“Dose Aeomi with stims and get her moving,” said Trask as he swiftly injected himself with a dose as he looked about the starport, taking in the sight of more gangers cautiously moving in on their position, “I’ll clear us some space and help you with Uri.”
Trask stepped out to the railing, intentionally standing on top of the grisly remains of the ganger he’d just obliterated. The agent keyed his voice caster and throttled the volume up to compensate for the wheeze in his voice caused by the injured lung. He made a show of blasting a crater of concrete out of the third-floor ceiling. As the concrete chunk smashed against the floor, he began to speak.
“Post 47! I am Bond Recovery Agent Jared Trask, duly licensed by Grotto Corporation to execute the recovery warrant of Martin and Uri Chiodo. During the course of my duties in pursuit of these fugitives, it has been brought to my attention that the Chiodo brothers have bled on the spiral and are now fam with the ‘47’s. As such you may be operating under the same illusions as your dead comrades,” boomed the amplified voice of the bond agent as behind him Lovat worked to get Aeomi up and conscious before moving to bind Uri with mag-clamps and tie his legs up with a thin cable dispensed from a box spool at his belt.
“As an agent on duty, my ID and location are uploaded to the Spire every thirty seconds, as are those of my two subordinates. If we are not allowed to leave this starport unmolested, the full might of the Spire will come down on Post 47. As you know, Grotto prefers you alive as a slave rather than dead as a free man. Stand in my way and enforcers will not only take the ‘47’s, but your children will inherit your debts, and soon follow you into an oblivion of labor and war. Make your choice!”
The pronouncement was met with silence, and Trask dared to hope. The agents struggled down to the bottom floor, and still, no more gangers revealed themselves, much less opposed them. It was slow going, with two wounded agents and a recovery in tow, but they made it out into the open without further incident. Minutes after they left the starport the running lights of an enforcer barge could be seen speeding across the wastes.
“I still can’t believe we made it out of there,” said Lovat as he shook his head in the spotlight of the descending barge, repeating himself for the third time since they’d made good on their exit. “That voice cast really did a number on them.”
“It was only the truth, nothing more and nothing less,” sighed Trask as he turned his head to face Lovat. “That’s what made it so effective. Nothing inspires more fear than the cold hard truth.”
4. PROSPECTOR PIRATES
The Rig shook as it moved through the upper atmosphere of the unexplored planetoid Osi 2216. The ship’s geologist, a man who called himself Braeden the Red, had been overjoyed about the readings his scout drones had returned. According to Braeden, there was a significant probability of sizable ink-rock deposits just beneath the crust of the planetoid.
On this distant fringe of mapped space multitudes of worlds had only been given the most cursory of surveys, often simply being named and charted without any surface expeditions. The universe was simply too vast and dangerous for there to be much incentive for cartography ships to undertake any but the most lucrative of expeditions. This was compounded by the fact that most planets held little in the way of valuable resources to extract, much less were capable of sustaining life, so exploration was generally left up to desperate red listers, freelance colonists, pirates on the run, or prospectors such as the Rig Halo.
Braeden had observed the planet from a distance, using the Rig’s long-range scanners to scrutinize its potential. After his initial evaluation the geologist had recommended a closer inspection, and the pilot, Meridian, had brought the ship into the upper atmosphere. Once again, their secondary readings were promising, so the pilot had brought them low enough to launch scout drones. There were three of them, patchwork robots of Braeden’s own design, that took soil and rock samples, returning to the geologists onboard lab for evaluation. It was a relatively swift process, one that the crew of the Rig had gotten very efficient at executing. In just a few hours, the geologist and his support team, along with the pilot and the ship’s crew, could make a final assessment about a planet. While the majority of planets encountered were of no value to the prospecting ship, when they did find one, Braeden had yet to be wrong in his judgment.
Osi 2216 had been no different, though it had not required quite so much from the geologist this time, as one of his drones had been fired upon by someone already on the ground. While the geologist conducted his tests in the lab, Meridian, at the captain’s orders, took the ship along the path the drone had taken. They had found who had been doing the shooting. As the ship made a wide arc around the source of the incoming fire, Samuel Hyst stood in his quarters with his wife as he prepared to disembark.
The couple was silent, having known this day would come, though neither had thought it would be so soon. The first prospect had been easy, a swift assessment on an uninhabited asteroid lazily floating through the void.
Samuel had worked with Yanna on the drilling team, his skills as a welder proving rather useful as he used his Reaper’s torch to keep the grooves of the drill free from the molten ore that kept locking it up. The Grotto torch was designed to be small and focused, more for cutting than it was for joining, and thanks to his ability to use it for detailed work Samuel was able to keep the drill clean without Yanna having to stop her process. In the end, Samuel’s presence had saved an estimated forty hours of labor, which meant that the ink-rock ended up on the exchange desk before a recent price spike had flattened out.
He should have known that it wouldn’t be so easy for long, thought Samuel, as he fastened his forearm bracers together. Sura buckled his chest plate to his backplate, deftly sliding the interlocking pieces of each plate together before affixing the locks that would encase her husband in a protective shell.
The Reaper armor had seen better days, he reflected, noticing the multitude of metal patches he’d made after the fight with the Tasca cartel operatives, blending into the various repairs and upgrades the suit had endured during his years of service. He couldn’t help laughing as he reminded himself that there never had been better days, to begin with.
“What about any of this has given my husband a reason to laugh?” asked Sura as she came around to face Samuel, and then smiled as she undid and re-fastened one of his hip pieces.
Samuel winced at the mistake, a frustrating reminder that his range of movement was modestly limited thanks to those Tasca bullets embedded in his Augur issued spinal implant.
The hardened metal of the spine grafts had prevented him from dying when the operatives sank rounds into him back on Longstride, though they had slightly damaged some of the articulation. Leaning and bending to his left had become something of a problem, and though it had been months now since he was shot, it had become clear that until he risked discovery and paid a hefty sum to have the bullets removed by an Augur tech specialist he was going to have some mobility issues. Today that meant that his wife, now intimately familiar with the armor, had to double-check his work on that side.
“I was thinking about the patches on the armor, and how it never looked new in the first place,” answered Samuel after a moment, nodding in thanks as he accepted the helmet Sura offered him from its wall mount next to their bed and slotted it over his head. “All these years living in this armor, and I never once wondered who wore it before me. What that man’s life was like, if he got early retirement or if he managed to get all the way through his service.”