obscured by time and once hotly debated, caused a huge portion of the ship to become toxic, uninhabitable. That section was permanently sealed off from the rest of the ship. No one goes Aft. But it was another, smaller empty section I was headed to.
The reason I was spelunking through maintenance shafts and between decks was that the smugglers had chosen their location carefully. More carefully than usual, which was what had me so intrigued. Any normal path in or out of the area could be easily watched. While I possessed the ability to bend light around me and effectively cloak myself from visible detection, there were ways around that. So instead, I was sneaking in through the cracks, almost literally as I wedged myself between two enormous conduits.
“It’s tighter than a Feyn’s sphincter in here,” I grumbled in a whisper.
Your capacity for crudeness knows no bounds, does it? You’re like an adolescent romantic poet. Paige highlighted a sector of the map that floated in my vision. It’s just through here, Wordsworth.
After a little more crawling and climbing, I finally came to a narrow vent that opened into a larger room. I reached out in front of me and “pinched” the virtual map in my vision, manipulating it to get a better view of where I was in relation to where the exchange was taking place. The room I was looking into, along with several others, was on a sort of mezzanine level, which looked out over a larger space where I was likely to find what I was searching for.
The vent grate was welded in place, but a few nanites I smeared around the edges were able to loosen those bonds enough to let me yank it off the inside of the wall.