Being: Thank you for waking me.
Daniel: You’re welcome. You also owe me six pounds of nome to help pay the parking fine. Someone left their ship here with a living crew and didn’t bother to pay for it.
If the crew could easily afford the ticket, he’d make them pay.
If the crew could easily afford the ticket and was extremely rude to Daniel, he’d make them work off the debt in the yard for a few weeks.
This was a sort of joke. Daniel didn’t need employees. The yard practically ran itself. As such, he’d make them try to polish the nanobot swarms, a task as tedious as it was impossible.
If the crew couldn’t afford the ticket, he’d take the loss and give them a little nome for their troubles.
Most of the time the unfrozen crews had nothing.
It was a common practice for pirates to hijack a colony ship, steal the onboard nome, empty the crew’s accounts, and drop the ship at the cloud yard before Daniel could stop them.
And that was only the practice of the more compassionate pirates. Many pirates would crack open occupied stasis chambers, just to watch passengers die.
Daniel and Trak sometimes found the pirates brutal handiwork: cryos with holes in them, the creature inside dead from temporal decompression.
It was gruesome.
At the cloudyard, he’d found many passengers in stasis, living and dead.
But at least he'd never encountered a creature like in Night of the Cryonic Salesforce.
