Jess resisted the urge to step back as Light approached. She knew his tendencies well, so she was at least not surprised with how close he came. Still, QV could really make one feel claustrophobic, and she did her best to keep eye contact without it feeling weird. “You and Senjen know Ruk better than I do. I don’t...completely know how she would feel about this kind of work. If you think she would want to be involved, then feel free, but this is the sort of thing that you keep [i]only[/i] to those who need to know. We’re going to be smuggling something, but instead of benefiting the hospital, it’s going to be for the benefit of our bank accounts. Which, frankly, is a perfectly good cause in my book.”

There was just a moment’s pause from Jess, as if she was listening for footsteps, only continuing when she heard none. “Okay, first things first, the what and the where. The ‘what’ is something you might be familiar with. I’m sure you might have had cause to use devices that can mask or spoof the identity of certain types of cargo on scans. Not a revolutionary thing for a smuggler, but the ones we are looking for are some of the best. They’re an ‘in-house’ product of the Centauri corporation. Their mining division has a presence out in the edges of settled space, but besides minerals, they’re also collecting some more restricted, or just overtaxed, substances and selling them in non-Human markets. Now the ‘where’ is in a, hopefully, unoccupied system around a pulsar. See, the company recently lost a freighter that was heading out to one of their frontier outposts, with a good number of these devices on-board. Now, the company thinks it was pirates, and they’re moving to search places where they might have been intercepted. However, I have some information suggesting it might have actually been an accident. The freighter’s route comes close to a pulsar, and being that these megacorps are always trying to squeeze out every bit of ‘efficiency’, they don’t like diverting to safer detours if it adds another day of fuel costs to the journey. Officially, their pilots have to keep a minimum safe distance so nothing bad happens, but they also ‘officially’ put harsher and harsher quotas on their underpaid employees so they have to cut corners off the books just to keep up. I have it on good authority that this one might have drifted too close to the star on their route and got their ship fried by the radiation. The cargo would have been shielded, though, which means it could still be up for grabs.”

“I won’t deny that there’s risk.” Jess added. “In a perfect world, we get in there, find it quickly, scavenge the wreck, and get out before anyone knows what happened. Big payday for just a little work. Places like that, though, are common haunts of pirates, and scavengers especially. We have to get in on this quick before someone else finds it, and we might have to protect our claim.”