Baz and Cas spend a few hours hanging out and getting to know one another. A few beers and the anxiety of having his secrets exposed slowly boiled away, allowing the pair enough space for a disposable friendship.

Casmir had been struggling for a long time. Upheaval was part of life in Foundry's underworld, but this had been a difficult one. The Families had ruled for a long time, but they were individual city-states, prone to rising and falling in bitter little wars within the confines of the archologies. How own was taking a beating and it was getting to the point where Casmir was about ready to throw in and get off world. There was a moment, however briefly, that Baz considered offering him a ride on the Exile, but his gut simply didn't trust the guy to quite that depth. There were simply too many crusty layers of old thuggishness piled up there. Casmir was coin motivated, and that was something he simply couldn't put his faith in.

When the two parted ways, it was jovial enough, leaving Baz free to wander even deeper into the complex to find the maglev stations that provided personnel access to facilities planet wide. He eventually found himself on a ruddy industrial personnel transport making the journey towards Droshad in exchange for another pittance in corpo script and allowing himself a few hours of shut-eye during the trip in the near vacant car.

Kessler meanwhile quietly focused his attention on Baz's destination, gently prodding around the edges and looking for the cracks in the data security. Such little weaknesses were inevitable in any system, but required care to explore. What could look promising could just as easily be an intentional honeytrap laid by a defensive cyberwarfare tech or a suitably trained AI.

In Droshad station, Kessler found a mixture of both. The surface industrial data structure was pretty much what he had expected. Macrotech's core network, the stuff that moved heaven and earth, was well warded by one of the planet's governor systems. It was big and mean and powerful, but it also had a lot to deal with planet wide. Kessler could exploit that, should it be necessary, but it would have to be a quick job before the enormity of that mind came crashing down on him and drowned him with caustic malware.

Secondary systems local to Droshad, however, were quite vulnerable and also extensively exploited as far as he could tell. These included personnel management software, low level security access, external doors, and environmental monitoring software. With even cursory exploration, he could see forks wearing the hollowed out shells of other forks, wearing them like macabre masks in the service of whoever created them. The quality of these fakes, however, was questionable and they lagged heavily even when presented with even token garbage data.

Curious as to where this was all leading, he made his approach quietly on a few of these false-faced systems, gently tracing their input and output pathways until he was confident he could imitate them in the short term. Then, like a spider pouncing on a fly, he made his move, strangling their output and boxing in their struggling software with his own, predicting their every action and cutting them off before they could even conceptualize an escape. It was a short and digitally bloody affair, and afterwards his own fork crawled in behind the fake creating a nested doll of deceit, but this time in his favour.

With the hollowed out mind of a few fakes under his control, Kessler could trace their output back to the source, a hab complex on the Eastern side of Droshad Station owned by one Eleanor Wild.

Eleanor Wild, near as he could tell, was some sort of mid-level administrator boss in the Yavari crime family, or so public security logs suggested. She wasn't a fighter, or a figurehead. If a crime family was an organism, she was the mouth, shovelling in profit from off world sources and masticating it for other family ventures.

She was also wealthy enough to have her own AI running around managing her business given the patterns he was seeing in her network access, but he couldn't tell if it had been the one to set up the fakes. They were certainly reporting there, but he could imagine the family farming that kind of work out to a specialist then turning over the keys to a local controller. Either way, he decided to give the system a wide berth and just study it from afar.

It was then that his monitoring fork tapped him on the digital shoulder, turning his attention back to his captain.

===================================

Yawning and stretching out his back on the uncomfortable bench, Baz blinked and glanced out the window at the ruddy landscape slipping past. It was a toxic wasteland of slate grey kills and pools of sulphurous liquids broken only by the occasional plume of geothermal activity.

The inside of the car was scarcely more hospitable. Built to industrial standards, it was all metal and hardened plastic spattered with countless layers of graffiti by generations of workers long past. Now it was nearly vacant, with only a half dozen other workers lounging sleepily like Baz was or talking in their little cliques around the train.

"Morning, Boss. How are you feeling?" Kessler whispered in his ear.

"Crooked." Baz chuckled, wishing he had grabbed a phamacase on the way off the Exile. "I'll survive. How are we looking?"

"I've got our mark. A woman named Eleanor Wilds. Seems connected."

"Extortion again?" He asked, stifling another yawn.

"Not this time. She has an AI running around. I didn't want to poke the bear unnecessarily."

Nodding, Baz considered their options. "What about honesty? We go ahead and book a meeting as a potential hire and go from there?"

"I think I could make that happen."

Just then the overhead announcer called out Droshad Station as the trains next stop through grainy speakers. The workers, few though they were, began to gather their things and shake the sleepier of their members awake.

"Set it up. Do I have a walk through security?"

"Yep. Shouldn't be a problem."

"Thanks, bud." Baz nodded, pulling himself to his feet.

===================

Making sure he was last off the train, Baz watched as the crewmen filed across the station and towards a group of security officers dressed in off-white riot gear that had clearly seen some wear.

The officers were perfunctory in their work, barely looking at the labourers as they filed through the barricaded checkpoint and only really aiming any measure of scrutiny in Baz's direction. One particularly brutish one placed up a gloved hand to stop him, a sergeant by his stripes.

"Sir, you've been randomly chosen for enhanced scrutiny." The man intoned through a visored EV helm, his voice flattened over the external speaker. "What is the purpose of your visit to Droshad Station?"

"Oh, I have a meeting."

"With who?"

"Ms. Eleanor Wild."

Baz watched carefully the man's reaction to the name and saw him stiffen. The sergeant glanced worriedly towards his fellow officer leaning against the barricade beside him, then back at Baz before nodding. Clearly Wild had her claws into local security…

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Carry on." The sergeant muttered, clearly wishing to cut short this round of enhanced scrutiny.

"Thank you, gentlemen." He nodded, stepping through.

===================================

Whereas Hexmark had space to stretch, in Droshad Station, it was at a premium. By the time he had emerged from the station, the little working crew had scattered and disappeared down the cross linked hallways in one direction or another, leaving him mostly alone. The concourse was minute, offering a noodle restaurant, a small outfitters for whatever gear a worker might find themselves short off at the start of a shift, and a security office.

Grabbing a box of synth noodles slathered in peanut sauce in exchange for a few pieces of Macrotech scrip, he followed Kessler's prompts through the mass of pipes, passages, and gantries that made up the transit station until he finally reached the habitation complex on the far side and immediately recognized that the situation was… unusual.

First and foremost was the distinct lack of people around. Hab complexes were, by the nature of modern life, confining. They stacked as many workers as they could in as small a space as possible, and that meant that people liked to spill over into surrounding spaces wherever they could. He had expected to find people milling about on staircases playing cards and kids running between the legs of workers moving on or off shift, but he found none of that. Only a quiet central space manned by a gaggle of rough looking types milling around at makeshift barricades at one side. He could see the bright metal where bullets had ricocheted recently, but which haven't yet been painted over by maintenance.

"Well this looks promising… Any mention of an attack?" He muttered sarcastically, watching from a side passage as he shovelled the last remnants of his meal into his mouth before discarding the case into a nearby receptacle.

"None that I know of."

"Yeah… Well these guys seem pretty antsy. How's my cover?"

"Should be pretty solid. Gave them everything but our actual landing coordinates and a fake name. You are now officially 'Wilmund Skunt' - a fellow BW exile from the aftermath looking for cargo work. They could probably run us down, but I think it would take a few days to work around my concealment work to actually find me."

Baz nodded. He didn't feel like a Skunt, but fuck it. "If anything bad happens, just… get orbital. I don't want you risking yourself."

Kessler decided not to comment on that. "Comms will be restricted in there, but I've rigged the fork in your earpiece with some of my heaviest stuff. Give the order and it'll try to brick everything it can touch and I'll hopefully see the disruption and bring down my own version of hell."

Baz nodded. "Let's go meet Ms. Wild."

Stepping out from behind his cover, he began the slow trek across the square towards the goons. Glancing around, it felt like he was scurrying across the dusty road between some Wild West bandits and the cops who had cornered them in a saloon. He could feel eyes other then theirs upon him. When it was clear that they were the destination, the goons bridled, standing up straight and tense, but Baz kept his hands in clear sight.

"Hey there, friends. My name is Skunt. I have a booking to meet with Ms. Wild."

"I don't know you, old man." Muttered a female thug with a scarred lip. Baz could still see the stitch sites where it was recently patched by some medtech. "And I doubt-" The girl paused, mid sneer to put her fingers to her ear before nodding reluctantly. Instead of finishing her thought, she glanced at her companions. "Search him."

The hands that patted him down were not exactly professional, but they were numerous. Both his datapad and his pistol turned up, but neither was hidden nor the favoured weapon of some would be assassin. The girl took the Armtech and looked it over, not recognizing the make.

"Blue Worlds." Baz muttered, nodding towards the weapon. "Can't expect a guy to walk around unarmed at a time like this, right?" Only the datapad was handed back. The grizzled woman grunted and the guards parted, pushing him onto the gantry beyond their makeshift barricade while she continued to explore the weapon's smooth action.

It was easy to see where he was going. A few doors down along the gangway outside the domiciles was a second knot of more professional looking killers, these ones bearing the unmistakable misshapenness of heavy cyber modification and Old Terra-style suits.

One pulled open the door and ushered him inside.

"Ms. Wild will see you upstairs. Follow me." He intoned flatly, from what was probably no longer a human voice box, but still looked the part. Glancing inside, Baz had expected to see something out of an old gangster holo - a richly draped interior with faux wood and tastefully ostentatious pieces of art on the walls. What remained may have once been that, only fed through a blender. Furniture lay smashed and walls cratered by what must have been some sort of explosive. A half dozen or so techs worked at patching up the damage, draped in white hazmat gear. The view was suddenly occluded by the hulking mass of his escort moving through the door, then turning for the stairs just to the entrances left.

"Uh… What happened? Did I just walk into a warzone?"

The goon grunted without turning. "We had some trouble with the local labour. It's all settled now. Nothin' to concern yourself with." That last sentence played off as both assurance and threat.

"Riiight." Baz nodded, following along dutifully as he was led through the ruin towards the stairs.

===================================================

Baz hadn't expected to be led directly to Wild's bedroom, but he suspected that was probably the point. She wanted to impress upon him that she was tough, tough enough that a little incident like what had happened downstairs hadn't shaken her faculties or her will.

Unlike downstairs, her room had clearly endured the battle and was the lap of luxury save for the medical equipment. She herself lay beneath a luxurious patterned bedspread while an IV snaked into one arm while nearby a monitor set read through every vital metric the body was capable of producing. She had taken a beating - there were bags under her eyes and she had lost a chunk of scalp now patched with bloody bandages, but none of that distracted from the handsome middle aged woman she was. Her eyes, flinty and cold, flashed onward with bemusement at his sudden discomfort.

Baz was starting to expect that she wasn't just some ordinary mid-level financial asset. A gentle but firm hand from his escort pushed him into the room, thrusting him center stage.

"Hello and welcome to Foundry, Mr. Skunt," She smiled woodenly, looking him up and down.

"Ms. Wild. Thank you for being willing to see me in your… current condition.". He tried to add more backbone than he, or fictitious Skunt, truly possessed.

Eleanor smirked. "I can assure you, Mr. Skunt, that my condition is temporary. It's amazing what the latest procedures and cosmo can do these days."

"I, uh… Hope it works out well for you."

She nodded, her eyes judging. "I understand that you have a ship and would like to offer your services?"

"That's right." Baz intoned, giving Skunt a bit more backbone and pride on that front. "I've got contacts throughout the Blue Worlds. Can't do business there legit anymore, but I know my way around the transit lanes. I can move whatever cargo you want in that direction."

"Oh? How's that?"

"Used to be a customs inspector on the Belargo-Mephet run. I know every dump location, relay site, and untouchable along the way. I can move any wares you want with a minimum of potential trouble." The corridor in BW space was notorious for that kind of thing, and doubly so during the civil war. Baz really was pulling the story from his ass, but it probably sounded legit to an outsider.

"And which side were you on in the war, Mr. Skunt?"

"Honestly, I never took issue with either side, Miss Wild. I'm just a man trying to make a living on the edge of it all. I earn nothing by dying for anyone else's cause but my own."

"And there's the crux of my concern, Mr. Skunt. How can I trust you with valuable cargo when I don't know a thing about you? You don't even come with any introductions."

Skunt scowled and shrugged. "Then Miss Wild, you don't. I'm not asking to make myself rich hauling narco, weapons, or the like. I just want a good dishonest living to get myself started. Give me… supply runs and the like. Enough to get me by until you take the proper measure of me."

Eleanor gave him another analytical lookover before nodding. "You'll stay for dinner then? I have a few more questions and a few introductions to make."

Baz nodded with a grin. "Of course, Miss Wild! I would be most happy to join you for such."

"Good. Baker, find him a comfortable room for his stay."

The human brick at his side, evidently Baker, grunted and settled a thick hand on his shoulder, denoting the end of their brief interview. Leading him out the door, he was taken to a room half a dozen doors down the hallway which opened with a hiss.

"Stay here till you are called upon." Baker growled in a tone either intended to intimidate or just innately tuned to that frequency of violence. Baz nodded and hopped inside, turning back to watch the door hiss shut and lock behind him.

"Well, shit." he muttered, still maintaining Skunt's outworld drawl.