He was on my dock before the thrusters had even stopped cooling...
01 Feb 2018Da5id Weatherwax
... Strolling out there trying to look all official, taking up a totally "by the book" stance by the hatch. Gods, his uniform looked so new I bet he squeaked as he walked, his face so shiny and pink I could almost smell the soap his mother used to wash behind his ears from my chair.As I stepped out onto the deck I ignored him, looking aft along the Schwartzschild's starboard side at where the railgun round had left a puckered hole in the armor, taking in the almost leprous look of the hull around the hole where vaporized armor had condensed around the impact site. The bastard had been going for my power plant, that's for sure, but what he'd actually hit was almost worse. I had secondary armor around all the critical power plant components but this one had beena golden bb. Straight through the primary starboard fire control matrix at just the right angle to be deflected ever so slightly and end up embedded in the port side coolant pump. All the critical systems would still work, they had backups to ther backups, but those two failures left me unable to fire my starboard hardpoints without cross-connecting to the port-side matrix and unable to cool the port-side matrix enough to sustain full load, or even half load if the port-side hardpoints were firing and dumping extra heat. That had been my cue to rabbit, which was accomplished with no problem at all, but I was still a little irritated.
Don't get me wrong here. Being shot at happens most weeks out there, particularly to those of us in the Pilot's Federation because we're the ones that dirtsiders and stationers employ when a run of the mill spacer either can't be trusted to or wouldn't do the job. That wasn't what was irritating me.
The burr on my hide came from the fact that after the wreckage cooled and my opponents had given up hunting me and cleared out I had circled back picked through it a bit. I'd found clear evidence that the bunch of uglies trying to prevent me carrying out my mission had been employed by the same megacorp that had given it to me. The surprise on the fat executive's face when I arrived back in his office and the way he looked like I'd served him a salad of Kamocan skunk-weed as he handed over the credit chip was all the confirmation I needed and I'd spent a productive few hours before hauling ass out of there doing highly illegal things with the station's computer grid an Imperial Security probe console that had never been intended to fall into civilian hands at all, let alone mine.
So, here I was, back in Alliance space and walking across the deck punching a repair and hangar order for one of the few wrench-jockeys I really trusted into my personal link as soon as the station-side connections came up.
"Had some trouble, Commander?"
That was the shiny-new cop falling into step beside me. Oh God. He was going to be helpful. I forced a smile.
"A minor inconvenience. I need to swap ships for my next run anyway and it'll be taken care of by the time I get back."
"Did you get good scans on the ship responsible?" I looked down and read his name off his tunic.
"Officer Simons, you know the law. There's only limited information you can demand from the Pilot's Federation regarding an incident outside your jurisdiction and our rules say we don't give you more than that without cause."
"I never really understood why, though. If you're dealing with criminals we should be able to help..."
"And you do, son. When something happens in your space and it starts getting sticky, we're as glad to see your ships turn up as anyone else. We just prefer to handle it ourselves if possible and the law lets us do that."
"But why?"
"Because they are all crooks, lad. Every corp, every faction, every station manager or colony administrator has some kind of fiddle going or is finding out the hard way that 'honest' isn't the same as 'legal' out there in the black." I paused, both to let him digest this and to punch in the elevator destination code for the small-pad hangar deck. "I could as easily see a Pilot's Federation transponder on the other side of a furball as I could a known pirate faction. It could be somebody I know, somebody I trained with or was having a drink with where I last docked. And I'll blow them out of space in a heartbeat, son, because if I don't that's exactly what they'll do to me. But if both of us happen to dock safely afterwards, we don't hold grudges and we don't tell tales because we could end up working for the same guy tomorrow, covering each others backs. If it has to get personal, we keep it in the family."
The elevator let us out on hangar deck s-14. The dozen hatches off the central corridor were mostly either dark, indicating an empty hangar, or red-lit to show powered down or vac in the bay. I walked up to the one hatch showing a green light, the cop still tagging along with a thoughtful look on his face.
"But when the trouble isn't with 'family', Commander? Isn't that the sort of thing that should be our business?"
I keyed the hatch open and the lights came up. A quick glance at the panel by the entryway showed everything as I expected, a full load of fuel on board and magazines topped off. Vulture DW-F01 "Keep Calm and Carrion" was an ugly angular blot of blackness in the middle of the transfer pad.
"When the trouble isn't with 'family', Officer Simons, we settle it. Hard."
As I keyed open the port the hangar bay hatch swung closed on a hopefully better-educated cop than the one had climbed out of his rack that morning. Being set up did indeed irritate me and a certain overweight bureaucrat just the other side of the Empire line was going to find out exactly how a Pilot's Federation commander dealt with somebody who didn't play by the rules.