You decide that expending some of your 157.000 credits to acquire new, helpful items for your journey would not be a poor idea. So you head down to the procurement module and begin to browse. The idea of buying a combi-tool springs to mind, but one glance at the cost (200 credits) dissuades you of that notion. A hand-held auspex scanner is likewise considered and ignored for the same reason. but two useful items do catch your eye and open your money-pouch: a micro-bead personal vox unit and a portable lascutter. The microbead is essential for communicating with work-mates over the noise of machines or across a workshop floor. The lascutter can both cut and weld metal, both options useful in many tasks and situations.

The microbead slips into your ear easily enough, but the lascutter is too large and awkward to easily stow about your person. You don't need to ponder a solution for long before deciding to invest in a backpack. You opt for a rugged model capable of carrying more weight then you can at the moment, figuring to keep the same one (or at least the same model) as your augmentations eventually increase your strength. It is the work of a few moments to transfer your various items from your pockets to your new pack.

The lack of a job description on your transfer command makes you wonder if your new, unknown assignment will be dangerous. You decide to presume that it will be and take some precautions. You know little of combat or fighting, only what you inloaded from the training archives, so you decide that a helmet would not go amiss: cranial damage tends to be fatal to organics and you still qualify as one, much to your ongoing disquiet. The armory yields a flack helmet for the proper sum, but a monomolecular edging upgrade for your knife, being both a useful tool and a combat implement, proves slightly too expensive for your (now diminished) supply of credits. Instead you opt for a back-up power pack for both your laspistol and lascarbine.

A random thought occurs to you: acquire a pet. Not an unexpected event, given the organic state of your cortex, but surprising nonetheless. You decide to at least investigate where this curious thought leads. Many of the menial workers have pets, or at least semi-domesticated vermin animals given that importing organics for non-work purposes is banned: Gibil 2 must import all of its foodstuffs, so anything deemed superfluous to requirements is forbidden. Accordingly, you presume that any organic companion would also be forbidden at your destination. Disheartened at the thought, you ponder acquiring a non-organic companion of some sort. You are far to low of a rank, and too poor, to acquire a servitor of any description, and the miniaturized anti-grav unit of a servo-skull would be far beyond your ability to maintain, but the idea of getting a humbler companion machine sticks in your cortex and refuses to leave. You look for the pricing on a Cyber-Altered Task Unit, little more then a minimally autonomous floor sweeper or mobile scanner, and wince at the two hundred credit cost of a basic unit. The vendor does comment that many Technographers, and indeed many techpriests in general, prefer to build their own units as a meditative exercise. Buying only the parts you would need and doing the work yourself would reduce the cost to a mere one hundred and fifty credits. It is still far beyond what you can currently afford, but you decide to keep the thought in mind for later.

You arrive at the shuttle bay indicated on your transfer order and are surprised yet again. Instead of the usual personnel / cargo shuttle, you are greeted by the sight of a battered guncutter with no particular livery and clearly in need of a paint job. Its engines have the reassuring thrum of finely-tuned works of mechanical art, and the weapon-mounts are all clean and cleared for action. The last is something of a safety hazard, but you have no intention of arguing safety regulations with a ship armed with two long-barreled lascannons and a quartet of heavy bolters. The logical end result would be you missing your flight (at best) or being reduced to a messy stain on the deck (at worst). Instead you simply follow the instructions of the Flight Master and board when told.

The ride out to whichever ship you are to be transported on is relatively quick at only ten hours, given that the guncutter must navigate the Gibil 1 debris field to get back to its mothership. You disembark and follow a guide-servitor down a passageway to a suite of rooms. At first you are taken aback at the lavishness of your quarters, but a brief inspection proves that your conveyance is as credit-pinching as any of the chartist cargo captains you have heard stories about. Of the four rooms around the central common room, two prove to be filled to the deckheads with cargo crates, the third is a washroom, and the fourth is subdivided into two spartan berths. One of the berths proves to be occupied by a middle-aged man with white hair and tattered robes, whose onyx skin seems wrapped taught around a slender frame filled out with corded muscles. He seems withdrawn, content to be left alone.

You permit yourself to feel curious. This will be the first time you have traveled aboard a proper starship (shuttles and the like not being warp-capable) and you have an itch between your shoulders prodding you to find out new things.