A coughing fit spreads throughout the ship. They find out a deregger smuggled in several pollinating plants instead of the seeds in stasis pods they said they had. -- BKF
It never would have happened if the scanners weren't down for maintenance. Later analysis would reveal that there was sabotage on them to manufacture a maintenance flaw.
It's amazing what malicious people can do with magnets, thumb drives, and a complete disregard for anyone's safety.
Slow Cruiser Vessel, the Idle Hours, took passengers at their word. To be completely fair, the alleged stasis pods that Passenger Fidendra brought aboard looked like functioning stasis pods. They used ship's power and submitted reports to the Idle Hours' safety monitoring logs. They even had expected normal fluctuations in the readouts. He thought of everything... except pollen.
One week after launch, a mystery illness spread through the Idle Hours halls. The spread was equally as mysterious, not moving along the usual vectors. The five passengers who initially came down with the cough did not spread it to their roommates, nor people they shared activities with.
It spread, seemingly at random, to various cabins along unpredictable lines. One cabin both floors and hallways away fell ill while those between the locations remained untouched. The shipboard Mediks were stretched to snapping, treating the ill and attempting to prevent further spread.
Until one of the crew, performing regular maintenance, came down with the illness whilst swapping air filters. The old one was caked in yellowish-brown dust.
Pollen.
All the sick were not only allergic to the microscopic particles, but the order in which they sickened was directly related to the air circulation system. By tracing the air flow backwards, they found the culprit. Passenger Fidendra and his fake stasis pods.
Which contained flowering plants, and not the racks of seeds he said they were.
"They're worth more when they're established," Fidendra protested. "This journey was the cheapest one I could get and I'd never be able to afford accommodations for the time it would take for them to grow at my destination. I need this income, damnit!"
Part of Fidendra's sentencing included paying the medical costs of his victims. Pour encourager les autres.
[Photo by Adrian Diaz-Sieckel on Unsplash]
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