How I Got Here: “Wolves Of The Sea"
20 Jul 2022Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 20-JUL-3308."I am become death. The destroyer of worlds..."
I read once that with a gun barrel between your teeth you speak only in vowels. And it's true. It's also true that different weapons taste differently, which you pick up on as you inevitably try to tongue the barrel into your cheek. Projectile weapons taste like cold steel. Cold like the impartial bullet waiting just four inches away, eager to shatter against the wall behind your head. Beam weapons? They taste like radiation. If you're asking yourself how I know these things, then you haven't been paying attention.
A backwater station on the ass end of nowhere isn't exactly the kind of place you want to find yourself in debt to someone and the people on these backwaters aren't exactly the kind of people you want to find yourself in debt to. These are the kinds of places where your debt accrues unfair amounts of interest. The kind of interest you can't pay back. The kind of interest you have no choice but to accept when you have the barrel of a gun in your mouth. If you search the galactic network, it doesn't tell you how extortion works, but this is how it works.
Any loan shark can tell you, when someone owes you money, you never squeeze the person for the entire sum all at once. You juice them, so you can squeeze them the next day and the next day. This is how you end up with a repaired ship, but it's also how you end up with a high yield explosive device hard wired to your navigational relay so it remembers to kill you if you decide to run.
This is how I met Ragina. Like me, Ragina was a slave. A slave to this band of pirates out of Moonlight Keep. Like me, Ragina found herself with a debt she couldn't pay off so to survive she fly's for them. For months it went on this way. Every night we would go to sleep, tired from flying for nearly twelve straight hours, and every morning we'd wake up with a new batch of junk to move to one fence or another.
The pirates would take off at about the same time as us and move in packs, like wolves, across Acamar and neighboring systems, killing whomever and stealing whatever they could and the next day, we'd take it to the fences to be sold.
Ragina was from a system in Alliance space called Al Mina. We were bunked together and over the next few months we'd gotten as close as two people in a situation like we were in could get. Ragina was a gifted pilot but her real skills laid in engineering. She was an expert at building and understanding the way things worked. It fact, it was Ragina who repaired the FSD on my broken Adder.
Before she knew she could trust me, Ragina had been working on a plan to escape but she couldn't do it alone. This lead to us discussing this plan late into the night sometimes only to fly the next morning on whatever little sleep we were able to get. One night, while we went over the plan again, which was starting to feel like a fantasy we replayed together, Ragina hopped out of her bunk, grabbed her bag which she struggled to carry, and set it on my bed. Inside, was the payload from the explosives the pirates rigged to her ship and mine.
"I am become death," She said as we stared into the bag. "The destroyer of worlds. I took this a while ago, when they asked me to hard wire it into your ship," She said.
"You mean, I've been here for months with a dud explosive on board my ship?" I asked, clearly getting angry. "I could have run at any time?!"
"I needed you," she said. "Besides, if you ran, they'd find you. This right here, will make it so no one on this shitty little rock will ever be able to look for you... us, again."