The ship, ‘The Crumbs of Seed’ was colossal. Gob-smackingly vast. I’d never seen anything up this close that was anything like it. Even docked, the ship pulsed with the quiet power and scale of something that obeyed no terrestrial scale. The hull, a slightly shiny slate grey interwoven with webs of golden superconducting mesh, stretched for kilometres in either direction. Florence and I were insignificant specks within the yawning confines of its passenger reception, shuffling around a controlled, orderly chaos of interstellar migrants, corporate envoys, and transient traders, all of whom were being processed through to the cryogenic units for cryo-stasis through the voyage. There was no Director Shallan or any of the Lotaran delegation to be seen and both Florence and I presumed they’d already been frozen on their way here from the GEO Station.

Mr Firby had done his work well. We were officially on the manifest as passengers. But he had somehow arranged that we show on the crew manifest as cargo handlers. The former gave us passage in relative obscurity, whilst the latter gave us access to the cargo areas and the ability to avoid being put into stasis. Obviously a little bit of creative obfuscation might be needed, but I was getting used to that. Apparently, this anomaly in the system was a capability, built in to the systems like a ‘back-door’. Jake Firby reckoned it was there to allow the Galactic Council to move assets around unnoticed. How Mr Firby even knew about it is testament to his in-depth knowledge and un-noticed long service. We knew from the schematic and manifest information Jake had given us that the Lotaran exhibition’s artefacts were listed under secured cargo, slotted for trans-shipment before the ship continued to the next system. That meant we had precisely the duration of this leg of the journey to locate and access the crate before it vanished beyond our reach. Always assuming that the Ship systems didn’t clock that we were on both crew and passenger manifests. Well, at least not too soon, anyway.

Boarding proceeded around us in staggered groups, dictated by some internal algorithm balancing priority, security, and cryogenic availability. The Crumbs of Seed was an intergalactic vessel, built for voyages spanning months and years. Most passengers would be frozen in low-energy suspension, their metabolic processes slowed to an imperceptible crawl for the duration. This was by far the cheapest option and was how the whole problem of time-dilation at hyper speeds was dealt with. It also meant that, for those in stasis there would be no need to deal with the very disconcerting effects of hyper speed travel. Florence and I would be two of perhaps only a few dozen awake passengers in a vast ship that was transporting tens of thousands, most of whom were already in stasis from their various boarding points across the system.

Inside, the scale was no less overwhelming. The main passenger decks were laid out in concentric layers along the central spine, each level dedicated to a different class of traveller. At the core, shielded from the distortions of the drive, were the cryo-bays, vast fields of cylindrical pods stacked like library shelves, where most of the occupants would remain frozen for the duration. Above and below the passenger levels were crew quarters, operational zones, and mechanical access-ways. Near the needle-sharp nose of the vessel were the conscious passenger decks, ours among them, although we also had berths in the crew quarters.

We visited the passenger quarters. Florence and I had been assigned a standard sleeper cabin: a six-by-six-metre cell, modular in design, with a single bed recessed into the wall, a fold-down second berth, and a narrow console embedded with basic interface controls. The walls were matte grey, the lighting automatically adjusting to circadian cycles. The only luxury was a viewscreen, which at the moment was giving us a view of L1 station shrinking away as the ship’s docking clamps disengaged.

The undocking sequence was as precise as it was enormous. The Crumbs of Seed pulsed thrusters in a carefully orchestrated ballet, extricating itself from the station’s moorings with the gentlest shudders. I imagined, luridly that even a minor miscalculation at this scale would rip the station to scrap, spilling its million inhabitants into the vacuum of space. But of course, none of that happened and the ship eased itself away on low-impulse drives, gaining clearance before orienting toward its departure vector. Then, the real transition began.

After about an hour of manoeuvring out past the parking swarm, a vast collection of visiting ships too difficult, impoverished, tight-fisted to use the docks proper, the ship's hyperdrive, a real hyperdrive, an actual Casimir Effect-based negative energy drive, not the crude intrastellar Alcubierre fields, was housed in the aft section, a system of nested, self-stabilising bubble generators that created a controlled topological fold, slipping The Crumbs of Seed into an eleven-dimensional trajectory. The shift was barely perceptible inside the ship, save for a subtle flicker of the lights as spacetime momentarily resisted and then relented. The view outside the viewscreen blurred, starlight smearing into unfamiliar spectra.

Florence exhaled. “Well. No turning back now.”

I grunted in agreement. We both headed away from the passenger area to the crew spaces. Our bunk was one of about twenty in a long, narrow space in the lower portion of the ship. We each had a space about a metre wide and two metres long, with little but a bunk and the terminal on the wall. We both checked the terminals. Our work assignments, conveniently aligning with the cargo deck where the Lotaran shipment was stored, nice work again Mr Jake Firby, started in six hours. Until then, we needed a plan. Actually, I needed a sleep.