Epic Death

by Mike Doom

  Tigeran Consulate Information Database

  Entry: Tellurian Incident - Violation of the Pre-Relativistic Non-Intervention Protocol of Federation Bill of Advanced Life Section-VI Part 2, Directorate XII-b7 of the Federation Formation Treaties

  Incident Summary: Human generation-ship was intercepted by Tellurian cruiser as it made a STL trip to [Bellatrix System], [2215he]. Human ship was 200 lightyears inside the non-contamination zone, but a Tellurian ship monitoring the contact zone saw the human ship faltering into a fatal gravitational well. Fearing a major set-back for the burgeoning race, the Tellurian ship gave primitive jump-gate technology to the human vessel. Moving human development two hundred years ahead, thereby braking the Non-Trading Requirement (Line 10.3.22-49 of FFT XII-b7: BAL VI.2)

  Result: Tellurian government was sanctioned with 100 billion rico in penalties, officers of the ship were detained for 50 years to refresh freeze in Federation Penalty Center A7-R.

  Case Status: Closed

  Stardust pulls the mining colony ship out of the LaGrange. She gets the expected barrage of LTs, dive requests and four poorly handled hack attempts. The Federalis are on her, trying their very best. However, she hasn’t killed anyone on the ship yet. She did strand several hundred people on Torch, but commandeering a ship is allowed within the constraints of the Hunt, insofar as she doesn’t damage the vehicle or pays the amount it is worth should she do so. Right now, she actually hasn’t done anything wrong, even kidnapping Last Chance is technically covered as she does have a small hit on her for possession and public indecency. However, all of this is in the most slate of gray areas, and any awkward motion on her part will have the full brunt of the flaccid cock that is Sprawl law. Which is to say that Stardust was checking several gauges and planning her docking procedure while handling the ‘covert’ attack on the ship.

  “Fucking flats. They might as well spread out nails to pop my tires.” Stardust mutters to herself. World access is blocked, but she gets around that pretty easily. A secure line opens almost immediately.

  “You are here. Did you really have to steal something so conspicuous?”

  “If I wanted to steal a woman on live-ansible, make it known that I did so to someone who is currently involved in a different firefight, and also not get the bitch killed during. Yeah, I kind of did.”

  “I suppose, but color me displeased. How do you intend on losing your tail?”

  “I have my ways. Where am I expected to take her?”

  “Get to Hess. You’ll know the instant you get there.”

  With that the connection ends abruptly. “Well what the fuck was that supposed to mean?” She mutters aloud. An alert blinks in her vision; someone has boarded the vessel on the back half of the engineering section. It will take her about ten minutes to even get there. She checks the crew manifest, nothing of interest in the area. She throws the vac-seals around the wing, and vents the whole section into space.

  That handled, she heads down the main thoroughfare to check on Last Chance. Judging from cameras she is still hiding under the desk in the maintenance ward like some child. Not even an intelligent child, at least she could have found a closet. Stardust is intensely irritated by how useless this woman is, not even worth the most cursory of efforts. A well armed dog could kill this woman. Or a particularly poorly constructed desk.

  “Woman.”

  “Wha-What?” Last jumps up, which works poorly considering she is currently under a desk. She knocks her head pretty hard, causing a desk lamp to spin around comically. Stardust laughs without thinking about it. Comically inept.

  “Pull it the fuck together. We gotta move. Feds are all on our oatmeal.”

  “What? Are you going to kill me now?”

  “Mu’halla weeps. Bitch, stand the mother-fuck up and come on. We got places and faces.” Stardust says sternly, closing her eyes to monitor the Federali presence outside. They scattered a bit after she vented engineering, there are six ships outside, two went to rescue the raiders and four are pulling a wider perimeter, presumably taking aim for a firing protocol.

  The AI they have hacking her network is pathetic, but she can tell they are attempting to turn the screws. They are going to have to blow her engines before she gets too close to Hess, less she risk the station in her ‘stand-off’ or whatever. They can’t actually fire on her until she does something out of hand, and she had only vented troops that were invading her ship off of Hunt protocol. Technically she should stand down and turn her catch over to the police, but technically her catch was supposed to be turned over to GovNet and not the Feds.

  Stardust can pick up heavily encrypted messages being sent through the ships outside and to Hess itself, working on crossing their T’s before they nuke navigation. She has about five minutes tops to get the model into a transport and drop a major deuce on the operation. Luck being with her, she should make it out in the confusion. But Last Chance isn’t walking like her life depends on it enough.

  “Walk, whore.” Stardust pulls a gun on Last, placing it heavily on the woman’s shoulder, not at her, just close enough for her to taste the metal a little. Last starts trembling but begins to pick up her pace. “Thank you.” Stardust lowers the weapon as the both duck through a hatch.

  “This is a trap you know.” Last mutters hurried, attempting to ingratiate herself with Stardust. A lost cause, but Stardust sighs and raises her eyebrows.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Toro knows where you are going. I called him.”

  “You were supposed to do that.” Stardust smiles icily. She had kind of thought the girl wouldn’t pull that particular stunt, and would call her boyfriend directly. Stardust curses under her breath. Toro isn’t very forgiving, not that Stardust has done anything to deserve forgiveness nor would she want such, and their grudge in blood has lasted unsated for quite some time already. He will come for her, and it seems like someone is setting it up for that to happen.

  “He isn’t going to save me. I know that, but I think he’s going to kill you.”

  “Oh he’s certainly going to try, but there is a reason he hasn’t succeeded in all these years.”

  “Are you really that strong?” Last seems suddenly actually interested, temporarily drawn out of fear. She is a flighty one.

  “Top three, easily. Toro might be a big shot now, but I was a big shot when he was still a little baby. This is going to be fun, haven’t gotten my hands really dirty in too long.” Stardust grins, her eyes distant, imagining the epic firefight awaiting her where ever this trail is leading. The girls arrive at a locked hatch, which Stardust hacks through swiftly enough, and then they are inside a very small transport vessel. Only two chairs and a small main area holding necessary cabinets and monitors for applying and removing spacesuits.

  “What is this for?”

  “It’s for sit the fuck down.” Stardust growls and pushes Last forward to the co-pilot’s seat, getting a little tired of the curiosity act and itching to get into the fray. Last sits in a huff and starts fiddling with the buckles and straps to get herself locked in place. Stardust sits as well, getting herself strapped in and then starting her eButler on the list of commands she needs to give the various parts of the ship they are in, and the mining ship as well.

  She takes a second to peer outside, the rescue operation is nearing completion, and the surrounding ships are pulling away, which means that they must have gotten the okay to fire on the ship. Stardust breathes out heavily, mustering up the will to push the big button that puts all of this into motion. A huge grin spreads across her face, and she looks over at Last. Last has her eyes clenched shut for some reason or another. Probably praying to some out of fashion deity or something. Whatever to that mess.

  Stardust vents all non essential areas of the ship (nothing tied to life-support), tossing tons of equipment, food, mined ore, canisters of unrefined gases, desks, chairs, random linens, exercise
machines, several mining probes, six small landers, and the ship that Stardust is currently flying into the vacuum surrounding the ship. The Federalis shoot out their maglifters and drones, attempting to block and redirect the flying mess that Stardust is using as an escape route. She used the propulsion caused by being forcefully ejected from the mining ship to coast away, making a course that only looks to be haphazard, attempting to graze just enough other items to appear to be one of the pieces of random shit that leaked out.

  Step two, Stardust orders the ship to begin a barrel roll maneuver. This is generally a sign that someone is attempting to do something reckless, like release a spray of fire in all directions. The actual attempt here is to move all of the shit that is still inside the ship out, and to do so that they have actual steady arches away from the ship. This allows Stardust to shadow some moving iron ore along a more direct route away from the ships. However, she cannot risk more than using the docking maneuver engines, which would get her to Hess in about three hundred years.

  “What is going on out there?” Last says franticly.

  “I dropped something. You wanna go out there and pick it up for me?” Stardust says with a raised eyebrow, not even looking for Last’s reaction.

  “I was just asking.”

  “Well, aren’t you just the reporter of the century? You still recording, bunny?”

  “What?”

  “I hope so, because this next part is going to be worth it.” Stardust laughs, and throws the ship into a forward roll. She accesses the mining ship’s mainframe one last time, just to throw the engines into full tilt. This has the effect of sending a pretty sizable, and hot, plume of ions out of the rear engines. This then ignites several barrels of unprocessed deuterium, and several more exotic items that are floating about. Combustion is odd in space, but blowing a bunch of ship fuel is a brilliant distraction. A huge explosion surrounds the mining ship, but due to its rotating, it manages to spiral away relatively unscathed, as the shards of metal and melting molecular mass shoot outward unkept by any strong gravinametric force. However the maglifters set-up by the Federalis do attract some unwanted attention, getting shredded as exotic elements degrade into unusual patterns caused by the unnatural gravity well.

  The distraction is plenty enough to get Stardust and Last out of there, although Stardust isn’t sure she can avoid all the shit that is flying around them.

  “What the hell was that?” Last cranes her head around as she accesses the ships monitors.

  “That was a distraction. Now for the hard part.” Stardust grunts, pulling their ship around a free-floating armature crane. She has to get them out of there before the Feds get their sensors back in order. A non-accounted for fusion signature, headed in Hess’s direction will throw the plan all out of wack. They have to follow the mining ship or she is fucked, as this little boat doesn’t have anything more dangerous than her pair of hand-guns in it.

  “Holy fuck!” Stardust yells, Last covers her head. A chunk of platinum the size of a small dog hits the front window, being deflected by the forward shielding, but only barely. Everything in space is a potential murder weapon, as there is nothing to slow its movement. Except their skulls.

  “Aren’t you supposed to turn me over alive?”

  “Not helping, bitch.” Stardust pulls them around a twin mattress. They are getting to the edge of the detritus layer, but smaller explosions keep sending more shards of metal to bombard aft shielding, and the colors on the indicators are not getting more encouraging over time.

  “Girl, I need you to do something for me.” Stardust throws the ship in another spin, the turn a slight bit more sickening as the gravity from the surrounding maglifters is getting more severe. Their ship is about seven thousand meters from the nearest lifter, but Stardust has about half her processing power trained on it, ensuring that it reports nothing more than the shit that keeps buffeting it from the detritus cloud.

  “What?” Last says frantic, Stardust realizes that the girl has had her eyes closed for a while now.

  “Call someone for me. I can’t dive, drive, and hack this maglifter. If you want to survive until someone else has a chance to kill you, I need you to make a call for me.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Jor Usukta.”

  Truckee and Cirrhosis take the first ship off Checktiza, paying extra to travel the red-eye bullet back to Torch, with only a seventy second layover on Torch, for Truckee and Big, who are handling the end-zone. The bounties on them have been lifted, at least for the moment. Ansible coverage of everything that happened at Checktiza, matched with the video pulled off the screen at the bar, showed that Vii Ariable was the man who stole the Jewel of the Ancients. Or at least, that Truckee and Cirrhosis had nothing to do with it. Parts are lies, but Truckee isn't going to correct them.

  After a mild problem in customs, only mostly caused by Truckee’s wardrobe, they managed to catch the last ship off planet. Their ship is a small ovoid number that seats people in lush cushions and runs a full sensivise suite the entire time. Truckee and Cirrhosis appear to be sitting in a giant stateroom, on two huge stone chairs at a marble table, sipping champagne.

  “This is a little much isn’t it?”

  “You said no to the beach.”

  “I don’t want to consider the bathing suit you would wear.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I imagine that you would take almost anything that way.”

  “Such it is. Did you get any sort of gameplan out of them?”

  “Not really. I think they just want us to do our parts in the grand ceremony on Selba Station, keep it public and high-rez. Pepper seems to think that some part of the plan is taking place during the race, so I guess he just wants us to be ready for that?”

  “Fucking hell, like I am some secret agent or something.” Truckee mutters under his breath.

  “So that kid is a Lance?”

  “Seems that way. He has been pulling his weight, amongst other things.”

  “He reminds me of something…”

  “Please say it isn’t your childhood.”

  “No, I… Fuck.” Cirrhosis gets an omega encrypted dive request. He gulps, knowing that it isn’t good. Smells like it isn’t good. Tastes so bad.

  “What?”

  “Fucking Toro.” Cirrhosis says, and clicks out of their session and into another. He opens his eyes and he is sitting on a chair in Toro’s office. Toro’s office is brightly lit, his home star Bellatrix practically knocking at the windows. A large gold desk stands firmly in the center of the room, facing away from the star. Both walls are covered in small models of places, things, people that Toro owns or controls in some way. Cirrhosis knows that a jersey of his is on a shelf to his right, three shelves from the bottom, right next to a pair of car keys. Cirrhosis has long wondered what car they belong to. The desk is the origin of the melting gold of the whole building, its thick clawed legs oozing gold which runs in thick rivers through the red shag carpeting. Toro sits at a thick gold chair, a silhouette against the cool blue sun behind him.

  “I understand you have been busy.” Toro mutters.

  “Yeah. Lots of people want me dead.”

  “Myself included.”

  “I thought we had a deal.”

  “We did. We still do. I am just misunderstanding what you have being doing lately. Or did you think that I don’t have people watching ansible?”

  “I know you have people watching everything I do.”

  “Good. I met your girlfriend recently. She’s perhaps full functioning retarded, on a good day. She came to me expecting a handout.”

  Cirrhosis’ throat dries shut. Last Chance has no concept of how much danger she put herself in so much as thinking about Toro, let alone requesting his assistance. What could have happened to her?

  “I see you had no knowledge of her malfeasance. I am glad that you know your place with me.”
<
br />   “Under your thumb, Toro.”

  “Naturally. Miss Chance came to me because she has been kidnapped by an old associate of mine, a hunter known as Baby Doll Judah Stardust.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Correct. In a way, I can even understand how she would think I would want to become involved in something like this. Stardust and I have ancient history in common, she killed my father.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. I am going to pay her a visit. However, I have an inkling that this meeting is not as it seems at first blush. I have a notion that I am being lead somewhere, only in an illusion of free-will. I will not be fucked with, Cirrhosis.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Who is pulling the strings? Your new friends perhaps?”

  “No. They seem to think it has something to do with the way your father died. They seem to think that you are all being lead there for something you did on that space station.” Cirrhosis mutters, stops, and corrects. “Something we did on that station. A long time ago.”

  “We?”

  “I found out something about myself today. I still have no idea what it means exactly. That I have this whole life before then, that I am several decades older than I thought. You don’t care about that. I was on the station too, died and was revived from my chip maybe. I don't know. Mindwipe and blam, here I am.”

  “I don’t recall you in the slightest.”

  “Neither do I. Would you like me to turn back? I am about to hit relative at Torch, I could take a red to Hess.” It was his original orders, Cirrhosis' heart beats faster.

  “No. I want the purse from the Race. You owe me at least that much for anguish and inconvenience. I will go to Hess alone, and close this disgusting chapter myself.” Toro waves his offer away.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Before you go. If you ever find out who you are, you are to tell me immediately. I need to know where the leak was.”

  “Leak?”

  And Cirrhosis is booted back to the beach. Truckee opens his eyes, enjoying a nap on the simulated beach. They are now in front of a large expanse of ocean, the sun just setting to their right. Two beach chairs with a small table between them, holding a chiller with a bottle of champagne in it. Truckee is wearing a micromini two piece bathsuit, apparently tucking the cash and prizes for later use. Cirrhosis chuckles, has his eButler switch his avatar to a pair of board shorts, and lies back in his lounger.

  “Have fun?”

  “A hoot and a holler.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Don’t know. There still some champagne?”

  “Of course. Pool boy brought it over.”

  “Good. This shit is getting too heavy to take sober.”

  “My words stolen from my mind.”

  “Toro is going for the trap too.”

  “Pepper seemed to think that would happen.”

  “I should LT him anyway, so he can plan ahead.”

  “Good man. You ready for the race?”

  “I guess. I heard from Toro that the purse was worth a lot. Did they change that?”

  “Seems that way. Char-els texted me that the Jewel was replaced with a trillion rico cash prize.”

  “Shit fuck!”

  “Exactly. I’m positive they’re docking my pay for it.” Truckee mutters angrily. The two men take a moment to sip their drinks. Calm nerves, at least for a moment.

  “This is not going to end well is it?”

  “I never thought it would end any other way.”