City of 4,000 Spies
The resort city of Lell lies on the remarkable Lake of Many Colors, where 100,000 fragments merge and re-merge into billions of patterns. One can spend multiple lifetimes watching its fantastic, ever-swirling waves and never (not once) see a representation repeated.
However, no one comes to Lell to watch the Lake. Lell is an international city where guests from a million different sectors are fully welcomed, as long as their cash holds out! It is where one comes to mine the most precious mineral of all — the mineral of information. They say that the resort city of Lell has over 4,000 spies. That’s not counting the taxi drivers, the hotel staff, the Farqat dealers in the casino, the Unie barkeepers, the Antonine fortune-tellers, and the ever-present Koopsie girls, any one of whom will gladly gather whatever information that is requested, for a sizable tip.
“Rarrko, the second son of the Great Nobleman of Sassko, was probably Lell’s most recognizable spy. He was handsome, athletic, and ingenious. He wore flashy high-end fashion and drove a speeder that broke 1.75. He was seldom seen without a bevy of beautiful females and was often described with that old-fashioned word “playboy” (although no one knew what it meant).
He looked the part of a spy. He moved in the nuanced way that spies moved.
If you asked him, “what is your occupation?”, he would smugly smile and say, “I am a spy, of course.” If you would follow up with another question, “who are you spying for?” he would again smirk, “Who ever pays me the most.”
However, he was already wealthy beyond imagination.”
In this episode, Noble Son Dusko Rarrko is in the very distant Ganna 40 Sector on a very hush-hush assignment of an unspecified nature He is working for a sponsoring entity that carries out actions of an indeterminate kind.
Then, he receives a secret message from PNB7Q. “Return home immediately on first available transport.”
Unfortunately, the only available transport is a very slow cargo klunker, designed for carrying extremely heavy loads to and from the mines. It carries passengers only as a necessary courtesy. Sixteen seats. No food. No drink. No entertainment.
Rarrko must spend the next 96 earth revolutions trapped in a 20-meter by 20-meter, very bare-bones passenger comparment with fifteen strangers, bound together by their boredom and monotony.
It turns out to be, as he says later, “a most eventful trip.”