Tokens

The tip had come through a contact Lindsy had made three days after coming aboard, a Bolian freight broker who operated out of the second level of Docking Ring Alpha and who had a sideline in navigational intelligence that he did not advertise but did not hide either. She had found him the way she found most useful people, by following the data backward from something she had noticed and tracing it to its source.

He had mentioned the Yridian almost as an aside, the way people in that world mentioned things they wanted you to act on without wanting to be the one who told you to act on them. A broker on the commercial level who moved salvage tokens, coordinates logged by passing ships that had picked up something interesting and not had the time or inclination to investigate. Cheap to buy, usually worthless, occasionally not.

Lindsy had filed it and thought about it for a day before she decided it was worth the trip. She mentioned it to Zedd that morning, not asking permission exactly, more keeping him informed, and he had said use your judgment which was the kind of answer she had already decided to act on before she asked.

The broker operated out of a unit on the commercial level of Docking Ring Alpha registered as a data services provider. The door was unmarked and the unit was small, two chairs and a desk and a display panel on the wall cycling through navigational data in a font too small to read from the doorway.

The broker was a Yridian, older, with the flat assessing patience of someone who had been trading information long enough that it had become entirely amoral. He looked up when she came in and took her in with a single sweep that lingered briefly on the way she held herself and the PADD she was carrying and then moved on.

"Navigator," he said, which was not a question.

"Is it that obvious," she said, sitting down.

"The PADD and the way you looked at my display panel when you came in," he said. "You were reading it from the doorway. Most people cannot." He folded his hands on the desk. "What are you looking for."

"Salvage tokens," she said. "Whatever you have in the outer sectors. I am particularly interested in anything the logging vessel found unusual enough to record and then decided not to investigate further."

The Yridian looked at her with something that was not quite approval but was adjacent to it. Most people who came to him asked for everything and filtered later. This one had already filtered. He reached into the desk and produced a flat case and set it between them.

"Fourteen tokens currently available," he said. "Each one represents coordinates logged by a passing vessel that detected an anomalous reading and chose not to investigate. I do not verify the coordinates or the readings. I sell the tokens as logged."

Lindsy opened the case and looked at the chips without touching them, reading the reference numbers and the brief notations on each tag. Her eyes moved through them with the focused efficiency of someone who processed spatial data quickly.

"These six," she said, pointing without picking them up. "Debris fields or gas phenomena. The readings are consistent with natural variance." She moved her finger along the row. "These four are probably salvage worth investigating but not unusual." She stopped at the remaining four. "These are the ones I want to understand better."

The Yridian looked at her for a moment. "I have been doing this for eleven years," he said. "You are the first person who has ever sorted my inventory before I quoted a price."

"I did not want to pay for things I already know are not worth my time," she said simply.

He named a price for the four she had indicated. It was steep for speculative coordinates with no verification and both of them knew it and both of them knew the other one knew it.

She thought about it for exactly as long as it took to confirm she was not going to get a better number. "Five bars of gold pressed latinum for the lot," she said. "That is what I have budgeted for this."

The Yridian considered her for a moment and then reached under the counter and produced a second case. "Five bars," he agreed.

She counted them out and he swept them away and slid the second case across and that should have been the end of it.

"One more thing," the Yridian said, in the tone of someone who had been saving something. "Token three in that case. The vessel that logged it filed no report and submitted no claim. It simply changed course and left the sector at maximum warp." He paused. "I have sold coordinates logged by vessels that were afraid of what they found before. That one has a particular quality to it."

Lindsy looked at him. "You are telling me this because."

"Because you sorted my inventory in three minutes and paid without arguing past one counter," he said, and went back to what he had been doing when she came in.

Outside in the corridor Lindsy opened the case and looked at the four tokens sitting in their foam cutouts. Three of them she already had a reasonable working theory about. Token three she did not and the Yridian's words were sitting with her in the particular way that things sat with her when they had not found their place yet.

A ship that changed course and ran at maximum warp and filed no report. That was not a ship that found nothing. That was a ship that found something and made a decision about it very quickly.

She closed the case and tucked it under her arm and pulled up her sector charts on her PADD as she walked and started thinking about what kind of something made a ship run without looking back.

She was going to need the astrometrics suite and a few hours and probably the Borg sensor data to cross reference properly before she had anything worth bringing to Zedd.

But she was already looking forward to finding out.