Kallawat stowed away the half-eaten sandwich in one of the olive jumpsuit’s pockets before he hit the button next to the hatch to enter the bridge. The button felt slightly sticky—or was it his hand? He rubbed all four of them against his garb in a futile attempt to clean them at least superficially while the hatch rumbled open, its servos whining. It was hard to tell if hands or clothes were dirtier afterward. The ship’s first officer and chief technician shrugged and stepped through.

  Captain Obollowong looked over his shoulder, his chair creaking from the sudden weight shift. Although he had been stripped of his licence a few years ago, he still held on dearly to the title, pretending to be more than a shady waste disposal company owner with a single employee, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. He had tried to get rid of him a few times, but it wasn’t worth the fight with the missus.

  “Have you fixed the cargo hold doors?”

  Kallawat pulled his eyes away from the still-greasy hands and wiped them again on his jumpsuit. “Absolutely. Good as new, Captain,” he said, half-distracted.

  Obollowong studied him for a moment, then looked around the bridge. Only half of the monitors were functional, and a few lights flickered, their meaning buried in a long-lost manual. A large crack across the hull, which had been more or less expertly welded by Kallawat a few cycles ago, looked like it was about to pop any minute.

  He sighed. It was a shit job, literally. But it paid the rent.

  Obollowong hit the dark control display in front of his chair with a practiced movement, making it stutter to life.

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  “Alright, let’s get this done,” he muttered to himself.

  He looked at the navigational map. In this backwater part of the universe, the stars hadn’t been named or even had a proper designation. But who cared anyway?

  The one next to their position was average-sized, not particularly large or small compared to other suns in the universe. It would do.

  Waste disposal was tightly regulated by the Empire and had become a costly matter. No wonder his business thrived. Dump it into the furnace of a star’s nuclear fusion, and your toxic material is gone for good, for a fraction of the official fees.

  He updated the cargo manifest with a few taps on the console: “Lost in transit.”

  Then, he hit the eject button and adjusted the course to his next pickup. What could possibly go wrong?

  ----

  As the large container filled with biohazardous material tumbled towards the star in the system’s center, its fate seemed sealed. Due to the nature of its contents, it was made of a pretty durable composite, but nothing to withstand the hellfire it was aimed at.

  The asteroid wasn’t special. Just a rock on its own unremarkable journey through space, flung out of its home system by target practice of a long-gone civilisation thousands of years ago. Hit by a ricochet, to add insult to injury. It didn’t know it was about to change history—or that history was even a thing. However, the asteroid collided with the container around half of its journey into oblivion, nudging both a few degrees from their trajectories.

  The impact alert flashed on one of the ship’s half-functional monitors. Kallawat glanced at it, hesitated—then remembered his sandwich.