Chrono-Kangaroo Conundrum

The Chrono-Kangaroo Conundrum

Jonno Virek had seen plenty of strange freight in his time — crates of singing potatoes, bureaucratic jellyfish, a militant toaster collective — but nothing prepared him for a shipment of genetically engineered kangaroos that refused to stay inside their own timeline.

He and Mara had barely finished bolting down a secondhand air filter on the Peregrine Queen when a harried station manager from Orbital Habitat 12 came sprinting up, waving a data pad like a distress flag.

“Time-warping kangaroos!” he wheezed. “They’re… they’re everywhere!”

Jonno raised an eyebrow. “You want to run that past me again?”

The manager gulped air. “They’ve been bred for planetary colonisation — docile, fast-growing, genetically enhanced. But they passed through a research field that — that —”

“That accelerated their personal time stream,” Mara finished, scanning the manager’s report with a quick flick of her eyes.

Jonno rubbed the bridge of his nose. “So they’re skipping through time?”

The manager nodded frantically. “We can’t keep track of them! They’re hopping from minute to minute, hour to hour — sometimes they vanish for days and then pop back to chew through a bulkhead.”

Jonno took a long, slow sip of boost juice. “Perfect.”

Mara hid a grin. “So, rounding up time-bouncing kangaroos. Easy day, then?”

They got to work, improvising a series of gravity snares and repurposed survey nets rigged with temporal stabilisers Mara cobbled together from spare engine parts. Jonno volunteered to herd the roos, donning an ancient pressure suit with an absurd amount of duct tape holding it together.

The first roo flickered in with a faint pop and immediately tried to box Jonno’s helmet. He staggered, clutched the stabiliser net, and managed to catch it just before it blinked back into 2043 or wherever it was trying to go.

“Got one!” he shouted.

“Three more on deck six!” Mara called, skidding past a startled security guard who’d only just recovered from seeing a kangaroo materialise through a station bulkhead.

Half a dozen roos seemed to delight in popping in and out of the station’s hydroponic dome, leaving trails of half-eaten lettuce and temporal echoes of themselves that made the lettuce rot and regrow at the same time.

By the end of the day, Jonno’s tea was stone cold, Mara’s tool kit had been thoroughly looted by a particularly curious chrono-roo, and the station’s manager had threatened to declare a quarantine — but they had all the kangaroos safely contained in a reinforced cargo pod, stabilisers humming like a happy hive of bees.

Jonno leaned against the Peregrine Queen, exhausted but pleased. “Next time,” he said, “we only take the cargo jobs marked ‘completely normal’, agreed?”

Mara laughed, brushing time-laced lettuce from her sleeves. “Jonno, you know normal doesn’t pay.”

He sighed, raised his mug of reheated boost juice in a toast, and nodded. “Fair point.”