“Sir?” Fourth Second Officer Lieutenant Commander Jacob Asher said to his commander at the end of a shift briefing. “If you recall that other matter I mentioned… the, ah, trafficking on the trade boards?”
“Yes,” Commander Mehoff said. “Has something more come of it?”
“Well, possibly… I’ve had what we might call a ‘nibble’,” Asher said.
“A nibble?”
“A nibble,” he said. “I responded to the original query, and I haven’t had any further contact from the querent, but there’s a third party pinging me about it.”
“Well, that complicates things, doesn’t it?” the comander said. “If there are multiple partners in the vicinity interested in buying what you’re offering, then it’s probably not connected to our runaway, is it?”
“Well, that’s the thing, sir,” Asher said. “I still have yet to hear from more than one party at a time… I’d expect there to be something of a bidding war going on between the original buyer and the new one, if there really was more demand, but I think we’re still dealing with the same situation.”
“Do you think they’re moving her around, then? That’s thinner than thin,” Mehoff said.
“Well, yes, sir, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the case.”
“Yes,” the commander said. “That would be why I said it’s thin.”
“Sir, I think this is all a bit of misdirection, a bit of smoke and mirrors,” Asher explained. “And if I’m right about that, well… that just makes it less likely that this is just some adult tourist ’slumming it’, as it were, doesn’t it?”
“Well… that’s somewhere between very thin and thinner than thin,” Mehoff said.
“Very seriously, sir, it’s a classic dodge, and a fairly obvious one.”
“So it won’t be any problem seeing through it?”
“I think not, it’s pretty transparent,” Asher said.
“So you’ll be able to trace it to the actual buyer.”
“Well… not so much, no,” Asher said. “It is an obvious dodge, but seeing that doesn’t really help me figure out who’s doing the dodging. In our own space, with our own channels… we could intervene, we could run a trace. But this is all independent, anonymous trades on distributed networks.”
“What about when you make delivery? They’ll have to give you a destination ship,” Mehoff said.
“It won’t be the final destination, not if they have any interest in hiding their identity,” Asher said. “I could keep an eye on the traffic between other vessels and the destination, but if they pick a busy hub vessel… or arrange for multiple steps…”
“Just how much trouble do you think somebody’s going to go through to get something from our mess stores?” the commander asked. “I mean to say, there isn’t anything precisely wrong with our food, but it’s something of… an acquired taste, I suppose.”
“Yes, and somebody who’s acquired that taste wants a bit of ‘home cooking’ but doesn’t want to give their position away to a Confederation vessel,” Asher said. “It’s very suggestive.”
“But can you actually do anything with that suggestion?”
“There are a few things I could try,” Asher said. “I can’t afford to pull any shenanigans with the actual delivery… if I dropped a tracer into the package or something like that, it would reflect badly on the ship as a whole. There could be a bit of an incident. We do have legal standing to protect our citizens and our ships in interstellar space, but… well, like you said, it’s a bit thin as far as ‘probable cause’ goes. I’m going to try to poke the original buyer, suggest that he may wish to increase his offer… that should let me stall a bit without arousing his suspicions.”
“And stalling will…?”
“Give me more time to think about what I can actually do.”
“Well, if that’s all you can do… do it.”
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