Chapter Two
“Gate travel’s a bitch, but it beats old-school FTL any day of the week. Guess who pulled the short straw for FTL insertion? This guy. Only good news is that the TCL won’t see us coming. The rest of the fleet’s going in the regular way, to get the locals looking the wrong way. Negotiation’s plan A. We’re plan B. If negotiations fall through, we get the signal. One realspace distortion later we pop into orbit, fuck up their planetary defense network from the inside out, and plant the payload. Score: TCL zero, NTA one. It’ll be a good day. Unfortunately, I’m also gonna hurl. Is it bad that I’m kind of hoping negotiations don’t fail?”
–Excerpt from the combat diary of Captain Carlos Gutierrez, NTA Marine.
Duncan felt the elevator slow to a halt and watched the doors cycle open. Of course, the doors here couldn’t just slide out of the way like on a normal void-cursed space station, could they? They were shaped like roses that bloomed closed and wilted open, all to keep pace with the rest of the overly floral design the station’s tech adhered to. In the furthest reaches of space, these rich bastards bought ships and stations that seemed almost organic in nature. Like they were trying a little too hard to reconnect with their too-distant roots.
The station purposefully resembled a tree. Not an actual tree, because that would be too simple, no. Some neo-cubist’s frail impression of what a tree represented, or some such bullshit. The main structure was the trunk, all the docking ports were roots, all the hallways were branches, and all the solar panels were leaves. The interior had no clearly defined stairs anywhere, but a bunch of inclines and chaotically spaced protrusions that allowed for some absolute asshole’s idea of better flow of movement.
It sort of felt like he was wandering through a cave at one point, replete with cave paintings and human handprints on the walls. The viewports depicting the vacuum of space completely ruined the illusion.
A little further on it was a forest. Cleverly concealed holographic projectors made the ceiling appear to rise much higher than it actually did, projecting a canopy of illusory trees waving in imaginary wind.
It got worse the longer he looked.
Sooner we’re off this surrealist nightmare station, the better.
It took him far longer than he would have liked to get back to the beach-themed hangar he’d parked his ship in. Stepping up off a deck made to resemble a sandy shoreline, he strode onto the Shrike and felt some of the tension in his shoulders relax a bit.
Here were the familiar, rugged lines of industrial space travel. The everyman’s starship. Home amongst the stars. Whether it was the faint smell of burnt food from the ship’s kitchen or the sound of laughter coming from the bridge, it put Duncan at ease to be back aboard his own craft. Admittedly, the highly modified and largely illegal arsenal of weapons and tricks he’d outfitted the ship with also played a part in making him feel safer.
Whatever hare-brained scheme Nolan Montgomery was getting him and his crew into, it was nothing a quartet of concealed Pulsar 57 splinter cannons couldn’t annihilate.
Some of that tension came back to him as he walked to the ship’s bridge. Listening to the painfully rich madman’s conspiracy theories live and in person was one thing. Relaying them to his crew after the fact was another.
By the time he walked through the door, there was a knot in one of his shoulders.
His pilot spun around and grinned wickedly. She was a curious hybrid. With the red skin and dendrites of a Kintar, but an unnaturally white set of freckles and a strange pattern to her skin that resembled Terren vitiligo. Ultimately it was the decidedly Citzan tail that was the dead giveaway. Her mere existence spoke to a member of the Kintar Empire abusing their power over a Citza slave and mating with one of them. Whilst such one-sided couplings were not terribly uncommon, most offspring of such a taboo union were culled shortly after birth to spare the Kintar parent the embarrassment. Even in a galaxy with relatively few hybrids, an adult Kintar-Citza hybrid was particularly… unlikely.
“Oof. Captain looks like he ate some bad Hissak cuisine again. Someone grab a bucket!”
“Quiet, Sybil,” Duncan said with a flat wave of his hand. “I’ve got some heavy cargo to offload. Let’s be serious for a minute.”
Judging by the light smiles on their faces, his crew had been in the midst of a far more fun conversation than the one he’d just left. While he wished he could join them, it was his job to keep the ship moving in the right direction.
Aside from Sybil, who was herself a potent psion, he had three heavy hitters on his crew. One Orchallen with a lot of tattoos covering his body and a pair of Maur from different tribes.
It was the burlier and more bear-like of the Maur who spoke up first. His real name was a deep animalistic growl no one else on the crew, not even the other Maur, could properly pronounce. Mostly they just called him by his nickname. He was a full head taller than his fellow Maur, a testament to the sheer size of his tribe’s ethnicity. Blue was a Munako—one of the two tribes who had first encountered Terrans many centuries ago—and his black fur and ursine features were a common trait amongst his people. His nickname was a byproduct of the streak of dyed blue fur that wove its way down the left half of his body from eye to ankle.
“Lay it on us, boss,” Blue invited.
Duncan leaned against the bridge’s door frame. “When I started this little venture of ours I promised to be honest and open about everything we did. Big decisions get made as a group. That’s a promise I intend to keep. This conversation ends in a vote and if it ain’t unanimous we hightail it out of this system and never look back. End of story.” He looked around the room and made contact with all five of his crew to let them know he was serious before moving on. “Now, let’s start with the bad news. Mister Montgomery’s a fan of that old conspiracy theory that the Maur intervened here in Sola Stella and kickstarted the failed revolution.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” interrupted Felix, the other Maur in the room. Felix had the white stripes on orange fur typical of the Obaguar tribe—the other tribe who first encountered Terrans many centuries back. Tall ears, full whiskers, and a set of fiery orange irises gave him a bold appearance. His most notable feature was the midnight-black cybernetic prosthetic that replaced his right arm from the shoulder down. “The Federation would never break treaty like that. We are an honorable species. We keep to our oaths.”
Duncan nodded his assent. “Oh I fully agree with that sentiment, Felix. Mister Montgomery does not share our lofty opinion, however. He believes some fringe tribe who wants an all out Maur-on-Terran war went to great lengths to kickstart the battle here in Sola, weakening us Terrans with the bloodiest civil war in my species’ history.”
Blue grunted, displeased. “Terran trickery. A Maur would never stoop to such tactics. If it came to war, we would face Terrans head-on and defeat them with our superior might.”
“How’d that work out for you last time?” asked the only other Terran aboard the Shrike. Duncan’s resident tech expert. His real name was Jace McCoy, but everybody called him Squint on account of the three mechanical eyes he had slotted into his dome. He was your standard case of an individual who’d taken a liking to cybernetic modifications and leaned into the more-machine-than-man route. Hard. A few more modifications and he’d be nothing but bones, brain, and nerves driving a mech suit.
Blue glared at Squint. “It wasn’t finished. Yes, we lost a battle, but the war had barely begun. If the goats hadn’t interfered, that war would have ended very differently. We were new to the galactic scene back then and still technologically inferior. That is no longer the case. You would do well to remember that.”
Squint shrugged. “If you say so, kitty. I ain’t got no skin in that game. Terran’s aren’t my people any more than the Maur are yours,” he gestured first to his obvious cybernetics—which most Terrans would consider extreme—and then to the mark of dishonor adorning Blue’s fur. “We’re both just castaways, remember?”
Blue had nothing to say to that.
Squint leaned back. The third eye started gleaming, letting them know that at least some of his consciousness was off swimming through datastreams. Escaping the confines of the mortal realm. Typical Squint behavior.
Sybil cleared her throat. “Let’s point this bird back towards the mission at hand, boys. This Montgomery must have some proof to support his theory. What’d he show you?”
Duncan shook his head a little. “Nothing too convincing as of yet. He’s got a code trail that seems to point to some Maur frigate jumping in-system right as tensions were picking up, and allegedly never leaving. I can work a MODAC just fine but when it comes to coding and all that, well, I’d like Squint to go over it and verify the data’s authenticity. But Montgomery’s already convinced. He also seems to think this mystery frigate fired the first shot in the battle of Sola. AKA, the battle that started the war that burned his family’s legacy to the ground and cemented the modern status quo. Great Houses sitting pretty in the clouds. Everybody else got stuck in the dirt. Forgotten Houses were swept under the rug. So yeah, he’s a big time conspiracy theorist.”
Felix let out a low whistle. “All that and a bag of chips, huh? So this bastard really thinks we were behind his daddy losing the war. Can’t even accept that they started a war they couldn’t win and paid the price. Pathetic.”
“Worse. What if he’s right?” Sybil floated the question out into the ether. “If word gets out that the Maur stoked the flames of the Colony Wars, things’ll get ugly real fucking fast. There’s still TCL holdouts claiming the frontier will rise again even to this day. All that anger’s been simmering on low heat for over a generation, now. If even one the Great Houses could be swayed to their way of thinking, Terrans would be pointing all that anger towards the Maur. They’d bathe the starways in blood.”
Blue shook his head. “Goats would never allow that. Their jump gates–”
“Jump gates aren’t the only means of interstellar travel, just the quickest,” Felix pointed out. “We’ve still got FTL-capable craft laying around. It’d be a little drawn out, but it would still happen.”
“Hell, scuttlebutt is that the NTA used an FTL drive to KIA Houston ASAP,” Squint said with a roguish grin at his intentional over-use of acronyms. “We’ve got ‘em too. It’d make for one hell of a slow dance, but it’d all end the same when the music stopped. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
A quiet spell fell over the bridge as the crew sat with that possibility.
Duncan decided to step in. “Look guys, I get it. This is a powder keg we’re walking into. But there’s something you’re not considering yet.” He slipped his MODAC from his belt and flicked on the holographic display, revealing the Shrike’s bank account balance to all present. “Krets. A celestial fuck-ton of ‘em. Count the zeroes and do the math. Even split six ways. We’d all be rich enough to give up the runnin’ game for good.
“This guy’s just another mark, okay? He’s got deep pockets and delusions of grandeur. More money than sense. He’s not asking us to kickstart a war. He’s asking us to scout one derelict ship and retrieve some intel. That’s it. And for our efforts he’ll double this amount when we walk away. We can do a job like this in our sleep. All that money’s ours if we say yes. So what’s it gonna be?”
His crew exchanged sideways glances and a dozen micro-expressions as they silently pro-conned their ways through this dilemma.
Blue was the first to break the silence.
“Fuck it. I don’t owe my people anything. Let’s do this.”
Squint nodded his assent. “Same. Whole galaxy’s circling the drain anyway. Let’s make some money and live while we can!”
Sybil leaned back and kicked her feet up on the pilot’s console. “I’m a simple woman. I fly where you tell me to, boss. Moral quandaries are above my paygrade. And frankly, I’d fly us all the way down to the ninth circle of hell for a payday like that.”
“If anyone could, it'd be you,” Duncan said with a grin.
Felix shrugged. “I’m with Blue on this. My people raised me to worship the art of war. ‘Praise be to Fyrinius,’” he said it with a dispassionate scoff. “Then they tore my arm off and exiled me for loving it a little too much. Unhinged, they called me. Dishonorable. Well, looks like I don’t owe them shit anymore. If doing this job makes me a rich man, I say we do it.”
Gunner, the heavily tattooed Orchallen, gave a noncommittal grunt. “Whatever.”
Duncan frowned. “Don’t be like that. Say your piece Gunner.”
The big hulking brute turned to Duncan and sighed. “I don’t like the smell of this one, boss. Seems too easy. Way too much money for such a supposedly simple job. Client’s a little too open with his wacked-out theories and his plans for the future. I don’t trust that. He’s lying about something, or he’s not telling us the whole story. Either way, it’s bad news for whoever’s boots are on the ground. Since that’s us, I’m inclined to steer towards caution. Since when has running ops based off bad intel ever turned out right for any of us? I don’t want to bring up Delilah, but somebody has to.”
Everyone on the bridge winced. Delilah was once the seventh member of their crew, and Duncan’s wife. Was, being the key word.
“Low blow, piggy. Back off,” Sybil warned.
Gunner held up his hands. “I know. I know. But I’m serious. We’re being played here. Think this through. Montgomery’s desperate to clear his family name. His inheritance is an irradiated wasteland and a system that’s been turned into a scrapyard. If we take him at his word, he needs this conspiracy theory to be true. He needs the Maur to be the bad guys. We do this, we help him bring back the glory days, whatever happens next will be on our hands. Forget today and tomorrow. Think ahead. Ten years from now, we’re living in villas in some tropical island on the ass-end of the galaxy, fucking like there’s no tomorrow, taking drugs that haven’t even been invented yet, right?”
“Sounds good to me,” Sybil said wryly.
“Sure. But meanwhile there’s a war going on between the Maur and the Terrans. ‘Bathing the starways in blood’ is how I think you put it, yeah? No matter how many drugs we take or how comfortable our mansions are, how long do you think we can run before the guilt catches up with us? We do this, whatever happens next is our fault.”
“I fundamentally disagree with that statement,” Squint said the instant Gunner was done. “This guy’s desperate. If we say no and leave money on the table he will just go out and hire another crew with looser morals than us. I say, we do this job and take the money, and run. If it’ll help your primitive moral compass, we can drop a report in with the Dorians on our way out of the system. How’s that sound, piggy?”
“Don’t patronize me,” Gunner spat. “I am not some primitive beast, you hollow shell of a man. My species developed later than yours, true enough. But we’re out here now, same as you. Your prejudice would have you believe we are simple. Stupid. War-mongering pigs who can’t see straight. But that’s a Terran contrivance. War is a tool to us, to better ourselves. You missed that, when you were dissecting us in your labs and trying to decide how we fit into your fragile false dichotomies. We are wise, and see things as they are. Not as we wish them to be. I was raised to think my actions through in terms of long years, not mere moments. If you ask me, the galaxy could use a heavy dose of Orchallen wisdom.”
The crew fell quiet again.
Gunner rounded on Duncan. “I swore to follow you, Duncan North, because you are an honorable man who thinks things through. If your heart is set on this mission, then I choose to trust you. For all our sakes, I hope you are not too blinded by the krets he flashed in your face to retain your wits. This Montgomery bastard is hiding something. We would do well to plan ahead for his inevitable betrayal and prepare accordingly. What is your vote?”
Duncan looked around at all his crew members. His friends.
“Squint’s right. If we say no, he’ll just hire a different crew. This is going down with or without us. Let’s not leave money on the table.”
Gunner nodded, unsurprised. “Then I said my piece. Let’s do this.”
“We will. But for the record, I heard you. You’re placing your trust in me, and I place my trust in all of you. Whatever the client’s hiding, I believe we can outpace him. We have each other’s backs and we’re going into this thing with our eyes wide open. Squint, I want you probing their network and authenticating that piece of evidence he threw my way. See if what he’s selling checks out. Blue, check our armor and make sure we’re ready for anything from a spacewalk to a hard landing. Felix, I assume you already have loadouts picked out for us?”
“Three, actually. How do you all feel about incendiaries?”
“If the situation calls for it. We might be scouting a frigate with hull breaches and null atmo. Plan accordingly. Gunner, make sure your bots are up for whatever comes our way. Sybil,” Duncan paused, “don’t crash.”
“Aw, everybody else gets a whole pep talk and all I get is ‘don’t crash?’ Boring.”
Duncan rolled his eyes. “We are sitting in one of the largest starship scrap yards in Terran space. I feel like don’t crash is actually pretty solid advice. None of the rest of us can do our jobs if we never even make it to the target in the first place.”
“Touche.”
