Free Transference Station by Stephen Hunt

they would find it.
    ‘Find something suspicious?’ asked Calder.
    ‘Nope. Exactly what it says on the tin, a mining virus. Powerful enough to level a mountain range. To go along with all the jungle clearance equipment, diggers, excavation tools, food packs and water purification gear.’
    ‘So this is a stand-up job?’
    ‘Well, if you were setting up a development company, this is the gear you’d buy off the shelf.’
    ‘That’s a good thing, right?’ asked Calder.
    ‘Kid, I was alive when mankind made its first extra-solar landing on Alpha Centauri. I was watching on TV when mankind establish first contact with a kaggen ship. And in all that time, across all the centuries, I haven’t once seen someone like DSD change his spots. If Lana wants to believe a crook like Dollar-sign is moving into honest endeavours, then it’s because she needs to believe. Because our future is at stake. Me, I’ll just keep checking crates until I find the hidden weaponized plague that carries a death sentence for us on four out of five worlds inside the Edge.’
    A small robot swung up to Zeno, running across the deck like a unicycle on a single ball. He reached down and tapped it affectionately, listening to the wireless burst of data being transmitted. ‘There we go,’ said the android. ‘That’s what I was hoping for.’
    ‘You’ve discovered a crate of nukes?’
    ‘Nope, your most noble highness. I’ve scored me a capsule with an atmospheric sample from the world we’re travelling to. The professor is shipping it back; along with the full spectral analysis she’s paid a very exclusive laboratory in the alliance to run for her. Extra analysis to confirm her in-situ findings.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Calder. That was a useful discovery, indeed. It wasn’t just criminals who left DNA prints, worlds did too, as long as they had been visited by a survey ship, however briefly.
    ‘I’m going to make a call to a contact of mine in the local colonial office,’ said Zeno. ‘See if we can’t find a little more about this Abracadabra before we turn up in orbit.’
    ‘What about the professor?’ said Calder. ‘She’s meant to be arriving soon. And there’s still the delivery from the shipyard…’
    The android waved away Calder’s concerns as he hitched a lift on the back of a passing cargo droid. ‘That’s why they pay you the big bucks, your highness.’ He disappeared among the waiting piles of freight.
    Calder snorted. The crew of the ship might have saved his life, but if he had collected a pay cheque yet, he must have missed it. The nobleman felt a brief pang of regret, of pure homesickness. This was beginning to feel like his real life now. His world, Hesperus, might have been an icy, unforgiving environment. But it had still been home. Calder had forgotten how peculiar feeling warm all the time was. Standing on ground where the wind didn’t hurry along ice particles in a fast-moving mist hugging the land. Where trees that lined the station’s promenades didn’t resemble lines of ice-covered trolls, bowed down by the weight of snow. You’re a fool, Calder Durk. You were being hunted, friendless and familyless with the death mark on your head. You can’t regret leaving, any more than you can regret living. For to stay would have been to die. You owe Lana Fiveworlds your life. And perhaps a little more than that too, after Calder had proved himself to her. It was the normal course of events back home for a noblewoman to assign her suitor a number of difficult tasks to complete for him to demonstrate his worthiness. Of course, it was the political fallout of Calder’s attempt to prove his worth on Hesperus that had seen him fleeing largely friendless across the snowy wastes, with almost every assassin and soldier’s blade in the land turned against him. Still, what are the chances of something like that happening again?
    When the professor eventually turned up, an automated pod of a taxi carried the woman into