The Monkey Who Walked the Walk

The mining colony on asteroid 7x-9R was a noisy, claustrophobic place, but for a capuchin monkey named Chomp, it was home. He had been genetically uplifted and equipped with a neural translator, yet he rarely used it, preferring to communicate through a cacophony of shrieks and expressive gestures. The miners regarded him as an odd sort of mascot, a comic relief in a world of grinding machinery and dim yellow lamps. His sharp eyes, however, missed nothing.

One shift, Chomp detected a subtle shift in the rock, a hairline crack snaking up a support beam in the main tunnel. He grew frantic, leaping up and down and pointing, but the miners simply laughed and carried on with their work. He had chattered so many times about imagined dangers that his words had lost all meaning; he was the monkey who cried wolf. Realizing that language was useless, he snatched a portable scanner from a tool rack and hurtled down the maintenance shaft, determined to show them instead of tell them.