Cohost writing prompt: Starship pilot with a cargo that probably isn't 100 tons of rubber ducks
"One hecatonne...cultural artifacts." The customs agent squints at her screen, eyebrows doing several perturbed manoeuvres as she pokes through some links to wiki articles and stock photographs. "Small yellow hollow plastic bird sculptures?"
"Traditionally yellow," Vanadium Diligence-Smith agrees, hands clasped behind her, shoulders relaxed, face neutral-to-bored, the way it should be dealing with officialdom and it's never occurred to you in your life that there are stakes to being perceived by it in return.
"What are they for?"
"Probable ritual purposes," Vanadium recites. "Honestly, though, I'm just a courier — I think these are going to some rich collector's Tellurian Era vault? History isn't my personal thing."
The agent looks behind her, at the modular cargo unit, a routine official stamp the only thing standing between it and Van's ship pulling it up into the onboard cargo cradle. "Artifacts need a module with life support?" she asks.
"Antique plastics," Van says. "Protective atmosphere, temperature controlled. You wouldn't want to breathe the stuff. They're so old it's the only way to keep them from disintegrating." She shrugs lightly. "Hell of a thing to spend your money on, but rich people...."
The agent laughs, but still her thumb hovers over the auth, not touching it. "Did you hear," she says, bright sharp eyes fixed on Vanadium, "anything on your way through Bremstow space, about the missing persons dragnet?"
Vanadium lets her own eyebrows peak a little. "I mostly listen to podcasts underway," she says truthfully. "There were some alerts about — I thought it said a manhunt? I assumed some kind of escaped criminal? Way off my route, in any case."
"It's a developing situation," the customs agent says, and Vanadium stands right in front of her, with a life-supported cargo module at her back, and thinks as hard as she can without moving her face, nobody would be so foolish as to shoot two guys and jailbreak twenty teenagers out of a conversion therapy camp then simply stroll out of your fucking interstellar theocracy with them in a crate while conspicuously being a foreigner openly wearing a Pride lapel pin, that's beyond credibility, and all my paperwork is fine, so push the button.
"We wouldn't want to hold up your important cargo," the customs agent says, dry and irony-laden, looking right at Vanadium's pin, and taps her thumb down. Vanadium smiles politely back as the ship's cargo lifters immediately whine into action, a domino sequence of contingent permissions autonegotiating, flight plan sprouting a green checkmark and a twelve-minute countdown to her departure slot.
"Thanks," she says breezily.