The Red Circle Conspiracy
06 Sep 2018Harry The Hatchet
CatharsisWho knows when
Who knows where.
It has been a while. I've not been motivated to keep a log of the troubles of the passed few months. Who would be? But given my destination is several days away, what else am I to do but recount my blues. A little self indulgunce never hurt anyone.
Let's recap, dear holographic diary. I had buried myself deep into the practice of Space Deliveries. You find a mission board, you pick up a to-do, you glide to the destination and drop it off. Rinse, repeat. It's easy work for scraps of pay. You sit, watch space glide by, land, deliver. Nothing can touch you, you are a robot. Land, grab, fly, drop. Land, grab, fly, drop. The occasional smuggle here and there. I'm just as guilty as anyone.
During this phase I met a drunk man in Columbus Station, Sol, who introduced me to the new concept of Telepresence. This is when someone is projected into your ship, all lights and glass, to accompany you on your journey. The sort of convenience every wanderer needs, but won't admit. I opened my ship to Telepresence travellers and got more than I bargained for. A girl, no more than twenty. Don't be like that, young girls are scary! she had short cut hair and a boyish, round face. Above all she had sharp wit and quick eyes. She gave me the intellectual run-around, a thorough tongue-lashing in the arena of sarcasm, but mostly importantly she gave me conversation. We talked for weeks, most days. Even when it got annoying (which it often did) it was still better than sitting in the quiet static of space, alone. Commander Sab7 was her call sign, Sabbatine was her name, Sabby is what she liked to go by.
Then nothing. No connections. No message. I searched the directory and tried to project myself to her ship, but it always came back with an error:
Error 4004: commander is not piloting a ship
It was back to the quiet static again.
Scanned
Two months ago
Maia/Thargoid Border Space.
I ended up running Meta Alloy from station to station, out in the Pleiades. Not shooting if off the 'goids. That's not me. I don't mess with that, it's not-human. It's beyond me. They make my spine crawl. When I returned to Maia Point a woman waited for me on the landing pad control deck. She summoned me inside and, though I tried to seem casual, I went straight to her. Practically ran. It wasn't Sabbatine, it was apparantly a courier of some kind, like me, but more deep-state. More mysterious. She handed me some battered solid memory cartridge and charged me four thousand credits for the pleasure. Her advice was that "anything could be loaded on there" and I should have it scanned by some wire-head before uploading it to my ship's console. I could do that, but that takes time.
The cardridge could hold miles and miles of data. The kind of cartridge you'd fill a flight black box with. But it contained only one horribly mangled file. What I could recover was this:
Harry,
Sorry for the cold letter, I couldn't risk communication across air. You see, [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] The mega-ship will be jumping soon. Big news, you [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] A scientific faction. Air heads with lofty ideas, they think they can uncover the truth behind it all. I don't [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] care about that sort of thing. Neither do you, we're the same in that way. Nevertheless, this megaship is going to jump right into 'goid terratory. It's gonna be torn to pieces. Harry, I am on this ship. A prisoner on it. The co-ordinates are attatched. It's [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE] I don't want to die, Harry. [CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE]
>>>>>[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
>>>>>attempting recovery........../r
>>>>>[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
>>>>>attempting recovery........../r
>>>>>[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
>>>>>attempting recovery........../d
>>>>>[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]........ Maximum Unsuccessful Recoveries /t
[CONTENT UNRECOVERABLE]
A scientific ship does not keep prisoners, not human ones anyway. I am bound for the Gnosis. But I will need hardware with enough distance to get me there and enough punch to get me through. I tapped my channels...
Shark-feed
A month ago
Undisclosed Pirate outpost.
Slim Jim had an offer for me. A brand new, fresh-off-the-Lakon-line, Krait Mk II. For 70% the normal going rate. I asked him if all brand new Kraits came with a dent in the external control surface and slight rail-gun burn across the stomach. The question made Jim laugh, his enormous jowels shook. "Aquisitions can be quick clumsy." Aquisitions would have been ex-military types who made a habit of stealing Krait Mk IIs from their competitor's stashes on backwater moons.
"It should be more than capable for chasing a girl, a third your age, across the galaxy." He said. I did not like it. I've never liked Jim very much.
"It's not like that." I protested. "You scanned my communications manifest on the way in! There used to be a code of honor, you know."
"No there wasn't, Harry the Hatchet!" He spat my old codename at me and it made my pits sweat. "Even you, with your asteemed and very, very out-dated smuggling career, cannot claim to have rose tinted glasses. If you do not want this ship, someone else will. Are you gonna take it?" He motioned his massive arms towards the exit door on the ship. There was no need.
I took it. The dented wing surface, the solid-manufacture landing gear, all of it. For 70% the buy-price and one small, simple favour:
The hold was fit to burst with Slip and Hyper. If Onionhead gets you a good night, Hyper launches you into a good week. And Slip? That's the kind of substance that'll dilate perception so much, an hour feels like a decade. All this stuff had a home to go to, behind a maximum security curtain somewhere in deep-space. Where some dealer turned warlord had gotten himself locked into a system-wide battle with Federal agents. He had occupied an derelict asteroid base and was in the process of turning it into a palace. The Federation had their eye on the base and fancied it as a "target of strategic importance." Both forces arrived to find they had... opposing viewpoints. That's as much as I was told and as much as I could take. This is known as a Red Circle kind of job, accounting for the red "Anonymous Protocol" symbol (which you will be seeing a lot of.) The sort of gig that smugglers are sent on when they've outlived their usefulness.
I am still bound for the Gnosis, but I will have to take a slight detour by way of maximum security warzone first.
But, Sabbatine, you know what? Red Circle jobs used to be known as "Hatchet Jobs."