Unwritten Rules
02 Feb 2018Da5id Weatherwax
You won't find this rule anywhere in the bye-laws or official policies of the Pilot's Federation, but it still exists. We're OK with dodgy deals, we're OK with some pretty dodgy employers too but there is one bright hard line. Flat-out doublecross a Pilot's Federation commander and you're going to get reamed.That's why the Carrion is currently hanging out uncomfortably close to the photosphere of a T-Tauri star, close enough to be completely masked by its emissions, while I watch a freighter and a couple of eagles escorting it crawl slowly across my scanner. They'll be meeting up with their contact not too far from here and when they do, I'll be dropping another steaming pile of dung on the reputation of one Sir Ephraim, Knight of the Imperial Order, Regional Director of a successful Imperial megacorp and the fat bastard who set me up with a mission and then turned around and paid a bunch of pirates to kill me off in the process.
After I left his lardy arse sweating in his office, I'd left enough behind in his stations computer grid to pretty much unravel his less official operations. He'd covered his tail pretty well as far as most ways of tracking his money were concerned but he'd never even tried to conceal anything from Imperial Security protocols, because that would have been seriously hazardous to his health. The Empire is a really easy place to do all sorts of business provided you don't squeeze the people below you too hard and you dutifully render up the customary percentage to the cops and the folks above you. On the other hand, trying to conceal any of your profits from those higher-ups was something they took a seriously dim view of and you demonstrated your honesty by not trying to hide any of your deals from them. If they even suspected you were being sneaky about it, your life as an Imperial apparatchik would rapidly become a lot more interesting and significantly shorter.
Unfortunately for Sir Lardass, that openness to his superiors scrutiny also left him open to the eyes of folks who weren't supposed to see anything, provided that other observer had a few pieces of hardware that they shouldn't, and which theoretically they couldn't since every single unit manufactured was rigorously tracked, fitted with self-destruct charges and all the other high-tech bells and whistles intended to ensure that anyone who wasn't supposed to have one would never end up in possession of a working unit. In theory, the one I had should have slagged as soon as I powered it up, but it wasn't running its original firmware any more - or, more accurately, it was running firmware that was considerably more original than the version it was loaded with when it fell into my hands, since I'd managed to get my hands on not a cracked version of it but a copy of the development code, complete with all the developers back doors that were rigorously purged from the version they released. I could have sold that for billions if I'd wanted to, or if I'd wanted Imperial assassins on my tail forever. Instead I decided to keep it and never let on to a soul.
That was how I knew in advance where to park my ship and how I knew that in about five minutes the type-6 that I was watching would activate a low powered beacon and why I'd made absolutely certain that any investigation would reveal that at this very moment I was working on a bounty hunting contract over a hundred light-years away.
There was absolutely no way they could tell I was there until I announced my presence by converting one of the escorting Eagles into a debris field on my first pass. By the time I'd got a bead on the second one, the freighter had goosed it and was running like hell for stars lock limit. They weren't going to make it. Between the hostile environment so close to the star and my incoming fire, an Eagle's shields couldn't ever last very long and my multicannon turned the hull into Swiss cheese before the type-6 had even made it half way to the limit. The comm system woke up as soon as my fire started tickling their shields.
"Hold your fire! As many diamonds as you can carry if you'll let us go!"
"Don't want 'em. This is personal business with your boss. However, for the offer I'll cut you a break. Take to your life-pods now and you get to live. Your buddies will be here soon and they'll pick you up."
I watched the sparkle of new blips on the scanner and when I'd counted a type-6's entire fit of escape pods, blew the ship into very tiny pieces, scanned around to make sure there wasn't a single intact cargo can in the floating wreckage and left.
***
Tapped into the news feeds and and searching specifically for stories that were being officially suppressed, I decided I was about done. I'd found stories about Fatso's debts being called in, about him frantically liquidating assets, about high ranked Pilot's Federation commanders with access to the executive levels of the station hanging around near his offices so they could "just happen" to be passing him in the corridors and spit on the decking. If there had been a "tipping point" in Sir Ephraim's fortunes, it was far, far in the past. Within a week, he'd not have a pot to piss in. It was time to go and pick up the Schwartzschild from the repair shop. If I timed it right I could be "officially" back here at just about the same time as he sold himself into slavery to pay off his losses on every enterprise of his that I and my brothers in the Pilot's Federation had wrecked and could put the cherry on top by making sure that was one cryo-can I bought and delivered to a particularly spartan mining colony.
I wasn't irritated with him any more.