Log Entry 2711.07.15-2

Met up with Piet. He still got some of that Schnaps he bought last time we visited Terra. Considering the amount we have used of it, there must be a container full of it somewhere on this ship.

We went through the usual options. All cargo areas are surveilled by cameras, obviously not the insides of the containers. Well, some containers linked up to the surveillance grid, only the valuable ones, though. Sadly in this case, dead people are not considered valuable, even if they are brought to Derram IV.

The coffins are stored in a few more than ten standard containers. We checked it up and sadly the doors of at least 5 containers do not face the nearest camera. A distant one catches those, but the resolution is somewhat poor. The lighting is pretty dim - in a cargo area were temperatures are around -20 C you don’t expect much activity, even rats prefer to stay somewhere else.

A quick check-up of the recordings confirmed that there has been no movement caught by the cameras. This doesn’t mean a lot. Current camouflage technology allows a person to pass close to undetected right in front of a decent camera. The other point is that if the geezer is somewhere in those containers, he can only survive if he’s got some kind of heating available. A lot of Schnaps possibly. That wouldn’t hold out for long, though. It’s a whole load of **#@! **Who pays this kind of effort? Nobody, of course.

Anyway, short of throwing the whole cargo out and running into the next Meta-Session we have checked the stuff stored in the same compartment. Nothing special. We have decided to put the compartment into a vacuum. There is no level one container in there, those need an atmosphere to avoid their deformation. Hardly used anymore, as level two’s have become quite cheap while offering more options for setting up cargo compartment environment. The level two and three ones resist vacuum without problems, although only level three and upwards guarantee containment of any atmosphere kept inside. Most of the containers in area five are two’s, a few three’s.

Hence we’ll suck out the air, and if we’re lucky the guy is dead in a few minutes. During vacuum we will enter (Piet and a few robs will enter) and check up the containers with an Infrared device. It should catch any coffin or even container with special equipment. After that we’ll hopefully know more.