The ridges on the back of my neck were prickling. 

I checked the feed from the cargo bay.  A dozen steel drums.  All of them full.  The bay was empty otherwise.  Normally that would have irked me, but the promised payment from this one delivery was worth the wastefulness of a near-empty cargo bay.  The drums and their contents were pre-approved to pass through every one of the near-hundred checkpoints that we were about to encounter.  It would not have been worth the risk of being stopped at every checkpoint for a full reckoning of our cargo if we were carrying our usual assortment of items—living, non-living, legal…not-so-legal.

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