The Living and the Damned - Part VI
09 Dec 2017Jellicoe
"Hello, Viktor,” Stannis Jellicoe asked the hologram before him. “Got time for a chat?"Viktor Kuznetsov, a short, thickset man with close cropped dark hair and pronounced stubble scowled back.
"Stannis Jellicoe, you are either a very brave man or a very foolish one," he replied in thickly accented speech. "And in your position I would be showing a lot more respect, I think."
"My respect is earned, old boy, and extortion and slave trading aren't the best ways to go about it."
"What is it with you English? Always looking down on rest of galaxy. Listen you little piss ant, I tolerate you in this sector because you piss the Feds off, and if they're busy chasing fools like you they're leaving me alone. But push me too far and I will feed your balls to my dogs. What you think you were doing laying hands on one of my men?"
"That's a very generous description of Danny Swift."
"He is little shit, but he's mine. If people think I cannot protect my own they take liberties. Is bad for business, I need make example of such people."
"I'll tell you what, Viktor, I'll pay you compensation for Danny, and, if you’ll help me with a little matter I'll pay you very handsomely for something else I think you've got."
"Or maybe I just rivet your head to my airlock."
Jellicoe smiled. "Let's be honest with each other shall we, Viktor? You're not Archon Delaine, you're a big fish in a very small bowl. I command one of the most powerful warships in this sector, streets ahead of anything you have, and I am quite prepared to use it to turn your 'business' to ashes. See what that does for your reputation."
" I have people at every port in this sector. You have to dock sometime, Stannis Jellicoe.”
"No I don't," Jellicoe replied, grinning. "I have workshops on this ship that can synthesise everything we need. I have fully automated self repair modules and a mountain of rations. This ship is quite capable of sustaining combat operations for more than long enough to hit you so hard that your rivals will pick you clean. Or you can make some money."
"What do you want?" Viktor said, his voice taut with fury.
"Danny took two prisoners for you back in July, a man and a woman. I'm sending you the details and a holograph of the woman; her name is Mhera Bathana. I want to buy them back off you, and I'll pay treble the going rate."
Viktor smiled wolfishly. "I am afraid you have wasted your time. The transport they were on never reached its destination."
"Attacked?" Jellicoe asked.
"Probably."
"Do you know by whom?"
"No, but I would very much like to. They have cost me a lot of money."
"Alright, I'll do you a deal; I track down whoever attacked your ship and teach them a lesson, and you give me the girl and her pilot."
"You have a deal, Stannis Jellicoe, but before you set off here is a lesson in what happens to people who fail me."
The camera panned back to show Danny Swift hanging by his wrists from chains embedded in the ceiling, his body a mass of welts and bruises. At a nod from Viktor a huge man swung a great axe almost splitting Danny in two from neck to crotch.
"What happened to looking after your own?" Jellicoe asked, just about managing to keep the shock out of his voice.
"That is important yes, but there is something wanted in return, and that is never, ever speak to bastard reapers. He failed me on that."
Kira Goméz sat at the terminal in her cabin, obsessively checking news reports and bulletin boards from across the bubble. When this drew a blank she switched to researching the main centres of unlicensed slave trading, looking for anything that might give her a clue, however small, to the whereabouts of young Mhera. Deep down she knew it was pointless; Claude Marsaud had already been through all this and more. But Kira was a woman used to shaping events for herself, and for her to feel useless was intolerable. It also occupied her mind, keeping at bay images of what might have happened.
As she studied yet another report, the door bleeped and Stannis Jellicoe entered.
"Can I help you, sweetie?" Kira asked, a single, elegant eyebrow rising.
"You and I need to talk," he said, a clear tone of discomfort in his voice.
"We spent most of this evening talking. We were working out how to find this spaceship we think Mhera was on. Was there something you forgot to tell me?"
"I mean about us; like whether there still is an ‘us’."
"Was there an 'us' when you seduced that trollop in a hotel bedroom while I was sitting in an interrogation cell?" Kira asked, her voice as hard as steel and as cold as ice. Jellicoe reddened.
"I needed somewhere to hide,”he said. “It was the only thing I could think of."
"It must have been terrible for you," Kira replied, a sarcastic smile playing briefly across her face. "I do know the reason, darling, and in that position I might very well have done the same. But you did do it.Only an hour after you had dinner with me you were in bed with someone else. Did you even consider the woman's husband?"
"I, errr."
"Of course you didn't, and then you disappeared and left me to deal with your mess. Again."
"I could hardly have come back. Half the galaxy wants me dead."
"Don't be so over dramatic, Stannis. There may have been a few months around the time that Salomé woman was killed when her leading followers had bounty hunters sent after them - even now I'm sure that if you fell into their lap they'd still enjoy making an example of you - but it was about her, not you. Now she's dead, and the rest of you have scattered, but none of you are that important, not really. Kahina Loren might have given Patreus and that blue haired creature sleepless nights, but they won't even know who Stannis Jellicoe is. So yes, if you'd put your mind to it you could have found out what had happened. But no, it tickled your vanity to play the great freedom fighter out in the Pleiades, you against the galaxy. And, as usual with you, what's out of sight is out of mind."
"I'm here, aren't I?" Jellicoe stuttered. Kira always did this to him; the clever answers died on his lips whenever she was there and she knew it.
"You're here because you still have some vestige of a conscience left, but it has to be pricked hard. But trust me, if I had anywhere else to turn you wouldn't be here at all."
"I suppose that answers my question."
Kira smiled, her face softening and the humour returning ever so slightly to her eyes.
"Sweetie, did you really think you'd just have to give me a couple of those boyish smiles of yours and I'd be on my back for you?"
"No, I..."
"Good, because if there is going to be an 'us' you're going to have to earn it. You’d just better hope I don't meet someone else before that happens," she said, giving Mira Hyde a very deliberate, lingering glance as she came in with a fresh report.
Thanks again to Jemine Caesar for her corrections and improvements