Minerva's Dirty Secret: The Contract
11 Jan 2018Mack Winston
Lundwall City, LTT 1349Christina Kendall of course had no way of knowing that her meeting today was going to leave her twenty thousand light years from home, with a broken canopy, a holed hull, with the added bonus of a neutron star jetcone's blowtorch of deadly particles playing over her ship - with her adversary as her only hope for survival.
In fact, until the meeting, things at her PI office had been a bit too quiet. There had been the usual run of the mill cases, investigating spouses for cheating, searching for missing cats, rooting out cases of corporate espionage -- and even being a part in one very minor piece of corporate espionage. It had been paying the bills -- just -- but business had been quiet and so incredibly dull. The change this meeting brought couldn't have been starker.
Her morning appointment had arrived. He hadn't given any hint about the nature of his enquiry, but few ever did. A discreet search on his name - John Fortescue, an Achenarian, revealed nothing. He turned out to be a tall, thin man wearing an impeccably tailored business suit - and Christina thought she had never seen anyone whiter. His hair was entirely white, his skin so white she thought he might be ill, and he had a long, patrician nose which seemed to complement his careful manner of speech and cultured Achenarian accent. His clothing, while obviously impeccably tailored, had no colours other than black or white, giving the effect that the man was entirely monochrome.
First impressions were that this was another industrial espionage case.
But it was not so.
"Do you recognise this man?" her client asked. His comm projected a small holofac on her desk. An image of a slender man, wearing an East India Company jacket and Protectafab trousers, the typical fare of the trader. Despite the EIC association, he was wearing eye correction, a hallmark of a person who was from a poorer background. His black hair was slicked back over his head, giving the man a slightly greasy look...
Christina was careful not to give anything away with her body language.
"How about this one?"
A new image appeared. Another man, dressed similarly, about the same age, Sinoeuropean features. Somewhat less greasy looking. In fact, she conceded to herself, the sort of person she'd try to chat up in a bar had it been twenty years ago.
Even knowing what she knew about him.
"Yeah, I know them both." That pair would be hard to forget. She was careful not to mention the investigation, even though she had the feeling that her former client - a man seething with vengeance for the fraud Vazquez had perpetrated against him - would be long dead by now.
"Good", Fortescue answered, smiling serenely. "I was counting on you remembering them. Yes, I know, confidentiality is paramount, but rest assured I know about your former client too, Davel Pistorious. You may be pleased to learn that your former client, the vile creature he was, was stabbed to death on Webb Port in 34 Pegasi. Your client's target, Callum Vazquez, lead him into a trap. Meanwhile Mackenzie Winston was providing a distraction for the security services. You will now be unsurprised to learn that I have an investigation contract for you, trailing these two"
Christina maintained her poker face.
"OK, well, let's get down to business," Christina said, sliding her notepad onto the desk and opening a new file.
"Remember I've chosen you," the John said, "because I believe you take confidentiality extremely seriously and you have already investigated these two in the past. The job is somewhat urgent. You will need four months free in your diary, starting in just a few days."
Four months...?
"For reasons I'm sure will no doubt become apparent, my two friends here are launching in a few days time on the Minerva Centaurus expedition. It takes in the entire Scutum-Centaurus arm. Unfortunately we received news, slightly too late it seems, that they have been given an extra little assignment by a person of interest"
"A person of interest? It would expedite things if you could tell me more"
"It's not important who, but unfortunately we discovered several hours too late that he had tasked this pair with a mission to retrieve some lost items from a ship hidden quite some distance away. Unfortunately we suspect it has been leaked that we may have discovered the location of this lost ship. The information contained has potentially deadly consequences to my employers. We need you to retrieve the items in question and the data." Fortescue tilted his head slightly. "At any cost", he added.
"There's one problem with this, I'm afraid. I don't keep a ship that's capable of flying a major deep space expedition..."
"You do now. Bay 20. An Asp Explorer which has had the attention of humanity's best engineers. It's armed too"
"Armed?"
"You may need it to persuade Winston and Vazquez to give up their cargo"
"I'm not a combateer"
"You're rated Deadly"
"That was twenty years ago. I haven't fired a shot in anger since"
"I don't think that's too important. Their expedition ship, the Alan Mathison Turing is an Imperial Cutter that is completely unarmed. The most dangerous thing on board is the four containers of onionhead they have with them. The only defence they are taking is more oriented at outrunning alien threats. That Asp Explorer has six railguns. It has an FSD interdictor. You know as well as I do that neither Winston nor Vazquez have a death wish. They will be surprised to meet a pirate so deep into space, I'm sure, but I would be they give up their cargo."
Fortescue paused. "They will probably even give up the onionhead," he added.
"I'm sure even an armed Asp Ex can beat a Cutter to wherever this stuff is hidden," Christina said, "so why not just give me the location, I'll get it, and everyone lives happily ever after?"
"The problem is we don't know where, exactly the abandoned ship is parked. The person who got it parked there had a very vexatious method of hiding the ship's ultimate destination. We only know that it's somewhere in the Scutum-Saggitarius arm and we only found that recently. You'll have to tail the Turing and then rob them of whatever they retrieve. I'll leave the details of the robbery up to you. I would caution though the fact that they are doing this at all may indicate that our adversary knows that we've managed to find at least some information on where the ship is hidden. Winston and Vazquez may well be on their guard for potential problems with what seems like otherwise a simple and low-risk mission for them"
The conversation turned to payment. A four month contract wasn't going to be cheap - and Christina began to explain this.
"Don't worry about payment. You will be well rewarded," Fortescue explained, while sending the details of the compensation package to her comm. Compensation package. Most people just shoved a small pile of anonymised credit chips over her desk.
A free ship (fully engineered) to keep, a big fat advance, and the promise of being made a preferred supplier of investigation services was indeed attractive...