Shepherd placed her hand over Jaisen’s. He released his grip on the bottle. “Easy now, our interview isn’t over yet; I can’t have you getting shlocked. Besides, this spirit should be sipped with respect, savored. This isn’t your outer territory’s moonshine, brewed with table scraps and distilled with the waste heat from a badly tuned APU exhaust.”
Jaisen glared at her with red bleary eyes for a few moments before relenting. “We’ve covered Eden, Aldeberan, and Leshan.”
“Yes, yes, but I know all about that stuff, it’s in the files. I want to know about stuff that’s not in the files,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She sipped daintily from the small glass she held. The contents were clear and very slightly tinted yellow. “I need to know about the jobs you weren’t ‘pinched’ for,” she finished.
‘That’s a long list,’ Jaisen thought. “Well, like weapons smuggling, drug running, contraband tech, that sort of thing?” Jaisen asked with a grim laugh.
“Exactly, and I need names, places, dates, all that stuff.”
“You want me to confess to crimes that carry the death penalty?” Jaisen asked, laughing a bit harder.
Shepherd laughed with him, adjusting her uniform. “I don’t need to trump up charges to execute you. I could just space you right now or put a plasma bolt through your head,” Shepherd winked. “Let’s start easy. How did you and Atticus Riordan meet?"
--A few years before the events of The Zarkazian Incident (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/100618/the-zarkazian-incident), about a year after Riordan comes into possession of The Passive Swindler--
Jaisen glanced left, then right, down the deserted gangway. Satisfied, he clamped the passcode phreaker over the keypad. Numbers streamed across the display. The unit beeped softly, and the outer airlock door hissed open. ‘180 sections, in and out, baby!’ He cheered to himself. He stepped onto the beat-up old freighter and tried not to inhale the reek of stale air, gym socks, and hydrocarbons too deeply. He found the network terminal on the dextral sidewall of the airlock. The next order of business was to shut down the security system and delete the internal sensor logs for the past 24 hours. He shredded the files with military-level encryption, covering his tracks. The inner airlock hatch hissed open, admitting him into the cargo bay. Lit only by a few banks of lights, he followed the readout on his handheld scanner to the right container. He quietly down stacked containers until the indicated one was before him. 120 sections. He phreaked the keypad and opened the case. His client requested ten units, MK XVII something or others.
His gloved hands deftly plucked unit after unit and placed them in the satchel at his left hip. He placed the last unit in the satchel and resealed the container. Just as he was turning away, a voice called out.
“I don't remember submitting a work order," a gravelly voice said from behind and above him.
He tensed, ready to bolt when he heard a weapon being cocked, a slug-thrower. He froze. "Shize!" Jaisen hissed, raising his hands over his head. He gingerly turned around to face his captor. He gauged the man standing shirtless on the gangway overlooking the cargo deck, pistol held lazily in one hand, a liquor bottle in the other. "I don't want any trouble," Jaisen began.
“Well, you just bought yourself a heaping helping of it,” the man responded, swigging from the bottle. “Those units are worth about 1000 credits each, maybe more on the black market,” the man with the gun continued as he started down the steep corrugated steel stairs. Jaisen backed away, hands still high.
“How dare you,” the man began drunkenly, “come onto my ship… and steal from me!”
“Sir, I just…,” Jaisen stammered.
“I assume you disabled my security system, deleted sensor recordings for the last twelve hours? Hmm? Probably the station logs for the docking section as well?”
“Uh, last twenty-four actually," Jaisen responded.
“Great! No evidence you were ever here then. So, what should I do with a thief that broke into my home to steal from my clients, endangering my livelihood? Bullet to the face?" he asked, raising the slug thrower. "Or should I tie you up and space you once I leave the system? Maybe call the Gendarme? I bet you get ten years for stealing restricted tech."
Jaisen swallowed hard. “You could also forget you ever saw me. You’re insured, right? Let me leave, then call the cops and file a report. Insurance will cover the loss!"
The man appeared to consider this course of action for a moment. “That covers my client’s loss… What about mine?”
“There are two dozen units, in that case, I'm only taking ten. No one will be able to determine how many I actually took," Jaisen proposed.
“Is the security system still down?”
“It’ll be down until you reset it.”
The man stared at him with bleary eyes, face unreadable. Sections passed. The man dropped the gun to his side.
“Get the frell off my ship before I change my mind,” the man growled.
Jaisen cautiously walked backward until he was inside the airlock. Only when the inner door closed did he let out the breath he was holding, and the shakes started.
Unbelievably, just a few weeks later, in a different system, Jaisen spotted the same man sitting at a bar. A pack filled with various spare parts occupied the stool to the man's left. ‘How fortuitous, I happen to need a pilot with questionable morals,’ Jaisen thought. Jaisen nonchalantly dropped into a stool a few seats to the man's right. He motioned to the barkeep, an ancient short stocky man of obvious heavy gravity lineage. "Dorian ale, room temp." Jaisen glanced over at the man. He's swirling amber fluid in a short dirty glass. The unlabeled bottle next to him was ¾ full. "Hey," Jaisen called out. "How's tricks?"
The man looked over, and his eyes widened momentarily in shock before narrowing with suspicion and, finally, recognition. “Well, well, planning to rob me again?” he asked.
Jaisen moved to the stool next to him. "I hacked your manifest. You're not transporting anything that interests me."
“Then why are we jaw-jackin, friend?” The man asked, downing the contents of his glass.
“Because I need transportation, pal.”
“Where to?” the man asked, pouring another few fingers from the bottle into his glass. “Off the books, I assume?”
Jaisen hesitated as two uniformed police officers stopped momentarily outside the bar's entrance, checking a hand scanner and watching the throng of passers-by. "Anywhere but here," Jaisen replied nervously, "and I have cargo."
The man sipped his drink. “What’s the cargo?” he asked, voice lowered.
“Does it matter?” Jaisen hissed.
The man looked at him hard for a few sections. "Guess not. 2500 credits. Upfront," The man drained his glass again as Jaisen sputtered.
“That's ridiculous..."
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The man capped the bottle and stuffed it into his pack. Standing, he said, “Take it or leave it. Berth 33, 2 hours.”
Jaisen held out his hand with a sigh, "I'll be there. Jaisen Folyn."
The man shook his hand firmly. “Atticus Riordan, Captain of the Passive Swindler. Don’t be late.”
Jaisen met him at the predetermined time. They teamed up and quickly loaded the 6 cargo containers from the rented gravsled and secured them in the hold amongst the other freight.
“I can’t believe you don’t have a shielded smuggling compartment!” Jaisen exclaimed while following Riordan up the ladder to the command deck. "If we get boarded and scanned, we're frelled!"
Riordan stopped, looking pointedly at Jaisen. “I’m not a smuggler, so I never get boarded. It’s not a good business model.” He hoisted himself onto the command deck with ease. Jaisen watched, slightly impressed, as the man flitted from terminal to terminal, entering commands, flipping switches, and tweaking knobs. Whines and hums began to fill the ship. “Hey, what color are the readouts over there,” he asked, pointing.
Jaisen checked the readouts. “Uh, all yellow… is that life support?”
“Yup,” Riordan replied, changing some settings on the navigation console.
“Shouldn’t they be green? he asked, nervously, tapping the display.
“Ideally,” Riordan replied, settling into the overstuffed chair in the middle of the command deck. Control consoles had been hastily installed by a less than professional hand on either side and in front. At a glance, Jaisen thought it looked like most of the major controls for the entire ship had been duplicated and routed to these consoles. “The CO2 filters are overdue for a change, I’m down two oxygen generators, and half the circulation fans need cleaning. Yellow is the best we’re gonna get for now.”
Jaisen scanned what he thought might be the navigation console, “Where are we going?”
“Appalachia,” Riordan pulled his restraint webbing around his chest and settled his headset into place. “Then Galorndan.”
“Galorndan’s good,” he said, agreeably.
“Yup, Galorndan has decent black market from what I hear. What am I transporting, anyway?”
Jaisen smiled wryly in response as he sat in the engineer’s chair and strapped himself in for launch. Riordan made final arrangements with Mechavilia flight control. The Passive Swindler lifted off from the surface of the lush green planet and arced into the afternoon sky, cutting between the dual suns as she shrugged off the hold of gravity.
--Back to the current timeline--
Shepherd’s stylus hovered over the console screen. “What was the cargo? You never mentioned that.”
Jaisen sighed, "Half-functional plasma weapons, some blast pistols, scanners, holocons, spoofers, plinkers, phreakers, and about 3000 ampules of Morph-A."
“So, what changed Riordan’s mind about smuggling?”
“Well, as soon as I sold my haul, I picked up another job and needed a pilot and second set of hands. We eventually became contractors specializing in fast, discreet delivery, theft, and insurance fraud. If you needed money and had something of value that we could steal, we'd steal it, and you'd get the insurance payout. Minus a small commission, of course. Sometimes we'd get to keep the stock, other times we sold it back to the original owner at a discount. The rest is history."
“Until the Zarkazian, when you graduated to piracy and murder,” Shepherd states with a superior smirk.
“Roger Syddel was a slaver, and what happened was mostly an accident! It certainly wasn’t piracy,” He fell silent for a moment. “And not all killing is murder.” He poured a few more ounces of the single malt into his glass.
"You know that turned into a Q-Net Urban Legend? A conspiracy theory, A ghost ship story." Looking thoughtful, she asked, “Did Riordan contact you when he got to Vesta station or before?”
“I believe when he was already on the station. We met up, had dinner, talked about old times, then he went back to his ship. I went back to my quarters with my wife.”
“Why did you remove the tracking device from his ship?” she asked, eyes going steely.
A bead of sweat dripped down the side of Jaisen’s face. “Professional courtesy, I guess. I don’t know what he’s involved in, I just know it wasn’t supposed to be there, so upon his request, I removed it.”
“You did more than that. I'd hazard to say you went above and beyond, striving for a hefty tip and a five-star rating. You placed the tracker on a different ship. Did it ever occur to you that it might have been there for a reason!?" Shepherd asked, her voice as sharp as her eyes.
Jaisen didn’t respond.
“We very well may have prevented the attack that killed your wife. If we hadn’t been chasing a banking executive on a jaunt with his latest mistress. You’re literally an accomplice to your own wife’s murder.”
Jaisen’s composure broke slightly. He stifled a sob.
Shepherd softened her tone. “We believe he has a weapon, a very powerful one, that he plans to use to kill a lot of innocent people. Do you want that to happen?”
“No,” Jaisen whispered.
“Then help me,” Shepherd plead, sliding a tablet across the table to him. “I need locations, dates. Any place you and Riordan ever visited.”
She waited patiently while Jaisen tapped out locations on the tablet. She scanned over the list when he was done. “Does he have the case? You can’t miss it. It’s very distinctive.”
"What case?" Jaisen asked.
Consternation swept across Captain Shepard's face. "The shielded case he stole from the freighter that he attacked near Besitera. Yeah, I know what the official record says. I had undercover agents escorting that container. When he attacked, they transmitted a general distress call, but before we could respond the Passive Swindler, and the case, were gone. My people died trying to protect that container."
Jaisen stared at her impassively. "Would you like me to make stuff up?"
"Don't make this a battle of wills. I'm going to get the answers I seek, one way or another. Cooperate, and you can enjoy the luxury of feeling guilty for betraying a friend. Resist and you can suffer until you're trying to buy the mercy of a quick death with the info I seek. Either way, I'm going to win. I always do."
Jaisen shuddered at the memory of the chair. He didn't let his mind explore any other directions. He needed to stay in the now. He didn't believe his friend attacked Vesta Station. He’d known Atticus long enough to know he viewed himself as the hero, and heroes didn't do things like that. Jaisen quickly reviewed the facts of his situation.
He was kidnapped from the station in the dead of night. He ended up on an FRS vessel. It was safe to assume he was grabbed by the fleet, tortured for hours without being informed of the charges against him or having access to legal counsel, all of which were supposed to be highly illegal. With the destruction of Vesta Station minutes after his abduction, it was unlikely anyone knew he was still alive.
Did the military destroy the station to cover his abduction, or frame Atticus? Possibly both? Why would Atticus attack the station and then stick around to evacuate survivors? The fleet knew he had the case. They knew he came to the station and asked him for help. They didn't want the public to know anything about the case. Whatever it held must be very important to have gone through so much trouble. They must be lying about Atticus. What else are they lying about? Could Glori still be alive? His mind reeled with the possibilities. Jaisen straightened in his seat.
“I invoke my right to counsel under the Fourth Clause of the Third Edition of the Greater Galactic Cluster Articles of Federation."
Captain Shepard’s face tensed. She clicked the intercom button twice. Two enlisted guards entered the room. Their black uniforms, like those of the rest of the crew, indicated the ship he was on had a combat role rather than a support role.
"You don't have any rights, Mr. Folyn. You died two days ago on Vesta Station with your wife," She stood. "Take the prisoner to the interrogation room and put on a pot of kaffee, it's going to be a long night."