Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Escape

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Escape

Sacha T. shrugged on a vacsuit so old that it probably belonged in a Core Worlds museum and not the equipment locker of a spaceport, wondering how long it had been since it had been inspected, let alone used. Luckily, the suit’s pressure-safety wasn’t entirely necessary; the pressure-sealing failsafes and atmo-reserve present in even the most basic set of shipboard fatigues would be enough, and Sacha’s clothes were several grades above the most basic. Mainly, he needed the suit for its built in maneuvering thrusters; jumping out of the airlock and aiming for the side of his ship carried an unacceptable risk of tumbling out into the darkness, never to be seen again.

Carrying the suit helmet under his arm, Sacha returned to the console and his scrambler and transferred the security feed from his now-concealed cuff to one of its displays. He was just in time to see the two men retreating out of the range of the security cameras, but there was no sign of the girl.

It might have been reasonable to expect that she had departed first and the men had waited until she was gone to leave, but Sacha hadn’t made his name in the trade by making reasonable assumptions. He switched to the ship’s internal security feeds and cycled through several, until he found her sitting cross-legged on the catwalk on the upper level of the cargo bay, eyes closed and two cases full of valuable cargo stacked neatly in her lap.

Sacha gritted his teeth. This was not how to conduct business smoothly. If the Malones didn’t trust him alone with their cargo, they shouldn’t expect him to move it aboard his ship. He jabbed a few buttons and started a warning klaxon in the cargo bay, hoping to scare the girl off, but she barely flinched at the sound or the accompanying flashing lights.

Briefly, he debated stripping off the suit, going down to the cargo loading dock, and dragging the unfortunate syndicate lackey out by her hair, but that would make a scene bound to draw unwanted attention, and keep him in dock far too long. If the Malones really were dodging BCI, he couldn’t take that chance. Neither was he willing to incur the costs and risks of coming all the way back to drop her back off.

In the end, Sacha decided to just put up with it, do the job, and drop her wherever the cargo was going.  With a sigh, he closed and sealed the cargo bay doors. He could pass her meal-packs through the accessway and never let him into the main part of the ship. If the Malones had expected him to provide a more comfortable voyage, they should have paid the extra fee for passengers Sacha normally levied. If she made trouble – and he almost hoped she would – he’d be able to evacuate the cargo bay and deliver the cargo in peace.

Jamming the old suit’s helmet into place and locking its seals down, Sacha glanced down the narrow accessway toward the airlock, estimating that it would take him about four seconds to get there without tripping, and another three to blow-cycle the airlock. The docking clamps holding his ship in place would take about fifteen seconds to release, and the autopilot would wait perhaps ten seconds after that to kick in the maneuvering thrusters and push away from the station. Those would take a few more seconds to accelerate the ship to a point where he couldn’t hope to catch up to it with suit thrusters. He had less than thirty seconds to be holding onto the outer hull of his ship, or this was going to be a very short and painfully embarrassing journey.

Fortunately, Sacha had done this a few times before, and had practiced it dozens of times more at a friendly dark harbor. Half-turning toward the airlock, he picked up his scrambler and pressed the override for the clamps.

As klaxons began to blare and red lights began to flash in the maintenance passage, Sacha saw a figure appear in an intersection past the airlock, then turn and shout something unintelligible over the alarms. This was a surprise; he hadn’t figured the station crew at a place like Anonga would discover his breach for at least ten more minutes.

There was no time to second-guess, however, and the figure had already caused him one precious second. Sacha started moving casually forward, waving one hand and tapping the side of his helmet as if telling the figure to switch to a different comms channel.

The figure reached for a sidearm, then paused, confused by Sacha’s casual demeanor. The pause lasted only a second or two, but by the time he overcame it, Sacha was within range to dive the last meter into the airlock and slam the control to seal it and initiate an emergency blow-cycle.

As air roared out into space around him, Sacha saw the man through the airlock door’s tiny, triangular window. He snapped a quick salute, then turned around as the outer doors irised open. It would only take the man a few seconds to override and shut them, so Sacha jumped out headfirst, his stomach lurching as he passed over the boundary of the station’s gravitic system and into microgravity.

Correcting his tumble, Sacha could tell from the chronometer in his helmet that he was precious seconds later than he’d intended, but that he still had time to reach his ship. The clamps had almost finished their travel, and his ship was already drifting lazily away from the rotating docking ring. The boarding umbilical had already parted, and now the only way aboard was his way.

Putting the suit’s thrusters at maximum, Sacha sped across the open space toward the lower aft hull of his ship, which happened to be closest. It would be an annoying climb up to one of the hatches on the dorsal crew space, but he could do that after the station was far behind.

A few seconds before impact, Sacha flipped the thrusters around to the front and put them on maximum, slowing himself down. This was the most stomach-turning part of the whole process for him – if he’d timed something wrong, or decelerated too hard, he’d lose too mant seconds and be forced to watch the ship shove off without its skipper.

Fortunately, this time, Sacha didn’t mistime or misjudge the braking burn. He hit the ship hard enough to set off warning lights in the suit, but not hard enough to bounce off out of A-grav range. As he slid down the hull under simulated gravity, he grabbed two of the handholds that studded the hull of almost any starship to slow his movement, then clipped a safety line to a third.

Almost as soon as he’d clipped in his line, the maneuvering program started, and the stars and station spun around Sacha’s head. Inside the ship’s A-grav, he felt none of the acceleration, but the visual effect was enough to disturb the equilibrium of his stomach all the same.

Only when the station began to shrink into the distance did Sacha breathe a sigh of relief. Opening a channel to the helm, he set in an outward course to the jump limit, dismissing automated warnings about departure and flight plan clearance sent by the station’s traffic control. Anonga had no system defense force worth mentioning, so he was clear, as long as the alert they sent out didn’t match his ship the next time he came into dock.

Interestingly, Sacha avoided mentioning in his account who the girl was, or why she had been put aboard his ship by the criminal syndicate he was working for. He ended it with a perfunctory note about the rest of the run being fairly standard, probably to conceal a few more tricks which he doesn’t want to put out there.

It seems he sent this in to us because this sort of unauthorized departure has been widely copied; I found more than thirty reports of ships (none of which are likely to be Sacha’s) blowing their way out of a spaceport in roughly this manner in the last sixty days, and I was just searching the Coreward Frontier and Farthing’s Chain. Perhaps he is hoping to see the practice leave common use by bringing it to the attention of the community, or perhaps he is claiming to have invented this trick and thus this being published solidifies his credibility with the underground.

[N.T.B. – I think our friend Sacha may be having this published as a way of covertly calling out his employers. I asked around; the Malones are really a syndicate really believed to be working in salvaged and stolen war materiel from both sides. By naming them in the public eye and detailing some of their methods, he’s taking the money out of their hands that they took out of his by not paying him for passenger freight for their cargo-minder, and establishing a convention that those who don’t deal fairly with him can’t expect the usual secrecy he treats their cargoes.]

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Misdirection

 

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Misdirection

We continue this week with the third of four installments of this account of smuggling illicit war material out of Anonga from Sacha T. I still have no good read on when this took place; it references scavenged battlefields on the Frontier but he was careful not to name any of them and thus give the reader a specific time-table.

I also suspect that he is lying about having been a luxury goods importer in Sol. Most likely given how easily he fell into notoriously untrusting smuggling circles, he was a narcotics dealer or a black marketeer there, too, and the comments about palling around with Earth’s high society are probably just part of how he anonymized this account.

[N.T.B. – Even if he was a drug pusher, those parts of the story ring true for me. Sol-based high society has always had a bit of a dark side, and avoiding this sort of company is a big reason I never bothered to climb Everest or complete any of the home-world’s other famous wilderness treks.]

 

By the time Sacha T. had completed a leisurely stroll through the station’s dingy concourse and was on his way back to his ship, he’d mostly reached an arrangement with the man from Malone. There was still no talk of what the cargo was, but that was normal; Sacha really didn’t want to know what it was. It was something the Malones had pulled off a battlefield on one of the worlds of the Coreward Frontier, and that made it both illicit and valuable.

Discussing business with walk-ins without getting into the messy complications of face to face meetings was something Sacha had kept from his heady days as a luxury goods importer on Earth. Though he’d clinked glasses with clients in some of the most expensive restaurants on that world, the cost of business that way had meant that his take-home income was really quite low. After a decade in that business, he’d had barely fifty thousand credits of savings, so he’d sold the importer company to the first idiot who had seemed interested and headed out toward the Frontier.

That had been only a few years ago, and he’d already made back the high cost of starting in a new line of work and set aside profits of more than five hundred thousand credits. There was danger, sure, but not much of it. This sort of business wasn’t exactly legal, true, but neither had been some of the things Sacha had done to streamline the customs problems around some of the goods he’d been selling on Earth. As long as nobody was getting hurt, he tried not to bother with the moral implications.

The basic gist of the Malone man’s problem was that his cargo was too hot to move with the organization’s normal transporters, but it didn’t have a terribly long shelf life and needed to reach its end customer before that shelf life expired. Sacha’s arrival on the station had been something of a stroke of luck for them; he was a known entity in the business, but so heavily associated with enemies of the Malones that most, even inside their own ersatz family, would think him unlikely to move their cargo.

Fortunately for them, Sacha had no particular loyalty to the organizations for which he normally moved goods. If he wanted to join them, he could have long ago; independence was part of how he maintained high profits and minimized risks. After extracting a few more thousand credits out of the representative, he remotely opened the airlock and let the two men go. By the time Sacha returned to his own ship, they were long gone. He knew he would not see either of them again; their cargo would arrive quietly via a go-between some time in the next hour.

Still, Sacha didn’t board his ship; he walked past the docking hatch to see if anyone was poking around, still disguised as an off-duty local. Whoever the Malones were worried about was not yet watching Sacha or his ship, a very good sign.

Requesting departure clearance would of course draw too much attention, so Sacha stopped in what was once a nicely upholstered viewport lounge area to call up a station schematic and find the backup control system for the docking clamps holding his ship in place just outside the docking ring. Normally, these panels were in off-limits areas and one needed local maintenance staff credentials to use them, but that would be no problem. He was heartened to see that the panel was placed within five meters of an airlock and a locker full of maintenance vac-suits; this simplified his job even further.

Accessing his ship’s systems remotely, Sacha spent a few minutes booking a two-day, one-night trip to the planet’s surface. From what he’d heard, Anonga was a wreck both culturally and environmentally, but there were still a few places near the spaceport catering to tourists and advertising reasonable prices. The cost of these bookings wasn’t refundable, but that was fine; the sunk credits would make it look like he was planning to meet a contact anonymously planetside.

As soon as his fictitious schedule was in place, Sacha pulled a security scrambler out of his pocket and went back out to the docking ring, wandering aimlessly until he spied an out-of-the-way maintenance access point. It took the scrambler only about thirty seconds to penetrate the hatch’s antiquated security program and slide it open. Now hidden from the prying eyes of the main station security system, he hurried back toward the control system for his ship’s docking clamp.

A moment before he arrived at the console, his ship’s security system pinged his comm. A trio of figures had arrived outside his ship’s cargo transfer hatch. Two were men in station cargo-master uniforms, and they flanked a young woman in an unmarked jumpsuit carrying two metal valises. This was no surprise; though the cargo capacity of Sacha’s ship exceeded fifteen tons once external cargo pods were loaded, the cargo he moved was usually not larger than a single crate.

Sacha set his scrambler to work on the terminal and remotely opened the cargo hatch just wide enough for a single person to step inside. Opening his comms through the ship’s sound system, he did his best to sound bored and distracted. “Just, ah, drop them just inside and I’ll get to them later. Payment is transferred.”

The young woman walked through the hatch just as the scrambler dinged; it had defeated the terminal. Sacha quickly set up the command to release his ship from the clamps, left it on the final key-press, then dashed down the narrow maintenance corridor to the space-suit locker. If everything went according to plan, he’d be out clean within two minutes.

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Introduction

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Introduction 

Sacha T. found a good seat in the viewing gallery a deck above the docking ring berth assigned to his ship. That the station had a viewing gallery above the docking ring suggested that Anonga had once been a system with significant wealth and prestige, but now the gallery was a dilapidated mess of refuse both material and human, avoided by respectable locals and spacers. 

Checking the time on his wristcuff, Sacha hoped the prospective client would show up. They didn’t always, of course. Often one interest would send out go-betweens to set up several carriers, either to throw BCI off the scent or to make it difficult for someone to re-steal such sought-after cargo. 

As the final minute of the shift’s third hour trickled away, Sacha began to hope that nobody would show up. There was a definite, if usually unarticulated, logic to when a client showed up to make final arrangements. If someone showed up several minutes early, it generally indicated a low risk job, with no known official or rival complications. Several minutes late was universal code for “too much heat, we’ll move this later.”  

Precisely on time generally meant that the client knew of complications but intended to move the goods anyway. Sacha hated working under those constraints; he could get the job done, but he would consume a not-terribly-healthy quantity of antacid tablets in the process. 

At 03:59:55, a pair of men walked out from under the gallery and approached the hatch leading to Sacha’s ship, and as the chronometer ticked over from three fifty-nine fifty-nine to to four-hour, the taller, lankier figure pressed the comms stud next to the hatch. 

Sacha sighed, then opened a channel linked through a relay box on his belt back to the ship. “Yeah?” 

“Hey bud.” The taller man leaned against the hatch. He didn’t look any worse for his hard-hitting drink choice barely six hours before, and Sacha hoped that meant he’d only had the one Starshine. It didn’t pay to deal with anyone who could stomach more than one pour of that stuff and still walk straight. “Got time to catch up before you head out?” 

“I might have a few minutes.” Sacha scanned the length of the docking ring as far as he could, and saw no sign anyone was paying the pair any mind. That, however, wasn’t enough to satisfy him; after all, they’d shown up right on time. “Who’s your friend?” 

“Just a good pal I thought you’d like to get to know.” The man, now aware that Sacha could see him, shrugged. 

“In that case, come on in.” Sacha tapped a control on his cuff and opened the outer doors, permitting the pair to enter the umbilical.  

As soon as they’d stepped inside, he shut the door once more and switched his relay to the speakers inside that narrow, thin-skinned tube connecting ship to station across a gulf of hard vaccuum. Sacha had played the game long enough not to let the paying customer be the only person to play elaborate games of security. “Do sit tight... buddy. I’ll be right with you.” 

“Er, something wrong?” The voice still carried its genial conviviality, but there was an edge underneath it now. “I thought we had an-” 

“We probably do.” Sacha stood, stretched, and headed for the stairway connecting the gallery to the docking ring below. “I just like to make very sure I keep the company of the right sort.” 

The second man, shorter and broader of build as Sacha recalled, cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea who-” 

“No, not yet.” Sacha shouldered past a pair of ragged vagabonds heading up into the gallery to imbibe their daily fix. “But do enlighten me. Don’t worry, you are quite safe from surveillance in there.” 

“I’m Malone, Mr. Terrare.” The heavyset man snapped.  

Sacha stopped. “Ah, that’s an interesting name.” Malone wasn’t his name, or at least, it wasn’t his legal name. It was the name of an adoptive family of two-bit criminals who’d made it big on unlicensed Nate-tech salvage. They were, as it were, one of the two or three biggest potential clients for his sort of services, and one which he’d never worked with before. “Very, very interesting.” 

It was doubly interesting because Sacha had heretofore mainly worked with the smaller interests and with the Malone syndicate’s main rivals over at Peake-Sonnen. Normally, he would have such a deep black mark in their book that they’d be more likely to put a knife in his back than cargo in his hold. 

“We are on a bit of a, er, tight schedule, bud.” The taller man thumped the inner hatch with his fist to emphasize its closed condition. “Let’s talk details, eh?” 

Sacha reached the docking ring, then turned toward the bank of lifts which would take him back down to the concourse. As he entered one of the lifts, he changed the pattern of his chameleon-weave smart-fabric uniform to resemble the shabby fatigues of off-duty station personnel. “By all means, do talk details. I am listening.” 

We continue with Sacha’s account of picking up war-profiteer contraband in the Anonga system. How the cargo gets to Anonga is still unclear to me (it is quite a few jumps from the Frontier, after all), but I’m sure BCI is looking into it. 

[N.T.B. - And when they figure it out, I’m sure they won’t tell us how, or announce that they’ve put a stop to it.] 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Bargain

2951-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: A Profiteer’s Bargain

There has been little action worth noting at Sagittarius Gate since our interview with Admiral Abarca. The defenses here are quite extensive, and all the more impressive for the fact that there are no planets or large bodies in this system to provide materials, manufacturing base, or work force for their construction. True, the defenses at Maribel are at least as extensive as these, but they are distributed to provide a defense network for a planet, whereas here the “fixed” defenses are in fact fixed to nothing in particular; a few fleet tugs could easily reposition the whole setup into new orbits in a week or two.

This week, I’ve elected to share part of an account sent in by someone who we’ll call Sacha T. (not, obviously, his real name). Sacha is, or more accurately was, an independent contractor in the semi-organized shadow industry of war profiteering. These vultures don’t directly plunder the Navy’s coffers, but they do pick over battlefields, smuggle people and goods across the lines, divert military supplies (probably those of both sides, though ours seem to be easier), and so on.

Sacha’s account picks up in the Anonga system, a backwater in Farthing’s Chain which has apparently become something of a clandestine hub for smuggling of war materiel.

Sacha slouched against the bar, staring into the amber liquid in his tumbler. Most likely, it wasn’t real Earth whiskey, despite the insistence of the nanotattoo-emblazoned barkeep, but it would raise uncomfortable questions if anyone knew he could tell the difference.

Ten years prior, Sacha had been the sort of person who would never have stooped to buying a drink in the cheapest bar on the decrepit waystation in such a sorry excuse for a star system, but now, he was the sort of person who hung around such places and drank whatever foul spirits were poured for him, without the slightest indication of revulsion. After all, the only people who were in his new line of business had long ago learned to bury any tendency toward revulsion which they had once had.

The stool next to Sacha’s creaked as a new occupant sat down. “Bad day there, bud?” The newcomer clapped a bony hand on Sacha’s shoulder.

Sacha shrugged without looking over at the other man. “No worse than most. Just not in any terrible hurry.” Without any outward indication of the shudder which his taste-buds were trying to propagate through his nervous system, he picked up the tumbler and took a sip, trying to picture the taste of a proper old-fashioned whiskey to replace the sickly-sweet, piney solvent which was actually coating his tongue.

“Funny thing about hurry is, you never know if you’re gonna be in it next moment.” The other man slid a reader-slate along the counter.

Sacha took another sip, pretending to savor the flavor, then finally glanced down at the slate. The garish symbols on its face might easily be mistaken for abstract art by anyone not familiar with the ways of the Reach’s underground, but Sacha knew their meaning all too well. Still without glancing over at the other man, he tapped a slashing series of marks in the middle of the screen, the ones indicating the fee. “I’ve seen this piece before, but there were two more green streaks here.”

The other man swiped through the holo-display menu on his section of the bar, then jabbed the icon for his choice of drink. “Would you be in a hurry if they were there?”

Sacha shook his head. “I’d still have time for a few drinks.”

The man took his slate back as the bartender passed by, depositing a tumbler of aquamarine liquid in front of him. Sacha tried not to wince; the only blue liquor on the menu was Bare Starshine, a distilled concoction infamous for its astringent, medicine-like taste, and for the trace toxins which had made most of the Core Worlds ban its import. Unlike the whiskey, the Bare Starshine was probably genuine. His would-be client had something to prove, no sense of self-preservation, or both.

“Y’know, it sounds like you could use those drinks, bud.” The other man picked up his tumbler, swirled it a few times, then downed it, slammed down the glass, and dropped a cred-chit into it. “I’ll go find out where those two marks went.”

Sacha grunted and took another foul sip of his own drink. “I might not have reason to hurry, but you do.”

The man gave no answer except the creaking of his stool as he shoved off from the bar and threaded his way out onto the station concourse.

He was back within ten minutes, which told Sacha that this half-crazed Starshine drinker was only a go-between. The real client was on the station, probably sitting in one of the slightly nicer diners on the balcony deck above.

“You were right. There’s supposed to be two green marks there.” The man tossed the reader onto the bar once more. This time, it slid across and bumped into Sacha’s glass, sloshing foul pseudo-whiskey onto its screen. Sure enough, the symbol for payment had been annotated with two new green streaks.

“I’ve got a good memory for that artist’s style.” Sacha picked up his drink as he surveyed the image to make sure nothing else had changed. “I’ve got an original on my ship. Stop by next shift if you’d like to see it.”

“Hey, thanks bud.” The other man grabbed his slate back and shoved it into a pocket. “Be there around four-H.”

Details
  • You are here:  
  • Home
  • Tales from the Inbox