long and hard to plan the “extraction”. Additionally, it may be a game to our clients and their friends, but that doesn’t stop them from throwing our butts into jail if we ever get ourselves caught. That’s if the aforementioned private armies don’t get us first. As you can see, Scavenger Hunting is risky and challenging, but it can be extremely profitable as well. And the higher the risk, the better the pay…

The receptionist smiled sweetly as I handed her my ID and pressed my finger against the scanner. Wonderful things, those scanners. If your fingerprint, voiceprint and DNA match the encrypted data on the card, you get what you want. If they don’t match, you get your finger blown off by a high voltage pulse. It’s supposed to act as a deterrent against fraud. Needless to say, it deters quite well.
The machine beeped, then spat out a ticket, and since my finger was still intact the receptionist smiled again.
“Mr. Gaz Nuclear? My, that’s an unusual name!”
“I know.”
“Are you some sort of writer or musician? They always have names like that.”
I smiled back and pretended that this wasn’t the sixtieth time I had explained this. “Nope. I just don’t like my birth name, so I changed it. My parents had a bad sense of humour.”
“Ooh! Well, I hope you enjoy your stay, Mr. Nuclear! This keycard will allow you instant access to the accommodation decks once we enter Unispace. Until then you’ll be confined to this deck, but please feel free to walk around and explore!”
“Thanks!” I said, taking the card. “By the way, speaking of musicians, isn’t there a big rock star that’s supposed to be staying here over the next week?”
“You mean Zen Falcon? Uwaaaah!” She looked about to pass out.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Are you okay?” She was now jumping up and down and looked rather pale.
“NO! NO! I mean, YES! I mean, THERE HE IS!” and she let out a shriek of glass-shattering proportions.
I became aware of a collective scream and sounds of applause from behind me. I whipped around, and there he was.

Jackpot.

Zen Falcon was making his way through the airlock, surrounded by enough armed guards to invade a small country. Long greasy hair, dark sunglasses, three day stubble, torn denim clothes - your classical twentieth century rock star look. Oh please… These guys had no originality. All the rockers were going for the retro look nowadays. Not that his fans minded – they were going into a frenzy. Any woman who managed to get close enough to touch him fainted instantly, although whether that was from his star power or from his not bathing for several weeks was debatable. The tazers in the guards’ hands were also a suspicious detail.
Obviously he had his pass already, because he made his way straight through the atrium without stopping to check in. He winked over his sunglasses at the receptionist behind me, who tripped over her chair in fright, and then he disappeared through the door to the main corridor with his entourage packed tightly around him.
The frenzy subsided. I turned back to the secretary, who had picked herself up but was still flushed and wobbling a little from the shock. “Miss, can you tell me in which cabin Mr. Falcon is staying?”
“I’m sorry sir. For security reasons nobody’s been told where he’s staying.”
Hmmm, of course. That would make sense. I would have to…

“Ladies and Gentlemen this is your captain speaking. Final boarding is complete. In a few minutes we will be undocking from the Rigel starport and making our preparations for final departure. Please note that we will be entering Unispace in a few minutes for our three-day cruise to Virgil’s Star. Please feel free to leave the atrium and explore the deck until all of our drive systems are online, and kindly finalise any communications you are currently holding.”
Time to get going. “Thank you, miss,” I said to the receptionist, who seemed to have recovered.
“Thank you sir! Have a pleasant flight!”
“Oh I will, thank you. I will.”
And with that, the ship flashed into Unispace.

At the dawn of space travel, people relied on solid and liquid fuel rockets to move themselves through space. This was fine for short hops, say to the moon and back, but was utterly useless for interplanetary travel, and interstellar travel was completely out of the question. Then a man named Yves Fontaine uncovered the Holy Grail of physics – the Unified Field Theory.
Relativity says that matter warps space to create gravity, and that gravity (in the form of that spatial warp) dictates the movement of matter, as well as the relative flow of time in that space. With the discovery of the UFT, all electrostatic, magnetic, and gravitational forces in the Universe were linked together into a single painfully complicated, but workable, relationship. We now knew how to control gravity using electronic equipment. By controlling gravity we could warp space, and with the warping of space came the limited control of time flow. One of the many results of our newfound control over the space-time fabric was that we now had the ability to move ships faster than light without the tedium of Einstein’s time dilation effects, inertia, and the infinite energy cost.
Unified Space, or Unispace, refers to the space-time warp that the ship’s Unified Field Generator creates to travel at superluminal velocities. However, many people think that the ship is travelling through some sort of hyperspace. This is understandable, if hopelessly misinformed, for two reasons. Firstly, when in Unispace, nothing leaves the warp - not hyperphase radio, light, or anything else. The ship that you travel on is essentially isolated from the rest of the Universe.
Secondly, when you look out of the windows of a ship in Unispace, the warped and refracted light from the rapidly passing stars creates the most incredible effect – a constantly shifting panorama of rainbow colours that you can’t quite focus on. It’s almost hypnotic, in the same way that lava lamps are. You just can’t help but stare…

So when, while walking down the corridor and staring out of the windows, I tripped and fell flat on the floor, I felt I could retain some of my pride from that fact. Fortunately the carpets were pretty thick on this liner, otherwise I could have broken more than just my dignity. I sat up and tried to find whatever it was that had tripped me.
I didn’t have to look very hard. The “whatever” turned out to be a “whoever” - a pair of legs in overalls sticking out of an access shaft in the wall. And that “whoever” seemed pretty ticked off.
“What the hell… Watch where you’re going, you…” This was punctuated by another thud from inside the shaft. “OW! My head!”
I decided that laughing was not the most intelligent thing to do at that particular moment. Instead, I scrambled to my feet and waited for the unfortunate maintenance guy to make his way out of the shaft, all the while trying to come up with a decent excuse.
It turned out to be a maintenance chick. The acoustics in the shaft must have distorted her voice. Not that her voice mattered very much, because whatever lame excuses I had come up with vanished the second I saw her.
She was in her mid-twenties. Short blonde hair, blue eyes and gorgeous features, if you didn’t count the large and rapidly blackening lump on her forehead. You don’t trip over one of these girls everyday, that’s for sure.
She looked me over with those sparkling eyes, and frowned even more. “Can’t you pay attention to where you’re going? Or do you make a habit of stepping on people?”
I had by this point recovered enough to reply. “Hey! Now that’s not fair! It’s not like you had any warning signs up!”
“Really? Look behind you.”
I did as I was told. “Beware, maintenance ahead,” said the bright flashing orange sign three meters back.
“Oh crud…” said I, and whatever remnants of pride I had remaining decided that they’d rather be somewhere else. “Um… I was looking out the window and didn’t see it?”
“Nice try, Mr. Clumsy. You’ve got to do better than that, I’m afraid.”
“Uhhhh…” Panic set in. This was not a good situation to be in right now.
Then suddenly the frown disappeared. “Relax! I’m messing you around! You guys can be so uptight!” She gave me a playful punch on the shoulder.
“I’m really sorry, miss…”
“Call me Jade. If you want to apologise properly, you can do it like a gentleman and buy me a drink. Meet you in the bar at seven?”
To say that this took me by surprise would be an understatement. “Erm… I don’t kno…”
“Great! See you there! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to tweak these Transporter relays.”
And she disappeared back into the shaft.

Wow. That went well, considering that I’d just been manipulated into buying a complete stranger drinks in what was considered one of the most expensive bars this side of Rigel.
You may find my above response to the whole situation a little strange. Well, in any other circumstances, I would probably have been in Nirvana at the very thought of a date with Miss Jade the Extremely Hot. But not today, and for a pivotal reason. Not only are Scavenger Hunters not renowned for their social abilities, but we’ve always preferred to fade into the background when doing high-profile jobs. When people don’t know that you exist, they can’t suspect you of anything. Now I’d gone and drawn attention to myself, from one of the ship’s crew nonetheless!

Then again… I did injure the woman…

Fine. I’d take her up on her offer and do some damage control. Buying her a drink as an apology would close this whole affair off, and I could fade into the background again without anybody knowing or caring that I was ever here. She was also a ship’s technician, and a few drinks could loosen up her tongue regarding some of the ship’s more beneficial little secrets. If the drinks here were as strong as rumour said they were, maybe they would kill off her memory of me altogether, if they didn’t kill her first.

Then, perhaps, I could finally make some progress on this job.


******

I had been quite impressed with my cabin. Direct Transporter access for visitors, soft fluffy pillows, mini-bar, large windows looking upon the majesty that was Unispace, and a computer console that linked me in with the ship’s library, message boards and chat rooms. The bathroom was even better. It literally glowed with marble, gold, chrome, and other exceptionally shiny things. I actually thought that I was in Heaven, or at least in a reasonable approximation thereof. Complete, absolute, luxurious Heaven. Until I tried the shower, that is…

As I walked down the corridor twenty minutes later, I ran into a pleasant family who was staying in the room opposite mine. The three-year-old daughter, upon seeing me, proceeded to scream like, well, a little girl, and ran away as fast as her stubby toddler legs could take her. Mommy and Daddy were of course in hot pursuit, and not necessarily because of their traumatised child. I was in a foul mood at the time, and I guess it showed in my expression. The numerous blisters on my face and arms didn’t help matters either. I should have guessed it. The showers here were too bloody hot.

At the end of the corridor, built into a slightly raised section of the floor, was a softly glowing oval pad large enough for about eight people to stand on. This was the public Transporter pad. Public Transporters link to the popular public areas on the ship and are designed for mass transit. There are also private Transporters in each room for individual visits, but these are coded to avoid gatecrashers and other unsavoury folk from just stepping into your room.

I mentioned earlier how faster than light travel was only one of many applications of the UFT. This is another. Transporter pads act on the spatial distortion principles of the Unified Field Generator, and so are only active when the ship is in Unispace (one of the reasons why we couldn’t go directly to our cabins after boarding). The actual science behind it would doubtless give most pre-UFT physicists a screaming headache, but suffice it to say that the space within the Transporter field (along with the matter within it) is switched with the space at the destination point through the network relay circuits. The upshot is that all you have to do is press the relevant button and hey presto, you instantly find yourself at your destination, ready to sample the wonders of the ship’s facilities.

I pressed the button for the bar and hey presto, found myself… well, not at the bar, that’s for sure. Jade had mentioned that she had needed to tweak the relays for the Transporter system. I intended to have a chat with her about that once the ladies in the public bath I was now standing in had recovered enough to show me the way out. This they did rather enthusiastically and, fortunately for me, with the minimum of slapping, biting and kicking traditionally required in such situations.

Once I had landed on the mercifully soft carpeting outside the entrance of the baths, I was happy to note that, if nothing else, I was at least on the same deck as the bar. Ah yes, the map on the wall confirmed it - same deck, and the bar was at the bow. The “you are here” was at the stern. Since Transporters were out of the question, I got up and started the long trek across the ship.


*****

“You’re late,” said a visibly annoyed Jade, “and you’re still paying for this drink.”
“I’m also blistered, bruised, and sweaty after a six kilometre walk, but you don’t seem too broken up about that!” I replied, limping to and collapsing onto a barstool.
“You are king of creative excuses, aren’t you? Oh, except for those blisters.”
“I wouldn’t be late if your stupid Transporter system worked, and I wouldn’t be blistered if it weren’t for your stupid showers!” I moaned as I keyed my drinks order into the panel on the bar. Something strong was in order…
Jade smiled that gorgeous smile again. “Well, we have been having trouble with those lately, so I guess you’re forgiven again. Don’t make a habit of annoying me, Mr… What is your name exactly?”
I sucked carefully at my drink and, convinced that it was strong enough to numb my aching feet, took a bigger sip. “Gaz Nuclear. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Jade got a strange look on her face, but that could have just been my drink catching on to the social atmosphere and making acquaintance with my brain. “Gaz Nuclear? Funny name. You a writer or a singer by any chance?”
I sighed and pretended that this wasn’t the sixty-first time I had explained this. “My parents had a bad sense of humour. I had my name changed.”
“It must have been a pretty bad name for something like ‘Gaz Nuclear’ to seem like a good replacement.”
“Well, I like it. It has poetic flair.”
“It sounds like a character from a bad science fiction story.” She gave me that funny look again. “In fact, I may even have heard it somewhere else before.”
“I doubt it. Only one Gaz Nuclear that I’m aware of, and he’s right here.”

“Oh well, my mistake!” She drained her glass and slapped it against the bar. “Well, Mr. Nuclear, I’m glad we had this little chat. Thanks for the drink! Consider yourself forgiven for this afternoon.”
“Oh? Where are you off to all of a sudden? Are those the only slurs against my name that you can come up with?”
She stood up. “As much as I’d like to stay and swap insults, I have to get back to those Transporter relays. I don’t want any more passengers having to hike through the ship, otherwise I’m going to have to hike back to Terra when they fire my butt. Thanks again!”
“No problem. Have fun!”
“I can assure you that I won’t.”
“Have fun anyway!” I shouted after her as she left the bar.

Well, that was that, I hoped. I swiped my credit card across the payment panel on the bar, and could have sworn it felt lighter as the credits flowed away into cyberspace. Now I could finish my very expensive drink in peaceful anonymity. It was a pity that I couldn’t gather any information from her, but I’m sure I could dig some dirt up on my own.
As I sipped, I looked around the bar to check out the clientele. Mostly young single rich folks looking to pick up other young single rich folks. Except for one guy. He certainly looked the part of the respectable businessman, kitted out in a fancy suit and an impeccable hairstyle, but he was well on his way to an ugly hangover judging from the pyramid of empty glasses in front of him. This guy was putting it away pretty quickly, quicker than most folks I know (not that I know a lot of folks). And for some reason, he looked very familiar…

He must have seen that I was looking at him because he motioned for me to join him. Ah, what the hell, he was already sloshed beyond recovery. What could it hurt?
“Hey friend!” he slurred at me. “You wanna drink?”
“No, no, the one I have here is just fine, thanks.”
“You sure? I could buy you a million more of those if you like! BARMAN! A MILLION MORE OF THOSE FOR MY FRIEND HERE!”
At this point, a knee-high robot that looked like a beetle with wheels scooted towards us from the bar carrying a tray of drinks on its back. “Ah!” said the man; “Here’s my last order! About time!”
The little robot deposited the drinks on the table, said “There you go, Mr. Falcon,” and scooted back to the bar, presumably to fetch the million drinks that had been ordered for me.

Mr. Falcon? Hold on…

Lose the suit…
Lengthen the hair…
Add three days of stubble…
Add black sunglasses…

I knew he had looked familiar! I was sitting at the table of THE Mr. Zen Falcon, and he was smashed out of his bracket! This was the best thing that could possibly have happened! If I could engage him in small talk… I tried to hide my excitement at this revelation and turned my attention to the robot again. It was your standard butler bot, and could be programmed to perform any menial task, such as doing the washing or, in this case, fetching drinks from the bar. And nothing gives celebrities more pleasure than talking about their belongings.

“Nice robot,” I commented. “I didn’t know bars were using those now.”
“Nah, it’s mine! He’s a great little guy. He does whatever I want! I just give the order and POW!”  Zen punched at the air and missed, instead hitting the pyramid of empty glasses in front of him. Needless to say, the glasses didn’t last much longer.
I’ve always considered most celebrities to be big children with way too much money. Well, it seems that drunken celebrities are even worse, because Mr. Falcon collapsed on the floor and started sobbing loudly. This was pathetic, and it wasn’t helping my information gathering much. I had to calm him down, or I’d never get anything out of him.
I patted him on the back. “There, there, Zen, you have more than enough cash to pay for the glasses! Don’t worry!”
His eyes blazed with toddler’s angst. “Who cares about the stupid glasses? My hand hurts!” Then, with his eyes streaming: “Will you kiss it better for me?”

I won’t go into what happened after that. Perhaps his streaming, pleading eyes awoke something paternal in me. Perhaps I felt so sorry for him that I had to do it. Or, more likely, the drink I had ordered turned out to be more powerful than I gave it credit for. Either way, I think you can gather what I did, and you can also gather why six of Zen Falcon’s bodyguards (who had probably been watching this whole incident covertly, and with some amusement, from the sidelines) jumped at me from all directions when I did it.
“Hey!” shouted Zen indignantly, “What’re you doing here? I’m supposed to be here… um… incognitive!”
“That’s ‘incognito’, sir, and you aren’t doing a very good job of it!” said one of the bodyguards from somewhere in the pile.
“Yo, I’m completely incogni… icogno… what you said! Can’t I just have a single drink with my friend there?”
“That’s the problem, sir! You always have about fifty “single drinks”, and then you go and blow your cover. See? Now everybody is looking at us!” He was right. From between some guy’s legs I could see that the people sitting around the bar were getting restless and pointing, although this was probably due more to the bodyguards piled on little old me than due to Zen. Well, nobody said that bodyguards were the smartest creatures in the galaxy. They just never said it to the bodyguards’ faces, that’s all.

I walked out of that bar even sweatier, bruised and battered than I had been walking in. However, you’ll notice that “more miserable” is omitted from the list. You see, Zen’s bodyguards had eventually let me go once they realised that I wasn’t some sort of crazy hand-kissing stalker but was in fact drunkenly doing it at Zen’s equally drunken request. Then they called up Zen’s PR people (read “lawyers”) and entered into negotiations to adequately compensate me for this most unfortunate blunder. This definitely wasn’t the first time Zen had got into trouble, and his lawyers had figured that settling it before it reached the courts prevented any bad press from leaking out.
I love lawyers. If you can play ‘em at their own game, you can mess them around as badly as they could you. Well, I made it quite clear that I was very upset at this cruel and unnecessary treatment, and that only a visit to Zen’s cabin could possibly sway me from calling legal hellfire down upon him, his lawyers, his bodyguards, and all of their descendants for ten generations. So it was arranged that I visit the next evening, directly after a feature concert that Zen was giving for the passengers. They were so desperate that the morons even gave me his cabin number so that I could find the place.
I hope that Zen was paying his lawyers well, because if all went as planned, they’d soon need lawyers of their very own. Good ones.


*****

“Mr. Nuclear?” said a voice from behind me. I yelped and banged my head against the Transporter access hatch. “Mr. Nuclear, are you there?”

“Coming! Coming!” I scrambled to my feet, grabbed some ice from the mini-bar, pressed it to my forehead, and then walked over to the door. A pretty young flight attendant flickered onto the security screen.
“Ah, Mr. Nuclear! I have a delivery for you!”
“A delivery?”
“Yes sir! It was time-delayed and addressed to you, with no sender specified.”
“No sender?”
“Oh, don’t worry sir, we’ve run it through all the radiation, bomb and biohazard detectors! It’s perfectly safe!”
I hit the button and the door slid open. “My dear, if you’d had the past couple of days I’ve had, you wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Planet-Killer nuke in there.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” I snatched the package from her hands. “Have a good day! Thanks for the unmarked package of doom!”
“You’re welcome, I suppose…”
“Bye now!”
The door slid shut in her face.
Whew, close! She’d arrived right in the middle of my very illegal attempt to hack the Transporter system. I’d spent plenty of time researching Transporter architecture before I boarded, and that research was now paying its dividends. Every Transporter pad’s control computer is linked to a central hub, which processes destination requests and sends the relevant relay address back along the network to the pad. I’d ripped the private Transporter pad in the corner of my room open, and was now using my handy ICEBreaker on the network node. You see, with Zen’s cabin number, I could now find the relevant Transporter relay address in the central database. With the address, I could configure the relays manually from my room and zap straight into his room. It would play havoc with the Transporter network all over the ship, but considering the problems that they were already having, my little piece of sabotage would probably go unnoticed.
The ICEBreaker beeped and its screen flickered to life. I was in. I ran a search for Zen’s cabin number. Bingo again! There it was for the taking! Copy, paste.
I then started to surf around the database to see what else I could find. Interesting - it also contained all Transporter traffic, logged according to time, date, and source/destination pads. Useful to know for when I needed to erase my footsteps from the system.
Well, that took care of my entry plan. As for the mysterious package, its contents were volatile all right, but not in the way that any security test could detect. I’d sent it to myself before the ship departed, for safety. It contained the blueprints and hacking procedures for a very special strongbox, which in turn contained the very special item that I was being paid to obtain. Along with the codes, my Scavenger Hunter toolbox was now complete.

Showtime!


*****

At eight-thirty that evening, the relays for the Transporter system were hacked, and a single matter transfer took place between the cabins of Mr. Gaz Nuclear and Mr. Zen Falcon, although record of this does not exist in the transfer log. This occurred while Mr. Falcon was performing for the passengers in the ship’s amphitheatre. His cabin was unguarded, the location having been thought secure since it had never been revealed to anyone but the ship’s captain and Mr. Falcon’s staff.
The perpetrator in question (that’s me!) then located the custom titanium strongbox in Mr. Falcon’s cabin, and proceeded to use his inhumanly good hacking skills (and duct tape) to make his way through the security checks and physical booby traps in the box. The perpetrator, upon opening the box, would then have located the Neurolex prototype that Mr. Falcon had acquired for a substantial fee from Ferroware electronics. This prototype was worth a lot of money to the perp, and he removed it carefully and skilfully from the case.

At least, he would have removed it, had it actually been there.
Instead, he found a little note saying “Sorry, too late!”


To Be Concluded