How I Got Here: "Kansas City Shuffle"
24 Jul 2022Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 24-JUL-3308."They look left. You go right... and then..."
The key to a good deception is distraction. For millennia, practitioners of deception have used a technique called sleight of hand. In not so many words, the technique involves keeping your target's attention on one hand while you deceive them with the other. Whether that deception is innocent to deceive children or onlookers as you might find with core world street performers or it's done maliciously as you might find with the nomadic peoples of the outer bubble, the principle remains the same. Keep their attention in one place, while you deceive them in another.
So when Ragina had me fake an engine failure during dust off, apparently crippling my ship while blocking hers in, we were keeping our captors attention on the docking bay, while Ragina was hauling our payload, now programmed to her navigation chart via remote, through the ventilation system under the flight deck to just below the pirate command center.
Rewind a week, to Ragina and me sitting up in our bunks discussing the finer points of our escape.
"You want to blow them up?" I asked, nervously eyeing the very live explosives sitting on the floor between our bunks. "Provided they don't find this bag first, how do you plan on getting this anywhere near them? More importantly, how do you plan on making sure we're nowhere near it when it goes off?"
"Have you heard of a Kansas City Shuffle?" she asked.
"What's Kansas City?"
"I don't know what it is... that's not important... but that's what its called when they look left, and you go right... then... boom!"
"I don't understand..."
"This is a dance and I'm leading. Just follow me," She said.
Fast forward to us having cleared my Adder off of the landing pad to make room for Ragina's Cobra and us flying together with double the cargo. The sentence handed down for my ship failure to fly double shifts delivering the stolen goods in our hold was meaningless at this point. A threat made in an empty room.
We strapped ourselves in as I began working the power relays to gear power toward the engines. Ragina pulled the sticks to bank the ship hard and off course to the starboard side, I felt myself pulled hard against my straps to the port side as the momentum of the vessel shifted, watching the barren red surface of the planet shrink out of the starboard side window. She burned the engines hard to pull us out of range of the surface cannons.
"Chart a course out of system!" she yelled.
"To where?" I asked, reaching behind her seat and frantically scrolling at the navigation chart.
"It doesn't matter! Anywhere..."
Spinning up the FSD, well out of the blast distance, the nav chart read our jump point. By the time our captors realized we were jumping out of system, the signal had reached the remote and, in two seemingly synchronized flashes of light, Ragina, myself and The Blue Pirates were gone.