Remembrance - Warts in the Plaster (Part 2)
25 Nov 2024Astraeius
Commander Astraeius – 15th of November
Seen from the sky, my target painted quite the sad little picture. A handful of buildings – lit, but not well enough – connected by a few dirt-paths – levelled, but not well enough. Even from above, I could imagine the dust and refuse that clung to every corner. I was confident that someone cleaned the place… but not well enough.
The leftover of some doomed mining enterprise; quite common a sight, on the fringes of civilised space. Someone, somewhen, had found this backwater of a moon and decided that it hid the secret to generations of wealth. Unfortunately for them, the little moon had been quite earnest about its modest means, and had hidden – beneath its rocky and desolate exterior – nothing excepted more rock and more desolation.
Twice, I circled that sad, little village – for what was it, if not a village? – before setting down some few hundred meters from its edge, that little village having no facilities fit to accommodate a ship of Evenstar’s size. Still, they saw her, and I relied on the fact: little village though it may be, if but half of its inhabitants carried a weapon, I would find myself hopelessly outgunned. Yet a fully armed combat ship could level an outpost of that size, with its handful of metal shacks, and I hoped that, in such a ship’s shadow, everyone would keep a cool mind.
Not that the Evenstar was fully armed, far from it. My debts had paid for her hull, but little less, and so she had been left a paper tiger, of little use in a firefight besides serving as cover. Nor, for that matter, was anyone in the cockpit with me, to aim her guns – had she had any – threateningly at the outpost while I walked in it unarmed.
Had I been younger, and bolder, perhaps I would have been more confident in my bluff. As it stood, I had seen enough of the world to fear that, even in such a sad, failed, mining village, there could be someone wise enough to see through my feint. What little had been left of my combat armour, after the accident that had nearly cost me my life, would do little to save me from an enemy slug.
And still I entered that carcass of a village. Still, I forced myself forwards, like a child stepping into a dark room, because that sad, little, dirt-ridden outpost was exactly the kind of place where Janus would go, when he found himself needing to lie low. And, if my suspicions were even half right, he had every need to lie low. If not… I would happily furnish him with the need.
I had come from another direction, but I made a point of walking around the settlement until I could enter it from its main gates, flanked by two turrets that could gun me down faster than I could blink. Another bit of bravado, with nothing to back it up, but I was told a long time back that, the worse your hand, the more you have to sell your bluff. Now that I think of it, those might have been Janus’s own words.
And so, in I stepped, bold and swaggering, and yet inside I was trembling like a leaf in the wind. But nobody challenged my advance, and I chose to think that they had bought what I had sold, and that I entered the little village as a man feared. In truth, I think it more likely that the poor miners did not care about my entry, having too little too be robbed, be it by pirate or government.
When at last I came face to face with one of the locals – not because I was confronted in the streets, but because I had walked into what, there, passed for a bar – I was offered a beer and asked whether I was looking to refuel. And I had thought them scared.
“I am looking for a man,” I answered, trying my best to sound cavalier about the whole affair.
“Aren’t we all,” she laughed back at me, and did her the courtesy of a smile. It was an old joke, told far too many times to still have much charm. But I had walked right into it.
“Not that kind of man, I fear,” I paused, but she did not bother to stop me. “He would go by the name Janus. Or perhaps Commander Byfrons. Whichever the case, he must have arrived here some weeks back. Perhaps a few months. Does someone come to mind?”
She all but laughed at me: “Someone does come to mind, bounty hunter. But you are out of luck. He left a while ago.”
“Bounty hunter?”
“Do you deny it? With that accent, asking after Janus? I don’t need to be a detective to know he’s avoiding the Empire, and I’m guessing that means avoiding you, too. Well,” she leaned in, and for a moment I expected her to usher me towards the exit, and I was ready to acquiesce. “I won’t sell him for cheap, Imp.”
Another day, as another man, I might have been sickened by the ease with which this woman was about to sell an acquaintance to what she believed would be his butcher. But, as I looked out of the great window that stood behind her bar, onto a desolate landing pad on which no ship had landed to trade for time beyond counting, I instead felt a pang of pity.
“How much?” I asked, knowing full well that I would not be able to pay her ransom.
“To know where he jumped off to? Hundred thousand,” she answered, and it took all my countenance not to curse. I had some quarter million credits on hand, and all of it was borrowed. “Two, if you want to know the name of his ship.”
It was only to quell my own, rising, sense of defeatism that I affected to go through the bar’s small menu. I still had my precious bluff and, were she to match eyes with me, I felt that all might very well be lost. It was sheer luck, then, that my gaze wandered over from list of beers to list of prices, and I noticed those three bright, digital, beautiful letters. “mcr”.
Two hundred thousand microcredits. A small fortune, for anyone planet bound. Or, in other words, two thousand credits, less than what I had spent restocking Evenstar’s munitions. For that much, for some paltry canisters of metal, was Janus sold to me. I sat a while at the little bar’s big window, taking in the sight of that sad, small, desolate village, and thinking that one could be happy in a place like this, with no need nor means to worry about the greater world.
“Eurybia, that’s what he said the final goal was, and the ship’s name is Valentina. Pleasure doing business with you, Commander.”
How quick had I been, to believe in this woman’s greed and desperation. Not for a moment did I think her shrewder than me. Not for a second did I doubt her loyal.
How easy had it been to fool me.
I even thanked her