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You grumble, brushing your sweaty hair back behind your pointed ears before you lever yourself up into a more proper sitting position. The synth-leather creaks as you move, first leaning down to pluck the still buzzing, almost foot-long oblong length from the floor between your feet. A quick flick on the switch shuts the molded plastic dong off, SAI reaching out with a skeletal metal claw to take the slick object from you. Your ears flick downward a bit in embarrassment at that. You know that the AI isn't programmed with the capacity to judge you, but that unblinking eye manages it away as the machine clacks back deeper into the ship.

"...see how much you judge when you have fucked up genemods like I do."

Your complaints die down into an atonal murmur as your butt squirms in a puddle of your own juices, bringing up the fact that you should really get your suit back on before the Nexus Command gives you a call to confirm transit. But there was plenty of time yet to call up the file containing the best leads you had to make some decent cash. There was still time before Burgess expected a return on his investment, time enough to do the job right.

The question was which job.

Cathris was the first option on your list, simply because it automatically alphabetized itself. According to public charts it was more or less a waste of a perfectly good sun, a healthy G-class star in the prime of it's life that had only a single anemic gas giant orbiting it. But according to your source, a retired Union intelligence officer, a large scale battle between the Argos and the Union had occurred there. The files you had... obtained from her personal computer while she had been recovering talked about how neither fleet had made it out.

There might be some risk of a Union salvage team being out there, but it was deep enough in the Scar that the bureaucrats running the government might not consider it worth it.

The Double D system, so named by any number of bored and horny explorers, a binary pair of massive M-class stars that were in the last stage of their life span. Within another couple million years or so they were set to surge to giant size and combined to form a massive black hole. But until then, Denaris and Denalil provided anemic light to several planets, most notably a jungle world that contained an incredible amount of ancient ruins buried beneath the stratospheric foliage.

Archaeology teams from every reputable university and government in the Union competed among each other and against countless illegal scroungers and smugglers seeking to make as much profit as could be made. You'd be one of the latter, but at least there would be an extensive support network available.

Venture is the final option, possibly the most normal system out of the three. A well-exploited system owned by a number of super-corps, there was an official request for independent operators and explorers. The third world of the system, an arid giant of a planet, was occupied by an indigenous species that protested the annexation of their system and violently repelled any attempt on behalf of the super-corps to explore or exploit their home. This wouldn't matter if the strength of the planet's electromagnetic field didn't prevent scans of the surface.

The corp rep stated that the natives didn't hold nearly as much hatred for people without corporate affiliation, though nothing explained how the backwater primitives would know how to tell. Either way, this was probably the riskiest option but also the one with the biggest assured pay-off.