Pandit looked at the crate. There were no markings on it anywhere. The wood looked new, but that meant absolutely nothing. In the dry heat of the Empty Places, wood would last a century, a millennium. They could not tell how old it was.
"Ready?" Sria Krishna called from the controls.
Pandit had secured the crate in the cargo bay. "Ready," he responded.
Moments later acceleration thrust them back in the twin pilot seats.
Sria leveled the jet at twenty thousand and they sped at eight hundred miles an hour toward the city and the spacefield just beyond it.
"Do you wonder about it?" Sria asked after a while.
"About what?"
"The cargo."
"We aren't supposed to."