Nova Cassidy's Chronicles: Back in the Saddle, pt 5
13 Aug 2016Nova Cassidy
Well, that’s a hell of a good start.
The wrecks of a Hauler and two stock Sidewinders were floating around the Snowbird. I had used the information from the sheriff's files and jumped into 'Old Col', making long, lazy passes back and forth. Just as I had counted on, members of the Gold Hand had taken the bait and interdicted me, demanding that I drop as much cargo as the three little ships could hold.
Last mistake they ever made. I took a deep breath and retracted the Snowbird’s hardpoints. The combat wasn’t even really combat, at least not by bubble standards. I had simply selected the targets and let the tracking do the rest. The last Sidewinder had tried to run, but-
I flew by the drifting wreckage of the dirty white ship. But you can’t outrun a hail of multicannon fire.
The ships had been outfitted as poorly as I’d come to expect. The multis hadn’t left much, but I needed something to show for my trouble. There wasn’t anything of value to scavenge, nothing to help break even on my costs for fuel and ammo- but that wasn’t important. I was trying to send a message. And an artist needs a canvas upon which to paint their masterpieces.
Or in my case, the flat, jagged underside of the white Sidewinder I’d shredded.
I smiled grimly to myself as I delicately enveloped it into my cargo bay and shut the hatch. Not being a cargo container, the auto-loading arms wouldn’t quite know what to do with it. It would bang around something fierce in the cargo bay once I hit atmo, but I didn’t need it to be pretty. I just needed it to be flat and white.
The element of surprise would be lost the moment the three Gold Hand pirates failed to check in. That said, no one that the Gold Hand send out had checked in since I arrived. I had thought about this next phase very carefully. Was it better to strike from the shadows, picking off their ships one by one? Or openly announce myself via some dramatic act?
It was tempting to just wage a one-woman guerilla-style campaign to rid the system of Gold Hand presence. It’s probably how I’d have done it in the bubble, partnered up with four or five other reapers. It was safer that way, keeping the bad guys on their toes, not quite knowing what they were up against.
But this wasn’t the bubble, and I didn’t exactly have backup. Old Col was basically one giant small town where everybody knew everybody. Here, it was pointless to try to conceal that it was me picking off Gold Hand ships. Who the hell else would it be, in a white Python?
So tits-out mayhem it was. Stealth and deception was for those reapers in black-painted ships, hiding in the shadows of an extraction zone’s asteroids. This was a time for look-’em-in-the-eye simplicity. It was all the locals knew, and it was the language in which I’d purge the Gold Crew from the system. Simplicity.
That, and scaring the piss out of ‘em. Hopefully. They've seen small time bounty hunters - but they ain't never seen a Reaper.
I parked the Snowbird a short distance away, powering down all but the essential systems to minimize sig. Unbuckling, I walked down to the cargo bay, making sure to activate life support in it and grabbing a plasma torch from a utility locker. Checking the bay readout to verify that it had full life support, I slid open the door, feeling the cold blast of air against my face.
Hitting the cargo bay lights, I smiled as I beheld my trophy. Sure enough, there it was- a large, blasted, but still- white piece of flat hull plating that had until recently been the underside of a Gold Brothers Sidewinder. It wasn’t the only piece, of course- I had scooped up a fair number of random ship debris in addition. I held up the hand torch and took a step forward- and then noticed something in the bay that had absolutely no business being there.
Hidden behind the giant (when standing next to it) piece of hull plating was an escape pod, already nabbed and secured by the cargo loader arms. I shook my head as my mouth dropped as I walked up to inspect it. It was occupied, and was showing the occupant to be alive.
Son of a bitch. What the hell am I supposed to do with a survivor?
I ran my hand down the side of the escape pod, my face contorting into a scowl. And how the hell did the sensors not pick it up?
Upon inspection, my question was answered: the emergency beacon had been smashed in the explosion. No one in a million years would have found the pod as it drifted through the solar system. I sat down on a blasted plasma coil, staring at the pod and trying to decide what to do with it.
The obvious thing would be to just drop it off at Paradiso and pocket the bounty. But this might also be an opportunity…
Rising to my feet, I punched the controls, opening the seal of the cryopod. My heart started to beat faster. I hadn’t done anything like this since I pulled a battered and broken Matt from his escape pod after I had scooped it up in my old Asp, the Bluebird. But that had been a long time ago.
And Matt hadn’t been trying to kill you twenty minutes prior.
My hand gripped the plasma torch as the white cryo gasses dissipated. I worried that he might have been armed for a moment, but if he was, I'd have the drop on him while he's still trying to get control of his limbs back from the statis drugs. Inside was a young man in a beat-up green flight suit. It looked to be a military surplus, standard issue crew uniform, patches ripped off and looking like it had seen far better days. The pilot, far from having the look of a hardened killer, was a skinny, sandy-haired young man. From the look on his pimply face, he belonged behind the controls of a hover-plough, not a pirate ‘Winder.
I felt my face harden. Wayward hick or not, this piece of shit tried to kill me.
Moving quickly, I interrupted the flow of stasis drugs and accelerated his revival sequence. Bypassing several warnings, I watched him open his eyes and gulp down air. He looked around in confusion until I put my hand on his chest, restraining him.
“Howdy.”
He eyes darted to me and focused, his breath still coming in panicked gasps. “Where the fu- who are you?”
I looked around, shrugging. “Put it together, meat: big cargo bay. Pieces of a ship that look like yours. A pissed-off women waking your ass up.”
He shook his head, the leftover stim drugs still clouding his judgement. “But how-”
My hand moved from his chest to his jaw, gripping it and forcing him to look at me. “You’re on my ship, spacebilly. The one you and your friends were trying to shake down. If a few shots landed differently, I'd have been your killer too.”
The young man didn’t speak, just letting out pathetic squeak sounds from his throat. I narrowed my eyes and leaned in to him.
“Didn’t work out so great, did it?”
Still in my grip, the man began to sweat, despite the chill of the cargo bay. He shook his head rapidly. “I don’t- we were just tryin’ to-”
My hand moved down to his neck, squeezing. “You were tryin’ to take what ain’t yours. Prey on the helpless. Maybe fuck some blue-haired truck driver who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that about cover it?”
Confusion and fear spread on the young man’s face. “I, uh-”
I held up the plasma torch to his temple, pushing it into the thin part of his skull. “You’ll do exactly what I say. Good news: I ain’t killing you. Not today, at least. When you wake up, you’ll be surrounded by all your Gold Hand friends. Tell ‘em what happened to your wingmates, and then you tell them the reaper is coming. That’s it. Think you can handle that?”
The man didn’t answer, only nodding his head rapidly like before.
I released the man and mashed the master control to resume emergency stasis. He struggled weakly as the pod began to close around him, the stasis drugs once again being injected into his veins. The pod shut and sealed itself with a tight hiss. Satisfied, I turned and looked at the flat slab of hull plating hogging my cargo bay. My lips curled in anticipation as I held up the plasma torch.
Time to write a message that even these hicks will understand.
Themis Terminal wasn’t much. In fact, it reminded me of a glorified Harris Sation with taller buildings and landing pads. Like Harris, it was located on a dry, desert world that didn’t have much value. Unlike Harris, its means of self-sustenance had dried up long ago. According to the sheriff's files, Themis had been planned as a waypoint for weary in-system travelers and a nexus for local authority. No one had wanted to invest in an outpost, so it was supposed to be the system’s hub. Once Paradiso was built, it lost all relevance and was abandoned by its original owners, leaving behind a rusting carcass to be slowly reclaimed by the desert.
Until the Gold Hand took over.
Using slave labor and kidnapped hostages, the Gold Hand had been able to rebuild and restore Themis section by section until it once again resembled a working starport. Now, it had a reputation for being well beyond the reach of local Authority. No effort had been made to bring them to heel- the manpower and resources simply weren’t to be found in Old Col.
As the Snowbird broke atmo, I let myself grin a savage grin. Today, the Gold Hand learns the difference between a couple of fatass lawmen and a reaper.
The Gold Hand didn’t have any kind of established patrol patterns. Ships came and went as they pleased, and a dirty-looking white Python, while larger than the norm, wouldn't attract much excitement.
Themis’s tower radioed in, welcoming me to the settlement in a folksy imitation of a legitimate station. I ignored it and hit the boost. Even if I outgunned every Gold Hand ship in the vicinity, the Snowbird handled like a drunken cow in atmo flight, and I would only have one shot at what I was here to do.
The Snowbird vectored toward the station, the cluster of buildings growing larger and larger. I scanned the vicinity for a good place to spring my little surprise, somewhere open and spacious-
There.
In the center of the building cluster was a large, open patch of ground. I adjusted the Snowbird’s course slightly as the ship disengaged the atmo glide and returned full control to me.
Just stay dumb and let momma drop the baby off…
Alerts began to register on emergency bands as I continued to neither respond to tower hails nor acknowledge orders to slow my speed. I grit my teeth, gripping the throttle and letting my right hand dart from the joystick to open the cargo hatch. This was going to take all my piloting skill…
The Snowbird streaked between the tallest of the settlement’s buildings, the roar of her engines and the sight of the massive Python sending the pedestrians below running. Just as the ever-lowering horizon was causing collision alarms to echo in the bridge, I pulled up on the joystick and slammed the throttle forward, putting power to the thrusters and leaving a blackened trail along the dirt and metal with my boost. Clouds of dust a hundred feet tall followed the Snowbird as her thrusters pushed against the dirt, her nose swiftly pointing upwards.
I heard a familiar groan of metal sliding against metal as the blasted piece of hull slid out of the Snowbird’s opened cargo hatch and skidded along the surface of the “courtyard”. I turned to my right and released the escape pod, watching it crash to the ground and bounce several times before rolling to a halt. A few lucky shots rippled against my shields- but for the most part, both the people on the ground and the nearest Gold Hand pilots had been too shocked to react. Under my helmet, I smiled.
Good. Let ‘em wonder what the hell just happened.
I banked to my left and looked out the side window at the rapidly shrinking surface settlement. Using the zoom on my artificial eye, I could see that crowds were already gathering around both the escape pod and the piece of hull plating that I had ejected.
Well, there’s no going back now. For better or worse, you’re officially committed to this mad little crusade.
Even at max zoom, I could barely make out the letters I had burned into the Sidewinder’s white hull plating:
Fear the Reaper.