Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 5D AV
** Cimbrean, the Far Reaches**
Adrian had spent a full three hours in rapid-fire conversation with the bat-girl he’d thought was dead, who technically still was dead, but today’s interaction had made that particular argument a shitload less compelling. The conversation had consisted mainly of joy that they were both alive – for want of a better word – followed by each of them filling in the other about what they’d been doing since they last left off.
Once he was satisfied that he knew everything he needed to know, Adrian had returned to the colony as fast as the atmosphere would allow him, and had immediately sought out Captain Powell as soon as he had landed.
“Hurry the fuck up!” he demanded of Cliff and Gorge as he ran, once again finding his expansive lungs were the most useful of his adaptations. As with all regular people – Jen included – they started off strong but soon found the exertions demanded more oxygen than Cimbrean’s atmosphere could provide.
He burst into the area that Powell made his regular stomping grounds, the area between his office, the mess hall, and the encampment, searching for the man with wild eyes as the two escorts rejoined him in a temper.
“Told you not to go running off again,” Gorge growled, heaving a punch at Adrian, barely missing as his target leant to the side and out of the path of his fist, grabbing hold of the offending arm and stepping in.
Gorge immediately shifted into a defensive stance for the return strike that Adrian did not supply.
“Listen to me you dense fuck,” Adrian hissed. “You’ve just been witness to one of my friends with her brain locked inside a fucking computer. You don’t think your Captain might like to know about something like that as soon as fucking possible?”
Powell’s ears must have been burning, because he was striding over to the situation with a fierce look of anger etched onto his face. “What the * fook* d’you think your doing?”
Adrian suffered no illusions that the entirety of Powell’s ill temper was being directed at him; he was, after all, the crazy one and these men were his supposed guards, so it only made sense for him to be the one causing problems. He released his grip on Gorge’s arm, turning to face Powell, and was amused to see the guard rub the place that had been gripped with a wince of pain.
“Looking for you, Powell,” Adrian replied. “Got a spare minute to deal with another lifetime of bullshit?”
“More bad * fookin’* news,” Powell breathed. “Fookin’ wonderful. Yeah, I’ve got a spare minute.”
They stepped into the privacy of his office under the watchful eyes of absolutely everyone in the area, yet another thing that Powell didn’t seem very happy about.
“Start talkin’, Saunders,” Powell ordered as he took the seat behind his desk, apparently sensing that he would prefer to be sitting down for what was to come.
“You’ll recall my story about the bat-girl, Trix?” Adrian asked, waiting for Powell’s curt nod of confirmation before continuing. “Turns out she’s not dead. Not exactly.”
“Stop beating around the fookin’ bush!” snapped Powell. “I haven’t the patience for it.”
Adrian nodded, annoyed but accepting. “They brutally fucking murdered her alright, but they brainsucked her into a little computer core the size of a ping-pong ball. She remains conscious. You wanted proof? This is it. Intelligence and technology? It’s fucking well that, too.”
Powell did seem disturbed by this, although whether it was simply the idea of having his mind ripped out and put into a computer, or if he was already coming to the same unhappy conclusions that Adrian had arrived at he couldn’t be sure.
“This real, Saunders?” Powell asked him. “Not some crazy fookin’ bullshit from your fever dreams?”
Jerking a thumb towards Cliff and Gorge, Adrian answered. “Ask these motherfuckers. They were there, they heard it all.”
The two guards glared at Adrian’s abuse, but confirmed the story with a nod when Powell raised a questioning eyebrow towards them.
“Well,” Powell said, “I suppose I shouldn’t be too fookin’ pissed off with you since you’ve delivered your promised ‘lifetime of bullshit’. This bat-girl is in some fooked up alien Matrix?”
“I don’t think it has the same amount of window dressing, but yeah,” Adrian replied. Trix had described it as an empty room containing only herself until Adrian had connected her to the console, and then it had become something completely different.
“If this is as you say,” Powell pondered, the furrow of his brow deepening as his frown darkened, “then these Hierarchy types are about ten times more fookin’ dangerous than I’d previously imagined. Steal a man’s mind and you ‘ave all his secrets.”
“I’m leaving as soon as possible,” Adrian advised him, already itching to get back to his friends and protect them from this dreadful menace. “Spot can fly, even if she’s not pretty, and I’ve got things I need to protect.”
Powell’s attention snapped back to him. “Don’t forget our deal,” he reminded him. “Good faith.”
Adrian didn’t need the reminder, although he didn’t plan on coming back to Cimbrean without a really good fucking reason. Affrag could give him all the food and supplies he needed, and maybe a home-away-from-home besides. He briefly considered the idea of starting his own colony there, blackjack and hookers always welcome.
“I’m going to need guns,” he said flatly. “Guns and ammunition.”
Powell stared at him. “I’m not handing over weapons to a crazy man without a good fookin’ reason. Quid pro quo, remember?”
“Then I might have something you find useful,” Adrian said with a smile. “I can build you a scanner that will let you know if Hunters are in the system, cloaked or not. Then you won’t be caught with your fucking pants down.”
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 6D AV
** Irbzrk Orbital Factory, Main Station**
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe adventurer and beginner-mode survivalist, most recently employed as a professional explorer and skinhead. The fact that she was now to be paid to stumble around space was a welcome new spin on an old game, and it was her hope that the constant influx of new discoveries and adventure would keep her from going mad.
This was her life now, and that was okay. She could miss Earth, her family and the comforts of Belfast life, all while knowing it wasn’t her home anymore. That place belonged to Old Jen, but even she was too changed by her time out in space to ever fit in back home; she’d be forever known as ‘that girl’ and treated like some kind of celebrity victim.
“I don’t want that,” said Old Jen, even if she did miss it all so terribly.
New Jen agreed. She wasn’t going to be treated like that after all she’d seen and done. She wasn’t a victim now, she had survived and grown beyond the cowardly I.T. girl who just went with the flow and was crap with men and basically every other sort of relationship; six months of survival and her own company had hardened her into a self-reliant, self-confident and completely wilful new woman. She hadn’t taken any lovers yet – the idea of being with another soldier after… well, it made her uneasy – but if she found a good bloke there wouldn’t be any mucking around. Julian, Kirk’s companion, had seemed nice, and he’d already seen her in the buff, but Jen had to get her shit together before she could get around to anything like a sex life.
As for Earth, there was no fucking chance she was going back while Old Jen still had any kind of grip on her. There was too much of a chance that, while everyone expected her to be that Belfast girl they all knew, she’d find herself being forced back into the same hopeless life she’d determined to leave behind.
Everybody had been surprised when she had decided to turn down the role of Colonial Governor, although Powell had certainly seemed to approve of her doing what she wanted rather than what everyone thought she should do, and her replacement, the quintessentially British Jeremy Sand, had done similarly, although he may have been a touch biased.
The job would have been prestigious, lucrative and challenging, and it would have been entirely wrong for her. At the end of the day her singular real act as Governor had been to name the colony – Folctha, the Celtic word for ‘bath’, her own little joke – and that had only been done as she handed over to her replacement. It had ultimately been a desk job and she was no longer felt she was the sort of person who could stay still for any length of time.
It had been hard enough doing so for the last few months, even though once she’d reached the ruins of the palace there was nowhere further for her to go. The soldiers had been helpful enough, providing her with more civilization than she’d had in the months prior, and they’d even brought chocolate as a little taste of home. That had been delicious, but it had also been a dangerous path to tread, because the last thing that New Jen wanted was to fall back into her old mindset.
She’d only watched the video from her parents after she’d made her decision to leave, and had put it off until the last moment so that she wouldn’t be swept up in a sudden change of heart and go with the wrong choice instead. The arrival of a Celzi Alliance cruiser had even been perfectly timed to provide a distraction from her nostalgia and an excuse to avoid any lengthy goodbyes.
If that wasn’t a good sign she didn’t know what was.
She had been saved by from the terrible fate of a lifetime of paperwork by Kirk, the white giraffe-like alien who’d wisely decided that siding with humanity instead of against them would have an ultimately better result on both a personal and political level. He had been hesitant about delivering her to Irbzrk, knowing she was a familiar face around there and fearing some might realise something on Cimbrean still remained, but Jen had been resolute. As far as she could figure, anybody with the knowledge of Cimbrean would also know it destroyed in its entirety, and she knew the right people to bribe or fast-talk into getting the construction of her own ship pushed to the top of the list.
Kirk had helped her out with that part of things, furnishing her with a generous supply of Dominion Construction Credits. That had allowed her to design, with some assistance, a small, fast craft fit for a handful of crew; she had no expectation of taking on a partner any time soon, but it was important to plan for the future – even New Jen didn’t want to be alone forever.
That ship, ‘The Governess’ was registered to her under the pseudonym of JD, simple initials but different enough that no alien would realise the true identity of its owner-pilot.
Irbzrk was also the opportunity to put a lot of rumours to rest, and to start some new ones. Counting on the aliens still having a hard time recognising humans, she had shaved off all her beautiful red hair – it was a liability right now – and had switch to a deeper, huskier voice when she needed to speak. Her story was that Jennifer Delaney had suggested she come here to get a ship built, and that the funds had been supplied as a sort of inheritance. Jennifer Delaney, feared pirate queen, had died to a Hunter attack – something entirely unverifiable – and her pirates had been scattered.
With her work with the shipyard masters complete, Jen had several hours to kill before the ship was in a habitable state. That gave her enough time to do some shopping and, more importantly, to gather information.
She had already started making inquiries into the fate of her pirate companions after they had fled Cimbrean. By Hrbrd’s own account they had kept the Hodgepodge and several functional vessels, getting them all clear before turning the orbital systems against the rest. Jen couldn’t imagine that they’d all simply returned home to the Dominion – she would have thought that at the very least Chir would still have wanted to fight on – so they must have moved on to find a new base of operations. Word on the station was that there had been a brief interruption in piracy in Celzi space before it had once again resumed in full and with even more expansive theft of starship components. Rumours abounded of Chir and Zripob and their dastardly band of cut-throats plying Celzi trade routes as hard as they ever had.
But there had been one change: nobody had been selling whole ships to the Dominion in any quantity that would match the level of piracy. To Jen it sounded as though the pirates were seizing control of everything they could get their hands on, and if history repeated itself they would be busy stripping them down and turning them into something else.
Whatever the case, there was one way to tell for certain, one way to know that it really was Chir and Zripob and crew still out there, all while collecting some pocket change in the process; she simply needed to follow the money, and that meant a visit to the local branch of the Blzhti Galactic Bank.
The Blzhti Galactic Bank was by far the most powerful financial institution in the galaxy, an institution backed by the Dominion itself that administrated over fifty-five percent of the Dominion economy, with the remainder dealt with by a large number of smaller enterprises backed by individual governments and some corporations.
When they had initially commenced work as privateers, Hrbrd had set up a secure anonymous account that required numerical keys to access. These keys were little more than algorithms based on the date, and having memorised the one she could discover the other, so once her new vessel was well and truly under construction she had quickly calculated the daily key and had made her way to the mercantile centre of the main station.
That had required walking down the central promenade, a huge corridor once filled with merchants offering their various wares. Stalls were made available to anyone wishing to use them, but with the war still in full swing most of them remained bare. The halfway point along the central corridor was where the banking house had constructed its base facility, but before she could reach that she had to go past the statues.
Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea.
She’d forgotten about the statues that represented Adrian Saunders in both his forms, one the ultra-realistic muscle-man she’d nearly had a relationship with, the other a blue-furred yeti with creative license taken. Jen had stopped and stared at both of them, silent tears streaming down her face as the old conflict reignited within.
“We need to move along,” New Jen urged, her voice trembling as she resisted breaking into sobs. “We didn’t love him. We didn’t even know him… he had a family.”
The revelations regarding Adrian’s family had been quite the surprise, those of the serious criminal charges much less so. While Powell had been light on the details, Jen very much doubted that Adrian had it in him to be violent towards those he loved. She did not, however, appreciate almost being the other woman.
And yet in the end it had been she who’d killed him, not in anger or on self-defence, not even with intent, but it still weighed upon her. The man who would have struggled every second to keep her safe, regardless of how misguided some of his attempts may have been, had died through her action and lack thereof.
“We killed him,” Old Jen condemned. “He died because of us!”
New Jen would not be drawn into this discussion again. “It happened,” she said, “get past it. We were poisoned by that awful foam.”
Those were the familiar excuses she told herself when she started to think about all of that; it would simply have been nice if she had thought of them as reasons.
Putting the statues at her back was hard and yet necessary, and she would make sure to take the long way back if it avoided them. She just needed to stop herself from thinking about it until she didn’t anymore. Easy.
There was only a few minutes between the statues and the Irbzrkian branch of the Blzhti Galactic Bank, but it was enough time for Jen to refocus and prepare. The banking house was, in the manner of Earth, built to intimidate with its size and impress with its grandeur. Every surface was adorned with etching or ornamentation, and in many cases etched ornamentations, with the overall goal of making their clients feel as unimportant as possible.
Jen just thought they must be compensating for something. She walked in and without waiting to be called proceeded to the nearest clerk, a small-by-comparison female Vzk’tk, although for the first time she did notice the fact that all of the clerks were Vzk’tk. They greeted each other quickly before getting down to business.
“Secure anonymous account One-Four-Zero-Square-Black-Nine-Red-Triangle,” she recited, hoping her memory hadn’t slipped over the past several months. “Keystring Green-Five-Circle-Eight-Dodecagon.”
When she’d left there’d been almost a million credits in the account, but she expected that figure would have dropped considerably with the costs of rebuilding; the account histories would at least tell her about the most recent transactions and give her an idea of-
She was not expecting the account to have been emptied, with an endless stream of micro transactions made to various other institutions. The money was gone, clearly stolen, and with it her hopes to procure a little to make her ship a home.
“It looks like your account is empty,” the clerk observed. “Sorry, but you would need a line of credit to make a withdrawal.”
“What the fuck do you mean ’empty’?” Jen demanded. “There were thousands of transactions listed there…”
“Four million withdrawals,” the Clerk advised, somehow managing to be more unhelpful than if had she remained silent.
“Four million tiny transactions,” Jen considered. “Each below a single credit. Let me guess, no fraud checking for tiny transactions?”
The clerk bobbed her head in confirmation. “Fraud checking begins for transactions of ten credits and higher. Can I offer you an upgrade to your account for full checking?”
Jen exploded, hitting the counter with enough force to bend it and scare the shit out of the clerk. “I don’t want your fucking upgrades!” she raged, beginning to attract nervous attention. “I want my fucking money back!”
Apparently New Jen had little tolerance for people trying to up-sell her a premium package after having everything stolen.
The clerk hesitated before shaking her head. “It’s an Anonymous account. I’m sorry, but those have no liability.”
“No liability…” Jen repeated in a growl, her anger rising even further. “I’ve had almost a million credits stolen from this account, and you have no liability!?”
The Vzk’tk recoiled at Jen’s bared teeth, sputtering nonsense apologies and excuses before finally settling on one in particular. “It’s bank policy!”
Bureaucracy. Even Old Jen had loathed it, but her response to having to deal with all those rules and regulations was to simply do as everyone said before reaching the end of the process, bedraggled and dispirited, and never raising a fuss. Old Jen was angry at the loss of so much money, but she wasn’t inclined to do anything about it.
That was an important way in which New Jen differed; she fixed a hard stare on the frightened clerk and made her demand. “Give. Me. Back. My. Money.”
As requests went, New Jen thought it was reasonable, and as far as manners went New Jen thought she had been very restrained. If it were someone like Adrian in the situation, it would already have devolved into robbing the place.
The clerks did not agree, and one of them pressed the panic button.
That was when the whole room changed: the exits sealed, the ceiling shot down several transport beams, and robo-security was deployed into room, eight bots armed with standard kinetics and decidedly non-standard shock guns.
“Stand down or be subdued!” the lead robot commanded in an entirely stereotypical robot voice, both guns levelled directly at Jen.
Jen held her breath, standing entirely still to avoid giving them a reason to start using any of those. She’d been stunned once before, by Cameron White, and she had no desire to repeat that experience. “Let’s not do anything we’ll regret, Robocop,” she said softly, her eyes flicking between robots. “I stand down…”
“She’s a human!” cried out the clerk she’d inadvertently terrified. “She was trying to rob the bank!”
Jen had vaulted the counter on instinct as soon as the word ‘Human’ was uttered, flipping over in a display of adrenaline-fuelled agility and landing into safety where she could listen to the rain of kinetics hitting the other side.
That’s the sound of me losing control of my life, she thought, remembering how problems had always kept Adrian on the back-foot; this must be what all those times had felt like for him. She didn’t like it very much.
“I just wanted a pillow,” she grumbled, looking for a weapon. “Some curtains, maybe a table cloth… just linens in general. Maybe some real goddamned food…”
She tore a decorative railing off the clerk’s side of the counter, felt the balance and sprang from cover. The length of metal was through the sensors on a robot a moment later, and she was back behind a counter before they could turn to react.
The broken robot hissed and fizzled and made mechanical complaint, but it would no longer be trying to shoot her. Robotic security would not use firearms if they could not detect where the actual target was, a very wise safety protocol that was currently very easy to exploit; they didn’t even have safety glass to protect the vital components.
There was another segment of the railing on the new counter, and she took that as she had the other. “I can’t believe I’m accidentally robbing a bank,” she muttered now resigned to the action through no fault of her own.
She weighed the balance of the new rail, gripped it tight, and readied to strike again. “One Robocop down… seven to go.”
+++++
Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
The Welshman known as ‘Legsy’, the big man who’d stuck his big gun into Adrian’s lower back when he’d first come ashore, had been allowed to furnish Adrian with a twelve-gauge combat shotgun, a magazine-fed SPAS-15, which seemed to him to be just about the most beautiful thing in the whole fucking world. Frankly speaking, just holding it made him a little hard.
It hadn’t been free, of course, but it had been goddamned close; with all of the half-broken shit laying around it had been a walk in the park to assemble something that not only worked, but actually worked somewhat better than standard alien equipment. The parts of three Hunter vessels had been combined to create a multi-band sensor suite with Hunter comms detection, just about the most comprehensive thing it was possible to get without knocking over a Corti heavy exploration vessel.
The fact that it had worked correctly on first power-up was a small miracle, and had impressed the more technical soldiers almost as much as the output itself. That had made them light up with the kind of joy that Christmas brings small boys who’d just gotten everything they’d asked for and then some.
But it was nothing in comparison with the beautiful weapon now resting in Adrian’s hands, a length of death-spitting metal weighing in just shy of four kilograms and he hadn’t needed to steal it, or borrow it, or simply discover it.
“ Watcha think, boy, reckon that’ll do?” Legsy asked as he handed the gun over.
Adrian had spent a moment looking at it in wonder, but had subtly cleared his throat and sobered his expression as Powell entered the room. “I… uh… yeah. Yeah, that’ll do.” he said, not wanting to seem too excited.
The big Welshman grinned, handing over the ammunition in a big bag before turning to clean his own weapon of choice. Clearly he sensed that Powell wanted to do some talking.
“The new sensors are up.” Powell said, which meant that technical group had managed to get it shifted over to where they usually did their thing and hadn’t broken it in the process. “And a fook of a lot better than the old ones. I might just have been wrong about you being a waste of good calories.”
“Jen could have told you that.” Adrian replied, still annoyed that she hadn’t given these guys jack shit in either intel or technology.
Powell winced in irritation, a sure sign that he still didn’t enjoy Adrian’s company, but since the feeling was mutual it was hard to give a shit. “Jen thinks you’re dead,” Powell reminded him. “Not a lot of point going into the skills and talents of a fookin’ dead man, is there?”
“Might have been worth knowing you on top of a fuckload of salvageable alien tech though, wouldn’t it?” Adrian added bitterly; that omission of hers was really going to take a while for him to get over.
Disapproval shot across Powell’s face, but he didn’t act on it, suggesting that maybe he wasn’t such an ass after all. “Your ship ready? Your two weeks are up tomorrow.”
“ Yep,” Adrian replied, “Spot’s all ready to go, provisions are all loaded… just need to hump the artillery here and I’m done mate.”
“Right. I hate to break my end of the deal, but right now according to those fancy sensors you set up, you’ve got a clear sky, no warp signatures within a parsec or so,” Powell advised, although Adrian had already taken the liberty of scanning all of that during the initial power-up. “No guarantees that’s going to be true tomorrow. So, would you mind awfully-”
“-fucking off?” Adrian asked, guessing how the request was going to end. He grinned in amusement at the similarity of thought. “Too bad, I’ll miss the food here mate.”
Unexpectedly, Powell put out a hand, and after only a brief moment of surprise Adrian shook it.
“Just try not to get killed you crazy fookin’ prick,” Powell warned, which was about as close as the man was going to get to wishing Adrian good luck.
Adrian grinned as though he had anyway. “So far so good.”
+++++
Record 573-Black-03 +Recovered from C11-Orange-712-Yellow-6+
It wasn’t much of a grave, just a stack of stones in a world of rubble, covering the worldly remains of an eleven year old boy. Cavven’s voice was unsteady as he spoke. “I… suppose it’s time to say goodbye, son.”
Maikie’s wailing sobs were easily audible off-camera, the name of ‘Ahred’ mingling with the sounds of grief. “Why!? she demanded, again and again.
Cavven finally answered. “Because we were led by fools.”
This didn’t appear to satisfy in any meaningful way, because Maikie continued her unsettling grief chant.
The camera approached the stones, carried by the dead boy’s father and sat atop the stones. “Here son,” Cavven said, his voice choking off. “Happy birthday.”
End Recording
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 5D AV
Irbzrk Orbital Factory, Main Station
It had been remarkably easy to destroy the security robots, so much so that it had actually been sort of embarrassing to stand around afterwards with hardly a sweat having been broken. Standing victorious atop the counter, staring down at the malfunctioning robots, Jen cut a fine figure, and one imposing enough to ensure the clerks fell over themselves to follow her orders.
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe adventurer, beginner-mode survivalist, professional explorer, and accidental bank robber.
“This is your fault!” she explained to the terrified clerks. “I just wanted to buy some fucking home wares! I want an unmarked credit chit with the exact amount in my account before it was stolen, no more and no less! If you use a marked chit I will know, and you will not enjoy the results! Savvy?”
In truth she wouldn’t have any idea how to tell them apart; the two varieties of credit chit looked completely identical, but as a rule Vzk’tk weren’t all that bright and it was better to put the thought out of their heads before it became a real problem.
“So now we’re robbing a bank?” Old Jen asked in disapproval. “What would mum and da’ think of this?”
New Jen ignored the question, although it still chafed at her. She hadn’t started the day wanting to go and rob a bank; she hadn’t even entered the bank intending to rob it, but here she was, surrounded by broken security robots, and waiting for the clerks to upload the full amount of credits onto the chit. As far as Jen could tell, the ‘credit’ was a barely functional form of crypto-currency, so bloated with whatever programming went into them that there was actually a waiting time for them to be copied onto an independent device. They were, however, completely untraceable as far as anybody could tell, so at least once she was done robbing banks she’d be able to spend the proceeds.
“How are we going to get out of this?” Old Jen demanded, and New Jen knew it was a good question. There would probably be station police involved, and then there’d be the security footage…
She knew that shaving her head had been the right thing to do, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
“Where’s the security footage?” she asked, turning towards the clerks. “Where does the camera feed go to?”
They just looked confused. “What cameras?”
Jen sighed in relief; she’d almost forgotten that she was in space, where nobody had heard of the surveillance state. “Never mind. Get that done.”
Outside the sealed front door she could already hear station security forces arriving. They’d taken their time, but perhaps they’d been waiting for an all clear after the robot attack failed. She should have thought about getting the clerks to do that, but in all fairness she’d never done anything like this before.
At last they presented her with the chit, even as the front door came under sudden assault by the security forces. They’d brought a plasma cutter, and the waves of heat pulsed out from it as it did its work. “Is there a back door?” she asked, figuring it didn’t hurt to ask.
“The only way out is through the front door,” a more senior, male Vzk’tk replied. “You’ll never escape!”
Jen disagreed, although it was definitely going to take a lot of creativity in a very short amount of time. Ideally it would also give her free run of the space station, and everybody would forget that she was here.
New Jen smiled a predator’s smile, and the Vzk’tk flinched. It was time to involve them all. “Okay, everybody,” she said cheerfully. “Grab a chit and fill it up!”
“You said you were only taking what was stolen from you!” the Vzk’tk senior accused. “This is-“
“This is for you,” Jen finished for him. “You’re going to be my accomplices.”
“But… but the bank…” the Vzk’tk senior stammered in horror. “Our families…”
New Jen’s eyes narrowed; that was definitely new and very unpleasant information. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that an economic powerhouse like Blzhti Galactic Bank might use the occasional bit of muscle, but turning their weapons against the families of employees… well, that was crossing some kind of line. The bank had a long reach and incredible power throughout the Dominion, and they weren’t the kind of people worth making enemies of.
It might be too late for her to reverse course, but she wouldn’t put that on these poor dopes, and even without incriminating them they could still be useful.
“Oh, you don’t want to be named as accomplices?” she asked, smiling broadly with parted lips. They all flinched as she looked at them, instinct kicking in, but they all shook their heads emphatically; it seemed that they did not.
Think fast… no way out… no way out… just the front door. That could be problematic, if she was identified, and had she still been sporting her flaming red hair it certain she would have been. Well, if the only way out was through the front door, then there was only one thing to do…
“Then let me congratulate you on your loyalty,” she said, shifting her tone to one of approval. This had the result of immediately confusing the poor blue giraffes, and hopefully the line of bullshit she was about to deliver would let her walk out of here in one piece.
“L-loyalty?” one of the clerks asked.
“Yes,” Jen continued, shooting a glance over to the ever-weakening front door; she didn’t have long. “I’m from head office, and we’ve been doing a top secret test of each branch for security and policy issues. I’m sorry to say that all your jobs must now go under review.”
They responded with murmurings indicating a mix of alarm and concern, but mostly still just a lack of understanding as to what was going on. The blue giraffes were usually nice, but sometimes you really had to spell it out for them.
She held up the credit chit. “Giving the criminal what they want? You should know better than that! You’re lucky you didn’t agree to the second part of the demands or these fine police would have to arrest you all.”
Enlightenment dawned on the poor, dumb bastards just as the aforementioned police broke down the door and surged in.
It was important to get the first word in before the waters got too muddy, so Jen took up position in front of the Vzk’tk and assumed her most managerial posture. “Officers,” she called brightly, “how nice of you to join our little training exercise. I wasn’t sure your department would involve itself in a simple training exercise.”
“Training exercise?” one asked, pulling up sharply. “We received a security alert…”
Jen assumed an expression of having encountered an unpleasant surprise. “Are you suggesting that nobody informed you that this wasn’t a real robbery?”
“No…” the policemen replied uncertainly, sharing awkward glances with each other. “Nothing like that…”
Jen frowned. “Then it seems as though somebody else will have their job under review. Rest assured that I will be sending over all the details as soon as possible, but for now I would appreciate your unit’s assistance in shutting down all these defective security bots.”
“So let me get this straight,” the senior of the Vzk’tk piped up. “You’re from head office and were just testing us? You should hand that chit back!”
Whirling on him, Jen darkened her frown with anger. “Why would I give you the evidence of your own incompetence, clerk?”
The clerk recoiled. “I.. I -“
“I will be presenting this to my superior… you may have heard of.. uh… Master… Skeletor? Because soon he will certainly know about you!”
“Master Skeletor?” the Vzk’tk repeated, having taken note of the ominous inflection Jen had added.
“Yes,” Jen replied, keeping her inner mirth buried under a troubled façade. “He will have quite the bone to pick with you.”
The clerk seemed resolute. “I will contact Master Skeletor and explain-“
“Why you let someone steal a million credits?” Jen finished. “Yes, I sure that bothering him with your indiscretions will put you in his good books. You will wait until he contacts you, understood?”
The clerk nodded miserably, close to tears in his own way.
She had them now, hook, line and sinker.
“I expect you to fill the officers here in on the details while I go about my other duties,” she ordered. “Give them every assistance you can.”
She turned to the equally confused police and smiled, making certain to keep her lips closed. “And please pass my apologies on to your superiors over our oversight. We will be providing a generous recompense to all officers for the trouble caused. It would only be right, yes.”
At that their attention sharpened. “Yes… of course… only right.”
Jen nodded gracefully and walked confidently from the building, through and away from the rather disorganised police siege. She was the very picture of the powerful modern woman right up until she was out of sight, and then she broke into run and legged it all the way back to the her ship.
There would probably be somewhere else that sold food and linens, and a million credits could go a long way.
At the door to her ship she turned to look at Irbzrk for what she hoped would be the last time, surveying the place that had given her so much grief. “Time for something new.”
+++++
Spot, the Outer Cluster
“We’re coming up on the coordinates you specified,” Trycrur reported, her voice coming from every speaker on Spot’s command deck. Not long after discovering that her ping-pong ball was compatible with the main core, Adrian had made the switch. The result was that Trycrur now had full control of Spot and served in every way like an A.I. She still wanted her real body back – or a decent facsimile thereof – but for the moment she preferred being a ship to being a ping-pong ball and understood that as the only way she was going to realise her dream of being alive again was to force the Hierarchy to make it happen, she may as well help Adrian with absolutely everything she could.
The upshot of all this was that Adrian could now focus his destructive force on the enemy and not on trying to fly a ship, or on trying to give it intelligible commands; Trycrur parsed every order and fulfilled it in the blink of an eye, her mind moving at vastly faster speeds now that she had been given access to the full power of Spot’s computer.
“Anything out of the ordinary?” he asked, coming fully awake from his dozing state. Trycrur had noticed that Adrian was both sleeping more and was more relaxed than when they’d last parted ways. He was still unstable, but he no longer seemed as though he was on the verge of mental collapse.
“The debris field is clouding sensor accuracy,” she replied. He’d wisely filled her in on what he’d been up to and what they intended, so the lack of readings didn’t concern her until they dropped into local space.
There she could find the faint signal of an asteroid base, only made possible thanks to the use of multiple arrays. Their journey here had been slower than Adrian had wanted by several hours as Trycrur adjusted the computer systems to cope with all of the modifications the ship had suffered.
“Found it,” she advised him, flicking the raw data into visual readings for his benefit. She hailed the base, not wanting to wait for a reprisal against their unexpected presence, and was concerned when no reply came. Three more attempts and a full scan confirmed what she suspected. “No answer to hails. Full scan reveals few life signs.”
“What the fuck?” Adrian demanded, clearly alarmed. “There were a hundred or more when I left.”
Multiple scans produced a more accurate result. “Two, now.”
Staring dumbly at the view screen, Adrian wet his lips and swallowed, a clear expression of great concern. “Jesus… Askit…”
The ridiculously over-built sensor suite took another step towards becoming Trycrur’s favourite thing as the long-range warp detectors began to peg several large, heavily suppressed warp signatures. That was the sort of thing that Hunters used, along with everyone else who wanted to launch a surprise attack. Suppressed warp was slower by a good measure but neatly undetectable on most ships and poorer space stations, and it was one of the few things that throwing more power at couldn’t overcome.
She put up the cloak before she even told Adrian. “Six large ships,” she said. “Coming on quiet, so I doubt they want to be friends. I took the liberty of going quiet ourselves.”
“Good idea,” Adrian acknowledged. “Any idea who they are?”
Trycrur could guess a few possibilities but she didn’t have anywhere enough information to be sure. “Hard to say. You’ll know when I do.”
“Alright, then. Let’s be quick,” Adrian said, prefacing the option Trycrur had already guessed he’d take. “We’re going-“
“To save those people,” Trycrur finished, finding some amusement in his expression of irritation. She knew what he would intend to do as soon as she learned the full details of the situation. “I know. We’re already lock on course for docking.”
“Well,” he said, slightly miffed at having been predicted so completely, “make sure you stay under cloak at all times. I have no fucking idea whether those defences are set to automatic.”
Trycrur cursed herself silently and tried to find out, annoyed to once more discover that a faster mind did not always equate to a better mind. “They’re active,” she said as the reports came back,” and there’s enough firepower there to end us if we’re detected.”
Adrian lowered himself into the piloting seat in spite of being no kind of pilot. “In that case,” he said, deliberately, “we’ll just have to hope they can’t spot Spot.”