Starbase Human Read Online Free

lid down and resisted the urge to remove her thin gloves. They itched. They always itched. Because she used department gloves rather than buying her own, and they never fit properly.
    She rubbed her fingers together, as if something from the crate could have gotten through the gloves, and turned around. Nearly one hundred identical containers lined up behind it. More arrived hourly from all over Armstrong, the largest city on Earth’s moon.
    The entire interior of the warehouse smelled faintly of organic material gone bad. She was only in one section of the warehouse. There were dozens of others, and at the end of each was a conveyer belt that took the waste crate, mulched it, and then sent the material for use in the Growing Pits outside Armstrong’s dome.
    The crates were cleaned in a completely different section of the warehouse and then sent back into the city for reuse.
    Not every business recycled its organic waste for the Growing Pits, but almost all of the restaurants and half of the grocery stores did. DeRicci’s apartment building sent organic food waste into bins that came here as well.
    The owner of the warehouse, Najib Ansel, stood next to the nearest row of crates. He wore a blue smock over matching blue trousers, and blue booties on his feet. Blue gloves stuck out of his pocket, and a blue mask hung around his neck.
    “How did you find her?” DeRicci asked.
    Ansel nodded at the ray of blue light that hovered above the crate, then toed the floor.
    “The weight was off,” he said. “The crate was too heavy.”
    DeRicci looked down.
    “I take it you have sensors in the floor?” she asked.
    “Along the orange line.”
    She didn’t see an orange line. She moved slightly, then saw it. It really wasn’t a line, more like a series of orange rectangles, each long enough to hold a crate and too short to measure anything beside them.
    “So you lifted the lid…” DeRicci started.
    “No, sir,” Ansel said, using the traditional honorific for someone with more authority.
    DeRicci wasn’t sure why she had more authority than he did. She had looked him up on her way here. He owned a multimillion dollar industry, which made its fortune charging for waste removal from the city itself, and then reselling that waste at a low price to the Growing Pits.
    She had known this business existed, but she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it until an hour ago. She had felt a shock of recognition when she saw the name of the business in the download that sent her here: Ansel Management was scrawled on the side of every waste container in every recycling room in the city.
    Najib Ansel had a near monopoly in Armstrong, and had warehouses in six other domed communities. According to her admittedly cursory research, he had filed for permits to work in two new communities just this week.
    So the fact that he was in standard worker gear, just like his employees, amazed her. She would have thought a mogul like Ansel would be in a gigantic office somewhere making deals, rather than standing on the floor of the main warehouse just outside Armstrong’s dome.
    Even though he used the honorific, he didn’t say anything more. Clearly, Ansel was going to make her work for information.
    “Okay,” DeRicci said. “The crate was too heavy. Then what?”
    “Then we activated the sensors, to see what was inside the crate.” He looked up at the blue light again. Obviously that was the sensor.
    “Show me how that works,” she said.
    He rubbed his fingers together—probably activating some kind of chip. The light came down and broadened, enveloping the crate. Information flowed above it, mostly in chemical compounds and other numbers. She was amazed she recognized that the symbols were compounds. She wondered where she had picked that up.
    “No visuals?” she asked.
    “Not right away.” Ansel reached up to the holographic display. The numbers kept scrolling. “You see, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary here. Even her