by Martin HC
The journey inside was a wonder for Haydn, who was in awe at the sheer size of the place, the spectrum of ship types in their berths were amazing, ranging from the tiny to vastly huge, some sleek and streamlined while others looked like modified flying bricks, so he was a little disappointed in truth when they'd docked and disembarked into the large and windowless but surprisingly tidy corridors.
“OK, first things first,” Damon said to the group. “I have to go grease a few fingers and get loose tongues talking to the right people, it's best if you two go with Jill, Brenn's with me.”
“Shouldn't we stay together, from what you told me this place isn't for holidays in the sun.”
You'll be fine, there's still security and rules to a point, wouldn't be good for business if there wasn't hence the clean corridors, just don't upset anyone or destroy their ships and kill everyone.”
“Low blow Damon, she shot at us remember,” Haydn answered, giving an awkward nod to the so far silent woman, who only stared back at him with a deeply unsettling look.
“I don't think I'll ever forget, though if I go around with a posse, it'll make it difficult to get people talking. You'll be more than safe with Jill, and she knows where the good bars are too.”
“I like that plan, you had me at bar, we'll go to where the drinks are and you can find people,” Haydn said quickly.
Damon left with a nod and Brenn followed behind him turning a corner. Haydn looked at Jill, it took a few agonising seconds for him to break the silence with the tall and pretty black-haired man slayer, but he did.
“OK... so we had that little spat back on my ship, then I threw you through the jump bridge which I know is really uncomfortable, but now that we're here, how about a drink?”
Her eyes narrowed for a few harrowing seconds, then they opened again and she nodded as everything about her face and body relaxed.
“Yeah, I like that idea and I know a place, quiet and decent, will your daughter be OK?”
Jill's voice was actually quite feminine, if you weren't looking at her when she spoke, you would never have suspected she was an augmented and nasty piece of work. Haydn also noticed something different about her eyes, before they left Damon's ship he could have sworn they were blue, but now they were green.
“Who Tiralyn? She's not my daughter, and you have no idea what she can do, trust me she'll be fine. Have your eyes changed colour?”
She stared at him silently again for a few seconds then seemingly making up her mind, smiled and gestured for him to follow beside her, ignoring his question. They came up behind a long line of people but Jill veered off into another corridor before reaching it.
Occasionally someone else would pass, drawing uneasy looks as Haydn and Tiralyn were silently led through the corridors. Eventually they entered through a doorway onto a balcony that ran parallel to the overly long queue of people, and followed it for another ten long minutes, drawing nasty looks up by those waiting in line below, much to Haydn's confusion.
Finally, they descended the steps at the end and reached a large door where surprisingly the line also ended. Standing in front of the door was a team of men holding weapons of various descriptions, although they weren't dressed for a fight, or bothered in the trio as they approached, they seemed only interested in maintaining the order of the other waiting people.
Jill stepped forward and pulled out a key card from her pocket, one of the men pointed to Haydn and Tiralyn then held up three fingers while pointing with his other hand to a terminal on the wall, Jill seemed to know what this meant as she approached the terminal, typed something and then held up her card to be scanned. The terminal beeped as the armed man checked the confirmation, “priority boarding confirmed,” he then waved them through while his colleague opened the door, to the loud protest of those who'd queued for hours in the hot and stuffy corridor.
“What was that all about?” Haydn asked Jill once they were through the door.
“This entire station is run by various cartels, I was paying our entry fees,” Jill answered.
“Damon hates the place but you have a gold membership card.”
“Yip, a lifetime one.”
The notion of entry fees to get into a gangster run station like this struck Haydn as comical but it made sense all the same, keeping the corridors clean and paying for the security had to be funded somehow, lawless law and order.
What they walked into was an enormous cavernous room, as big and as high as a stadium. Filled with makeshift structures, tents, stalls and buildings, thousands of people shifted around on multiple levels, buying, selling, shouting and arguing. Odd smells and smoke wafted through the place, mostly inviting the senses but sometimes suddenly assaulting them too.
“The bar's this way,” Jill said, leading them into the crowd of people.
It didn't take long to get to the bar, Haydn noticed that there were children darting in and out of the crowd of people, which made him reach instinctively for his wallet. Feeling nothing there he swore out loud, then remembered he never owned one in the first place.
“Are you alright?” Jill asked.
“I thought someone stole my wallet.”
“You don't have a wallet,” Tiralyn added.
“I know, so all good.”
Jill just shook her head with a look of curious bemusement before turning and pressing the door buzzer, a hatch slid open and she held up her key card to the hole in the door, which someone with a mechanical hand took from her, a few seconds later the card was handed back and the door was opened. An angry looking, no nonsense and heavyset woman filled the entryway, a scar ran from the base of her ear to her nose, her right eye was missing, and in its place was a mechanical replacement. She looked them up and down before stepping aside to let them in.
“You know the house rules, keep your friends in line,” she growled.
“Thanks Flower, nice to see you again too,” Jill said before leading them all up the stairs and to a table in the corner.
They sat down as a pretty girl approached them this time.
“Hello again Jill, it's been a while, are you here for professional reasons, if so, would you like to see our open menu?”
“No thanks just passing through, three drinks and nothing fancy,” Jill answered. The girl nodded, smiled and left.
“Open menu?” Haydn asked, with a look that suggested he knew it wasn't food.
“Best not to ask,” she answered, with a look that said he wasn't getting any other answer.
The bar had plenty of people in it but in comparison to the bustling crowds outside, it was a welcome quiet.
“So Flower seems like a pleasant person,”
“Who?”
“Flower, the woman at the door, with the scar on her face.”
“Her name's Flower, not Flower.”
“Right, never mind, how long do you expect Damon to be?”
“A few hours so you may as well relax, we'll be safe in here.”
So relax he did, of course after finishing his drink he then also finished Tiralyn's untouched glass. Up until that point she'd been mostly passive and silent, but as the second round of three drinks came around, agitation was starting to creep through.
“You're poisoning yourself again,” she spoke out.
“Oh for the love of... not this again, if you're just going to criticise me for having a drink then please just go back to the ship,” he shot back.
“I'm not criticising, just stating facts.”
“Yeah right, it's amazing how you just love stating facts when I have a drink.”
She never answered and so Haydn desperate to change the conversation turned to Jill, being the only other person available.
“So what's with your eyes? I know they changed colour but I don't know how.”
“A lady has her secrets,” she answered with a smile.
“They're implants,” Tiralyn told him. “She's also been heavily nano enhanced and is capable of changing her hair colour.”
“I can see them, and please remember you were on my operating table.”
“That's impressive,” Jill spoke. “They're top of the range mods and should be hidden to scanning technology, you must have implants of your own to see mine.”
“No, she doesn't have implants but her body's been altered in a different way, I think,” Haydn spoke. “She's changed my body too a bit, I'm stronger and faster but I also have implants like you, just not the same.”
As a regular subscriber to Bodymods Illustrated, the black market shopping centre for only the most keen and hardened modders, her curiosity peeked out from behind her rough exterior.
“What kind of implants?” Jill asked,
“One stops me feeling the gut wrenching effects of the jump bridge, there's another that is a locator type thing so Tiralyn can always find me, and there's another that lets me understand any language, and speak it.”
“Ah, so that is why you can speak our mother tongues, Arlan told me that after you woke him, everything you said was fluent, and in his dialect, it was the same with me so I realised something wasn't right.”
“I'm not really speaking your language, I'm speaking mine, the implant is hard wired to my brain, it takes what I'm thinking as I say it and sends it into your brain, you just hear what your brains being told.”
“I had no idea technology like that existed,” she told him.
“Well it does in my head, but I need to get Tiralyn to back it off a little, set it to the standard common you all use so people don't get suspicious, and it's really annoying to get the literal translation of names, have you ever met someone called Dancing Flower War.”
“No.”
“I have, I hear things like that all the time because names usually come from different meanings.”
“Ah, that explains Flower, you don't have a mental reference for the type of flower she was named after, it probably doesn't exist on your planet so the name just translates as Flower, right?”
“Exactly, so what about your eyes, do they just change colour?”
“They can do more than just change their colour, they help me out a lot at times,” she told him.
“They're not x-ray are they, you can't see through my clothing can you?”
“I wish they could, just think of all the funny squashed up bits and pieces I would see,” she said with her smile turning mischievous before they both laughed.
“Oh great, another round.”
A Lead
“We've received a report, the man we're after is between the fringe territories in a place called the Grinder.”
“The Grinder, yes I know it, and nothing good ever comes from that place. Are we sure it's him, and has the ship also been identified?” Admiral Ortza asked his agent.
“Facial recognition taken from his arrest matches him to our fugitive, but the ship has not been seen. He docked using another ship, the Ophelia, an old decommissioned runner from one of the fringe territories, under the command of Damon Osthorpe.”
“What do we know of Osthorpe, is he working with the cartels?”
“We don't know. Our person on the inside only reported that after docking, they split up into two groups, and our target went with two previously unidentified females. all we know of Osthorpe is that he's a smuggler of sorts and is on our more minor wanted lists, we have nothing to indicate anything more than that.”
The waiting so far had been uneventful, other than the probe into the station's security commander who was still being detained, there was little else to do.
The in-depth investigation into the equipment used to disable the cameras and kill the servers turned up a few theories, but nothing concrete. The delicate circuitry in the equipment was fried by an electro magnetic type device, it was common tech, but no one could explain how it got through the shielding of every single server.
“I see, this puts a spin on things, if he's laying over with the cartels in the fringe territories then he could be working for anyone, using the cartels as middlemen to provide a safe harbour for the ship and her crew between operations,” he stopped here, thinking a little before continuing slowly. “Or it's also possible there is a new undiscovered civilisation beyond the fringe, one more advanced than ourselves running scouting and information gathering operations.”
“A worrying thought, sir,”
The speculation wasn't helping, hard evidence was what they needed and now their first real lead just handed itself to them, fast action was required, he had to inform the necessary channels immediately.
In the Borei system, the fleet had never stepped down from its readiness to depart, Fleet Admiral Y'Riell ensured that regardless of the hour, her people would not be found sleeping. The intelligence colonel's update was a relief to her, despite patience being a quality she had much of.
Her fleet departed the system just one hour after being informed, and she commended her fleet captains on their speed and rigid preparations.
The briefing was short and the objectives laid out, secure the Grinder, prevent anyone from entering or leaving and apprehend anyone so far involved.
“Are there any questions?” the colonel asked the Starfyre battlegroup commanders.
“Sir you called that place the Grinder and given its size I'm guessing it's a relic from the Fall, why have we done nothing about the criminal gangs that now run it before now?”
“We believe there to be a second station like her but we've as yet to identify her location, our agents are getting close but so far no success, now do we have any more questions pertinent to the mission?”
This was a lie quickly conjured to silence the commander, he added the bit at the end to keep any further questions on topic. There were other stations like her, but they were too far out in unpopulated space to be of use to anyone. They were built to resupply exploration fleets numbering in the thousands. Now they were lifeless hunks off steel, abandoned in the dark depths.
The Grinder centralised the criminal organisations, gave them a false sense of power and stability, while ensuring through proximity they would continue to quarrel amongst themselves.
Governments and intelligence agencies would also use the station to conduct nefarious affairs or sell off decommissioned warships to those who opposed their enemies. Politics were the real reason the place was never shut down.
“Do they have a fleet for the defence of their station, and what sort of defences can we expect to find inside?” he was asked.
“A good question, the station does have a fleet but it's a patchwork of old and outdated ships, forty or fifty at the most, depending on how many are operational, but they will not commit them to fighting us,” he paused for thought before lining up the rest of his answer. “As for inside, there will be minimal resistance, most will be ordered by their leaders to let us board without incident. A careless firefight would be extremely bad for business, so they'll most likely provide support in our search to get us out faster.”
“So they will surrender their station just like that and allow us to dismantle their operations, Colonel?” the questioned was asked by the same person.
“No, because they will not be surrendering their station to us, nor will we be disassembling their operations, that is not the purpose of this mission, our mission is to capture these people and that ship,” as he spoke their fugitives faces appeared again alongside the image of the ship in the main holo display, he continued. “Commanders, this is a fleet based smash and grab, not a cartel hunt, we will not deviate from that mandate.”
No one was happy with this answer, finding out that so many criminals lived under one roof and then being told not to do anything about it was naturally upsetting for the strike group commanders, whose purpose was to bring down people like this.
“The Grinder has no gravity well to avoid when jumping in, so with careful planning, we'll be on top of them before anyone has the chance to run,” the colo
nel finished.
The meeting ended shortly after, each commander would now brief up his own strike group.
Revelries to new Friendships
Damon had been gone longer than planned, the streets were already clearing for the evening by the time he arrived at the bar, or what was dictated as evening by the space station's internal clock.
He went through the same process to get into the bar as the other three, and wasn't surprised to see Haydn drunk and staggering off to the toilet. What did surprise him was the unknown face sitting beside Jill, a male face, and just as fixed on the girl as she was on Haydn.