Besides, she was not the only sniffer aboard the Marauder. They weren’t supposed to know each other, but Mousey knew. They all knew. A sniffer smells slightly different to another sniffer. It isn’t the unpleasant dustiness of a Tookee, but it is similar. It is still a slightly dusty smell, but there is a sweet overscent to it, more like the dusting powder that some of the female crew used to perfume their bodies. Liquid perfume wasn’t banned on the Marauder, but pressurized aerosol containers of any sort were. And in the lower pressure and very dry air of a starship, even tightly-capped volatile liquids soon evaporated away. And they had been at space long enough for all of the perfumes on board to have long since disappeared.
That wasn’t a problem for Mousey. In fact, it was a blessing. She was thankful that after months on patrol, her sensitive nose was no longer assailed by the overwhelming smells of Earth lavender and lilac and Perdonian luluum. Except for the much less intense dusting powders, all perfumes were long gone. The one exception was the captain. A perk of his rank was evidently a pressure vault in which to store a supply of his obnoxious cologne. There was no way he would ever sneak up on a sniffer– or even most of the ordinary crew– because the scent of leather and female pheromones preceded him wherever he went. Mousey often wondered if the captain knew that only other males– and sniffers– could sense the pheromones which made the cologne so appealing to him. Perhaps he did. From the after-smell of sex that was often upon him and other crew members after one of his latenight “meetings” in his quarters, it was obvious that when it came to sex, the captain was a true omnivore.
Galaxy Command didn’t care about the captain’s sexual preferences… as long as it was consensual. What they cared about was that he was the right person to command the Marauder on this critical mission. The Marauder, and the defensive fleet it carried within its massive decks, had been sent to track down the Tookee’s homeship. It had to be a homeship because there was no known planet that claimed the Tookees. They were not the only race to live aboard– or on– an artificial structure. Such homeships were often the size of large moons or small planets. They showed up as bright blips on any sensor array while they were still light years away. But not the Tookee homeship. That massive homeship was somehow shielded from all sensor arrays. It was invisible, but its path through space was easy to extrapolate from the drifting wrecks which it had left behind.
None of the ships had signaled that they were engaging or being attacked. They just suddenly went com silent and disappeared from all tracking screens only to reappear a few days or weeks later as drifting, powerless hulks barely able to sustain life support for the unconscious crews who slept within them. Sometimes several ships which had disappeared in the previous months would all reappear together. A number of the female crew members were usually missing. And strangely, missing female crew members from previous ships would occasionally be found among the unconscious crew. None of the crew on any of the ships could recall what had occurred. Several, however– especially the recovered females– reported extremely lucid dreams involving sexual slavery and strange games and contests. The cargo bays on all of the ships were empty and almost all energy had been drained from the ships’ energy banks. But more importantly, all traces of Muridium dust had been removed from the star flux chambers in the ships’ engines.
Muridium was perhaps the most valuable substance in all the galaxy. It was what made regular interstellar flight possible. Prior to its discovery by the Two Thousand Mines Corporation nearly six centuries ago, the fastest starship could travel at only point seven light. But Muridium changed all that. Muridium somehow existed as both matter and energy at the same time, constantly fluxing back and forth between the two states. It took only a small amount of external energy to cause it to completely change state and become pure matter or pure energy. And as it changed state, it would release a tremendous amount of long-wave energy.
When Muridium was forced into a pure energy state– or a pure matter state– the resultant ionized form was unstable and would quickly revert back to its normal state of balance. As impossible as it sounds, as it returned to its natural state, the Muridium would again release a huge amount of long-wave energy. A pulsed ion engine was developed that forced a contained amount of Muridium dust to rapidly flux between states. The result was a faster-than-light long-wave engine which could drive starships to the edges of the galaxy.
The only place that Muridium has ever been found was on the totally barren planet, Muridius. On the first planetary exploration of Muridius, the strange properties of the dust that was in a thin layer on the surface of the planet was discovered. Shortly thereafter, it was determined that the dust came from the rock layers deep within the core of the planet. Once that was known, the Two Thousand Mines Corporation quickly established two deep mines to exploit this rare resource. Unfortunately, after less than a century of mining, some sort of accident destroyed the mines. No one knows what happened because the resulting catastrophic release of energy destroyed not only the mines, but also the planet Muridius, the star around which it rotated, and the other five planets of the solar system.
Despite decades of searching, no other source has been discovered for this strange material. Muridium is thus the most expensive mineral in the galaxy, and the Tookees have gotten rich– and powerful– selling stolen Muridium on the black market. Where they obtain their Muridium is an open secret. They– or their compatriots– are space pirates that have obviously been attacking ships throughout the Galaxy to steal the Muridium from their engines. The mission of the Marauder was to bring that to an end.
***
“Mousey? Are you OK?”
Despite looking through half-closed eyes, Mousey recognized the person speaking to her as Julina, an engine room tech on the Marauder. If it had been anyone else, Mousey might have had trouble recognizing them. Almost everyone on board the Marauder looked the same. Everyone had the same light brown skin. All women were approximately 1.7 meters tall. All men were approximately 1.9 meters tall. Everyone had medium brown, slightly wavy hair. Everyone had the same, somewhat thin, athletic body. And everyone had medium brown eyes. Everyone, that is, except Julina. Julina had one blue eye and one green eye. She grew up wearing dark sunglasses… a lot. And she learned to hide in her room and study engineering. Her dream was to go into space and meet other humanoids who were “different.”
That was not going to happen. The Great Galactic War a thousand years before she was born prevented that. Or to be more accurate, the devastation which destroyed one third of the inhabited planets in the galaxy prevented that. After the war, the remaining humanoid life forms decided that their differences were what caused the great war. So, as part of building a new peace across the galaxy, a standard language and culture was adopted throughout the galaxy. Income and wealth inequalities were overcome. And more importantly, genetic measures were put in place which insured that all humanoid lifeforms were the same. There were always mutations, of course, but mutations such as Julina were not allowed to breed unless the offspring was genetically tested while still an embryo to insure that the mutation would not be passed on. Within a few generations everyone looked so much alike that ID chips were implanted at birth to verify identity. Mousey usually relied on the ID reader in her watch to tell her who she was talking to. There were, after all, only so many different ways you could wear your hair.