Kiseleva paused, putting a hand up to her ear. Her brow furrowed as she listened, and Apollonia stopped as well.

"Something going on?" she asked the Response officer.

The woman listened a moment longer, typed a quick response, and just as quickly got an answer.

"There's been a change of plans," she said.

"What changed?" Apollonia asked.

They were walking down a sloping hall from one deck to another, and ahead Apollonia could see a sign labelled Astronavigation.

"This way," Kiseleva said, turning at the bottom of the ramp and heading towards a lift.

"Wait, but this is Astronav, right?" Apollonia asked, pointing to the sign.

She'd never been in this area, it was the science section, judging by the number of officers walking around with the green sash of that department.

Everything looked sleek and neat, like in every dumb movie she'd ever seen where scientists had rooms of the most advanced equipment. But this was real, not a film set. She wanted to see more.

"We are not doing that now," Kiseleva said. She sounded rather unhappy.

"Why?" Apollonia asked.

"There has been a change in plans," the woman repeated, stepping up to a bank of lifts.

One of the doors opened and she stepped in.

Apollonia took one last look around the science deck and then followed her.

The doors closed, and she glanced at her tablet to see what floor they were headed to.

They were going deep into the ship. There were something like three hundred decks on the Craton - a fact she'd only actually learned the day before - and they were heading to deck 282.

She'd rarely been that deep into the ship. It felt . . . ominous.

"What's on deck 282?" she asked.

"It is a storage deck," Kiseleva told her.

"Storage? Do we need to get something?"

"You've been assigned a new task," Kiseleva told her.

"What? I thought you set my tasks?"

Kiseleva did not answer that. "Ham Sulp will be your instructor for this lesson."

"The . . . short bald guy who acts like he wants to bite everyone's head off?" Apollonia asked.

Kiseleva's jaw twitched at the description of the man, but then she nodded. "Yes."

"Oh," Apollonia said. "Wonderful."

The lift decelerated, making Apollonia's stomach lurch, and the doors opened.

The room beyond was darker than most she'd seen on the Craton. Lights came on as they entered, but there were still creepy dark areas ten meters out in every direction.

Most decks seemed to be broken up into many small rooms and corridors, occasionally piercing up through other decks when greater height was needed.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But this seemed to be mostly open. It surely was not open all across the kilometer-or-so diameter of the Craton, but it was a massive open area.

"Wow," she said. "This is a lot of crap."

Kiseleva began walking, weaving between the neat stacks of crates and containers. Angel ran alongside Apollonia, keeping pace with them and sometimes dashing off to sniff a crate or corner.

"The Craton stores a massive amount of supplies," Kiseleva said. "These are bulk general goods."

"Oh, so there's like . . . shoes and spacesuits and cups in these?"

"Spacesuits, perhaps," Kiseleva said. "The other things are only made as-needed to suit each individual on an as-needed basis."

"And the old stuff is recycled, right?" Her orientation had mentioned that, she vaguely recalled.

"Yes," Kiseleva replied.

"Isn't that kind of wasteful of energy?" Apollonia asked, giving voice to a question she'd always had. "On an isolated station I get the need, but surely raw materials are easier to come by for a ship. I mean, most stuff can just be gotten from any random asteroid or planet, right?"

"No," Kiseleva said. "The energy output of the Craton's reactors is far beyond what is needed for the recyclers. The majority of our energy production is for the zerodrive."

Well damn. On New Vitriol they'd always said that the costs of recycling things was prohibitive, and that was why goods were always in short supply.

Maybe the reactors there just weren't powerful enough, she thought. But more likely . . . more likely it was so the merchants could make a profit bringing in goods.

If it cost nothing to recycle stuff, there was no profit to be had for them.

That gave her a heartburn-like surge of bitterness at how often she'd gone without stuff she'd needed for no reason whatsoever.

"Through here," Kiseleva said, pointing through a door. The wall seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, but in an odd way Apollonia was glad to think the room was not endless. There was something mildly disturbing about a room with no end.

"Are you coming?" she asked Kiseleva.

"No," the woman replied. "I will come back to check on you later."

"All right . . ."

Apollonia went through, and saw the short, bald Ham Sulp standing with his back to her. He was studying a tablet, and to Apollonia's surprise, Angel ran right up to him, jumping up his leg in joy. Sulp reached down and petted her. Then, without turning to face Apllonia or even looking up he pointed off to the side.

"You see these totes?"

There were only four of them on the floor, they were not that big, but each was full of small foil packets with colored labels and barcodes on them.

"Uh, yeah, and hello," Apollonia said. Angel was still adoringly staring up at Sulp, and she found herself shocked that the man seemed to reciprocate her affections, still petting her.

"Salutations," Sulp replied in his grumbling voice. "Your task is in these totes."

". . . Okay, what's the deal?" she asked.

Sulp finally put down his tablet and looked at her oddly, finally noticing that she was dressed up like a flower. Like Kiseleva, he had no costume on. "We picked up some of these from contracted suppliers on Gohhi."

He shook his head in annoyance. "We didn't know that our original supplier's parent company was bought out by a much less trustworthy company, and to cut costs they started some . . . creative practices. Like lying about the expiration date on their volatile chemicals and using randomizing identification codes." He paused, picking up Angel, carrying her in one arm while continuing to gesture with the other. "I guess they thought we'd not realize they sold us crap, but all it's meant is that they've gotten sorted into the general supply and we have to sort them back out."

"So they're just out of date?" Apollonia asked, puzzled. "I ate food pouches that were out of date all the time on New Vitriol. Those dates are just suggestions!"

Sulp did not seem impressed. "When you're doing high-end chemistry, you wanna know your chemicals are just what they say they are, and not decayed down into something else. Most of the time it's just an annoyance. Sometimes it can cause bigger problems. Last week, a drone exploded after trying to mix something that had gone unstable, and took two others with it."

"Damn, okay. Gohhi sucks, man," Apollonia replied, grimacing lopsidedly.

"Yeah, well their system is chaotic and motivated by selfishness," Sulp grunted, then pointed again. "Deep in the labels are codes that identify them as being from Gohhi. I want you to use this hand-scanner to find them. That enough of a story?"

He offered the device, it was about the size of a writing stylus, and she nodded. "That's not so bad."

Sulp arched an eyebrow. "I mean all of them."

"These four?" Apollonia asked.

Sulp laughed. "And all the ones behind them."

Apollonia looked - and realized that what she'd taken as a bulkhead was actually a wall of totes, draped in tarps.

"There's four hundred and twenty-seven in total," Sulp continued.

Apollonia quailed away from the pallets of totes.

"This is drone work!" she protested.

"Oh yeah? Does that mean it's beneath you?" Sulp asked her.

"Well . . . yeah!"

"Let me tell you something," Sulp replied. "Back in the day, humans did all their own work. You know that? We started from dirt, and so we shouldn't be afraid to get our hands dirty when we need to."

"But why do you want me to do it?" she asked.

"Because my drones are busy," Sulp replied with a shrug. "You think they sit around? No, they're all doing their jobs. I got volunteered an extra hand, so I'm putting it to use."

Apollonia was practically stumbling over her words. "Surely not every drone is busy! This is ridiculous!"

Sulp shrugged. "You don't have to do it. But you signed up to help."

"Maybe I'll just leave!" Apollonia said.

"Suit yourself. I'll just have to report it." Sulp truly did not seem to care, but he stopped to gently put Angel down. "You stay with her," he told her. The dog seemed not to understand until he pointed to Apollonia, then she ran over.

He walked away, leaving Apollonia to seethe, Angel at her feet and staring up at her expectantly.

There was no way every drone was busy; this was some stupid-ass test. Was Kiseleva just trying to annoy her into giving up? She clearly did not think much of her! The woman never even smiled as far as she had seen, she was probably incapable of it.

She ran through a list of every curse she knew, even some she had heard from old spacers that still didn't make sense to her, heaping them all on Kiseleva and Sulp.

She'd been taunted with cool science and then got stuck on scanning packets? It was bullshit.

More curses and insults flew in her head until she began to run out of new ones and had to start repeating.

A resigned sigh slipped out from her lips.

She looked over at the totes. Her anger still burned, but had subsided at least a little.

Going over, she picked up one of the packets and glanced at the label. "Pure Javelic Hydrate", it said. It was squishy, like it contained a liquid or gel.

Well, she already had the scanner in her hand. She waved it over the package.

There was a beep and the light on it turned green. It was, apparently, from the Union and came up as keepable.

Dragging over an empty tote, she threw it in, then took another one. It was "Concentrated CDMP". Also from the Union. She threw that in as well.

The next one seemed to contain small vials, and when she scanned them it marked them as past due.

"Potentially volatile" her system said.

She carefully placed that one in a new tote she decreed as the waste box. Hopefully she could tell them apart.

Angel walked over, sniffing the crates, then floomphed over onto her side dramatically.

"I feel ya," Apollonia said gently. This was going to be a long night.