Author: Beth Cato
Narrator: Valerie Valdes
Host: Laura Pearlman
Audio Producer: Wilson Fowlie
This story originally appeared in the Cats in Space anthology, 2015.
Headspace
by Beth Cato
Something was alive in the crawlspace above aft berthing, and damn it all, it was Akiko's job to slither up there and clear it out.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. In this case, illegal drugs.
With fumbling fingers, she unwrapped a tranq patch and slapped it on beneath the waistband of her jumpsuit. She braced herself against the wall for a long moment, breathing through the terror that came at the very thought of that narrow tunnel.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, she got by just fine. Haulers like the Tolleson had nice, wide hallways. Her crew berth was as large or larger than what she'd get in some residential stack down in Kyoto. Enviro duty meant sys-monitoring most days, and filters could be changed through hall or room access.
Then the one percent moments came along and slapped her upside the head.
Her heart rate slowed as the tranq did its thing. The overwhelming sense of doom diminished. Thank God that whoever busted into her room last week and stole half her stuff missed the tranqs hidden beneath a floor panel.
She stared up the ladder to the hatch in the ceiling. "Let's do this."
The work chit had described several passengers' complaints of moving noises in the ceiling. Akiko had her suspicions. The ship's last hop involved the transport of about fifty small animals for a colony on Capulet. The critters had been too temperature sensitive for the freight locker, so they'd been given a berth of their own. If anything had been flagged as missing, it wasn't Akiko's place to know.
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. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0 license.
