The port authority, as it turned out, was incredibly petty. I was kept in a holding pattern for forty minutes, while Lilly insisted I let her inform them that I was with the legion and was going to land, I insisted we play along.
They were more of a pain than the black boats; at least they didn’t increase my blood pressure.
We gave them a fake designation; it wasn’t like they could read my ship's serial number, considering it was on the dashboard right next to me.
At first, it was because they needed to register me for a long visit, then it was because I wasn’t a Luna-built ship, so they needed to find a landing pad, and then it was me being handed up the chain of command…
Five people up the chain of command, I started to lose my patience.
None of them made a single decision.
It was all, “A thousand forgiveness” and “I dare not make a decision without divine oversight.”
The only thing that changed was that each step up the chain resulted in more mouthy, less kind people. They started with the former and sounded genuinely sorry for needing to pass me up the chain, and slowly but surely, they got ruder and ruder. I got everything from my inferior craft, which could not fit on the x or y landing spot, to being called a spy for the dogs because my ship's nickname was “a dog's name.”
I got all the way up to ten when I was told that this had been a great waste of time and rapidly gave me the information I needed to land, where I needed to pay, how I was registered and would receive a travel visa.
It took him all of twenty seconds.
I happily gave him six names for six people who gave me to him and let the lunatic deal with it on his own time.
I made my approach and got to the landing. It was a large ‘open air’ hangar, and I needed to burn a little fuel for vertical landing because it wasn’t a runway but a plate, but soon enough, I landed and got pulled in and along a track before entering a pressurized area into a large underground hangar lovingly and thoughtfully named ‘Bigitokōnō prefecture, voidrome 23,’ whatever that meant.
Very creative, I had to give whatever city drone that made that name a pat on the back. It really rolled off the tongue.
“Ok… Let's head off, I guess. I need to check in and get my visa, then I can slip off, get some of my change from a bank and get some stuff and then right to planning,” I told her getting out of the chair and stretching.
“Did you just jinx it?” Lilly asked.
“Yeah… MMh, probably,” I told her with a yawn, “but I don’t care, I’m just going to bring my guns and hide them in my coat and work from there.”
I headed down, got my stuff in order, scrounged around for my mercenary card, and headed out of the bay and locked up after syncing my timepiece and the Junkers clock so I didn’t get locked out.
The fall and rise of the bay was a nice return to normal, something I did so much I never needed to think about it.
Then I turned and took in the size of the voidrome. It was a well lit huge metal plate and concrete structure that would make a ship’s hangar blush. The curve of the semicircular arch towered overhead with exposed steel girders overhead. I was on ground level, next to the tracks that had brought my boat down, and I had to imagine that the ceiling was something like 150 feet high.
There were rows of boats parked side by side on platforms and tracks to pull ships out along the corridors and other corridors for walking, with little lights to warn pedestrians to get out of the way.
It was very industrial, considering all the metal that Luna wasn’t known for; if I had to guess, these were for asteroid mining.
It was the kind of large that freaked me out a little. I had grown used to cramped confines, with the only headspace being outside, but this towering place was the kind of place you could park a ship if it weren’t for the fact you couldn’t get one in here.
“You know… It isn’t often I park inside when I land planet side. Usually, there is just open air, but I guess they wanted to save on footprint,”
“You can’t exactly land through a force dome, and they can’t be easily expanded. Land must be at a premium without the empire guiding the servitors,” Lilly remarked.
I winced at her words.
“Yeh… Well, let’s find our way to the closest office and get the paperwork out of the way,” I told her, looking around for some clues as to where to walk and I found little arrows and started to stalk down the rows of newer sleeker boats that did not fill me with any envy at all.
I bet they had onboard electronics and cushy seats… and fuel-efficient engines… and had hull integrity.
Not envious at all.
“Hey, Lilly, are there any cameras in here?”
“There are, but they are relatively low quality, why?”
“Nothing in specific, I was just thinking it would be terrible if someone scratched the paint,” I lied to her.
“You were thinking about scuffing them, weren’t you? You shiter,” she said with a wry chuckle.
I clicked my tongue but shut up at how close she got it. I was thinking of finding the most expensive one and finding out if they were an asshole before keying it, but it was basically the same thing. Considering my talks with the port authority, I was getting major elitist vibes from the planet already, but I wanted to verify too.
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We walked in silence for damn close to five minutes when I felt a little unnerved. It was just too empty. Too quiet.
Voidrome’s were a busy place. Some sent a guide to show you the way to the offices, but even shy of that, there were always people coming and going at all times. There was no night in space, and even with the blockade, if you could call it that, I would expect flights delivering supplies or even a military presence to root out spies or saboteurs.
A port was like a border; you at least wanted to check the people coming and going, but there was nothing. I looked around, between the ships all square on the pads and saw no one between the ships. No ground crews, no pilots, no one moving cargo, nothing.
“Lilly, what time is it planet side?”
“It’s 4 pm planet side,” she helpfully told me.
That was not a good sign, not at all. Those were work hours for sure, so the lack of anyone was a major bad sign.
I hurried my footsteps, quickly getting to the end of the row and after recording the aisle, quickly making my way from sign to sign to the office of the port authority. I was surprised at the ease of breath, but I kept going. Whatever transforming did, it apparently helped clear my lungs of the terrible shit cigarettes had in them, so that was a plus, I guessed. It could have been the low gravity, but that just gave me more hop, not lessen the effort needed to run, so I didn’t think that was right.
There was a sign of violence before I even got there. Blast marks and the smell of smoke lingered as the metal gained a venire of some variety of light-coloured faux biowood. The holes in the wood were the thin circular holes of energy weapons; they were charred instead of pierced, and the smokey air thickened as I reached the scene of what looked like a bomb blast.
A crater stood where the office once stood, a collapsed building pinning whatever remained below the rubble. The shattered bodies of normal people, pilots, and ground crew had been flung in loose heaps from the blast.
I stopped and took it in before I took out one gun and asked, “Lilly, can you tell me the closest way out of here,” all ideas of getting out of this easily went out to pasture and were forgotten like a dream. I could feel my heartbeat quicken its pace as I made my way to the next corner. One hand cannon out, hammer pulled back, ready to fire on anyone that would fire on me.
“There’s only one exit; the right leads out, and the left is to utilities and more offices; cameras are out from here, so I can’t check, but audio says nothing around that corner,” she told me in a cool response, a reflection of my own.
“Thank you, Lilly,” I told her, focusing on the sound of the room, eerily silent, the sound of small pops the only noise beyond ambient. There were strangely no sirens. There were no alarms for fire or to hearald the occurrence of the bomb blast.
I tucked up against the corner, took my hat off real quick and peeked the corner, then proceeded down the corridor, stopping at the next corner. I almost took it immediately, but my ears pricked, and I managed to halt relatively quietly on the giving material as I heard voices from around the bend.
They were hushed murmurs, muffled further by the corner and as I peeked out from the corner, from them facing away.
There were three of them, each facing away. They were relatively short, maybe 5”11’, nowhere as short as me, but I was a midget compared to most, and each of them was dressed uniformly. Black clothes with no defining marks, fully clothed to hide their features. Each had a black close pack on their backs and, by the looks of it, were armed. There were also the telltale signs of some armour, both on their backs and presumably their fronts, but only on their chest.
Much like me, they appeared to prefer a breastplate, though unlike me, they didn’t hide it for the bonus of getting people to shoot the armour instead of the head or extremities, not that I cared all that much because I was packing solid shot and they were presumably packing laser, blaster, or plasma.
They had the death squad meet’s terrorist look down pat, and I felt it was safe to say they were not a group of lunar guards. There was also no doubt that I would be able to walk on by and get shot down like an animal, so instead of making pleasantries, so I decided to pull out Lefty and try and get two at the same time.
I pulled back the hammer of Lefty, tried to line up both shots as well as I could, and aimed down both one after another.
One of the guards, turning to face me, said, “Fine, fine. You two stay here, I’m going to go take a pi- What the fuck,” and I pulled both triggers at once.
A whole bunch of things happened all at once.
Both of my guns fired at the same time, kicking in my hands as two hunks of metal, cased in hard plastic shells, spun out of their barrels, the air kicking off the casings and letting the smaller metal slugs spin out at my foes.
The one on the right, not taking his eyes off the corridor and not caring about his companion, took a bullet to the mid back and went limp like a stone, slowly drifting to the ground like a kite. The one on the left, more canny, turned, and I missed his center of mass as the bullet skimmed his ribs, and the middle one, shocked, but with signs of training, raised his gun to return fire.
In an attempt to preempt it, I started to hurl myself out of the way and into a roll and made to cock the hammers on my guns.
The one on the left turned and was more shocked than the one in the middle, who quickly levelled his gun and fired off a shot. A brilliant beam of light shot forth, covering the distance between us in an instant and slammed into my hip.
The burn was immediate, the quick burst of light carved through my clothes and into the skin beneath and hit the bone, transferring a scolding hot burn about an eight of an inch in diameter into my hip bone.
I bit back a scream and fucked up my landing a second later but managed to snap off a second shot that shot through the leg of the pisser, who screamed and lost control of himself and fell back slowly towards the ground, one leg in the air, and without a gun on me.
It was just in time for the second one to go to level the gun on my crouched form.
Panicking, I kicked off again to try and get to standing so I could change my center of gravity, only for my shoes to unlatch and my momentum to carry me up and off the floor, my right hip screaming in agony as I put the cooked joint to work.
My uneven pressure caused me to list towards the right in a slight spin that left doctor slow ass’s shot he snapped off to skim past my left leg so close I could feel the remanent heat bloom as the lance passed, cooking the top layer of my skin and burning a hole through my coat twice and pants beneath.
I kicked out my left leg in pain while I grit my teeth, and piss boy proved his namesake with a bloom of wetness in his pants, his shrill shout accompanied by three more quick shots that went wide, slamming into wood two feet to my right.
My foot came close enough to the metal wall for my shoe to latch onto it and snap with surety to it. Mr. Medium Rare on the left got ready to take another shot, and with a moment of rapid comprehension, I snapped my other foot out for two points of contact and fired off two hasty shots, one skimmed his armour, pining uselessly into the ground and the other flying off into the foe wood of the wall.
He let off a shot, and it burned into the wood ceiling above me.
The former black-clad man known as Professor Pisser snapped off another panicked shot without looking before dropping his gun to clutch his leg. It didn’t even come close, so I kicked off towards the ground, rolling before letting my feet snap and the spin right me.
The man on the left, flinching from the expectation of being shot, didn’t get a chance when I snapped off two shots, one that slammed into his leg and the second slammed into his chest plate, where it smashed through like tissue paper.
He managed to flinch from the hits, and with the flinch came a pull of the trigger. A lance of light appeared from the muzzle of the gun and slammed into my chest, burning through my coat before slamming solidly into my chest plate.
It got very hot… but it didn’t penetrate.
I started deeply breathing, panting while pissant cried.
He decided to speak up. I didn’t let him say shit, I was already utterly fucking done with this utter fucking lunacy. He opened his mouth, and I snapped off the rest of the shots right into him. I did not negotiate with terrorists; I wouldn’t even hear them out.