Every station has one.
17 Feb 2018Da5id Weatherwax
Every outpost, every little hovel with a landing pad and a hangar on the most god-forsaken dirtball anywhere in the galaxy. Just like since before our species even left its home atmosphere wherever there were cops, there was - and still is - the "cop bar", wherever there's a landing pad there's the Pilot's Federation bar. It could be a swanky place like a couple of places in the "old worlds" where it is pretty much the best bar on the station or it could be a little hole in the wall dive like the one down behind the repair bays on Hutton. The process of picking it out probably owes more to the boozer preferences of the PF members that hauled workers and supplies to construct the place than it does to anything else. Then in pretty short order it became the place the locals quickly realized that walking in without at least a PF shoulder flash - even if it was only harmless rank, it still counted - was a good way to invite a thorough kicking. You just had to be "one of us" to drink there and if you were so shiny and new that even your ship still had zits, you were still welcome. For us it was neutral territory, that was why we took it all out on any "tourists" daft enough to wander in and try to buy a drink.That was also why I immediately waved my hand at Carlo behind the bar and sent a bottle of Lavian brandy over to the table as soon as the little knot of uniforms wandered in and sat down. I knew every one of them and they knew me, we just happened to be employed by different sides in the little local squabble between the mining corp and the local chapter of Emperor's Grace. Buying them their first drink was one of those unwritten protocols, telling them that my contract was done and I wasn't working for the opposition any more.
Sure enough, Mikhael cracked the bottle, poured a shot all round the table and then, after the first toast and as the bottle made a second round called for another glass and beckoned me over. Message received and acknowledged by the senior commander of that little group.
"Dave! Good to see you , man. Knew you were around but you've been almost invisible the last couple of weeks."
"Aye, well, I was being paid to be." My companions at the table grinned then Megan raised her glass in my direction.
"Earned your bloody pay too, you bastard. We're all pretty good sneaks but how the fuck do you make a damn 'conda just up and vanish like that?" I knew exactly the incident she was talking about.
"Meg, it never vanished, just nobody bothered looking where it was." She just shook her head and took another drink as the rest of the table chuckled.
"For what it's worth, lass, I was pretty sure you had me so was sat there prepping for a scrap. You were just that little bit ahead of the wing so I was betting that if I gave you a Remlock ride I'd manage to be elsewhere before the rest of you dropped. It's just that when you dropped out of weapons range I knew you'd missed me and went silent."
"Out of range? How the fuck did you manage to clear the drop point that fast in a ship that size? AND keep silent while running fast enough to stay ahead of us after the boys dropped in? Because we scoured every rock in that belt a good ten degrees down-orbit from the drop point so you weren't sitting still anywhere."
"Your employers must have really wanted that shipment to not get through. That's... excessively thorough, even for you guys." This time it
was Mikhael's turn to chuckle.
"The miners were pretty careful to make sure no insignia showed on any of their propaganda vids, Dave, but we all know who flies an entire fleet that is universally painted in the best stealth-black smart-paint you can buy and spent an ungodly amount of credits on having all their thrusters tuned to filter out the low wavelengths of their parasitic light on the grounds that less reds mean less heat for our scanners to find and the blues don't show up as well to the old mark I eyeball either. Plenty of us do that. It's just that we knew there was only one commander with that habit in the neighborhood who wasn't working with us. We knew we were hunting the Radius, man, and you managed to stick a finger squarely in our eyes for two weeks!"
"Well, come tomorrow they'll all be working with you. I've found a pretty good investment opportunity for the credits they paid me, but where I'll be selling it is halfway to Sirius. Even if I were minded to come back after, this will all be over before I got here. Your boys are winning, Mikhael. The miners are about out of credits and as soon as the money runs out so will all the stuff they use 'em to pay for. Including me."
"Yeah, it's always the way. You didn't answer Megans's question though."
I reached for my personal link, called up a record and hit 'send'. "Souvenir for you, Megan."
She flipped open her own as it chimed and shook her head. "Son of a bitch.... " She turned it to show it to the rest of the table, having the chutzpah not to show the slightest embarrassment.
It was a single still image, the view from the pilot's seat of the Schwartzschild Radius, every weapon deployed and grouped up for the most devastating alpha-strike she could dish out, the indicators not glowing the standard orange of ordinary preheat but the livid blood-red that showed everything was overcharged as far as it could go without melting. Right in the center of the screen, perfectly boresighted, was the rear aspect of Megan's courier with the scanners highlighting the swirling instability in the shields that made us all so vulnerable in the two or three seconds following a drop from supercruise. And she was 200m out of range. Rob reached over and patted Megan's hand.
"Escaped by the thickness of a pube hair there, lover." He looked up at me. "So how did you manage to be up-orbit of the drop point and know exactly where we were going to drop out?"
"Same way 'the fish' nailed my Cobra's arse out Candecama way a couple of years ago. Never even saw him. I drop thinking I'm on his tail and boom, suddenly I'm in the pod watching the light show that used to be my ship. We ended up on the same side just under a year later and I sat in as a gunner for him while the Edge was being patched up after I got into a little scrape with a wing of mercs. He showed me how it was done."
The offer was unspoken, but understood. Sometime down the line, when we found ourselves on the same side, I'd be meeting Megan and Rob again in a bar quite different from this one and yet completely the same. On that evening, however, they would be buying the booze.