Four Earth standard months earlier:
She’d just walked into her quarters after a meeting with the president of the Salvager’s guild, her long, lithe body trembling with frustration. She’d barely enough time to peel the lightweight strathi headwrap from her smooth hairless scalp when the door chime sounded.
Boudya was extremely tempted to just ignore it and continue with her plans to slip into her soaking tub to wash the slime of politics off of her azure skin. She always felt this way after meeting with President Temberan about guild business. He was an ethical man, but politics just made her feel filthy. She could be covered from head to toe in hydraulic fluid and micro-lubricant, and she’d still feel cleaner than dealing with a politician.
The door chimed again.
“One moment,” she called out, then sighed, sent a prayer to the Stars that it wouldn’t be someone needing her for some errand, and walked over to the door to open it, “yes?”
A courier stood outside the door “Miss Boudya Mend’nasa?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
He handed her a thumbprint scanner, “I have a secured package for you. Please confirm delivery”
When she reached to place her thumb on the scanner, she couldn’t help but notice him eye her up and down and smile. She might have just come back from a business meeting, but she was still benastian; So her outfit showed enough of her azure skin to be disqualified as appropriate in most Terran run businesses. Licking her lips, she wondered if maybe she could get her mind off the slime of politics another way. It was a rare man that would turn down a chance if one presented itself. The Commonwealth knew that, so couriers like this only delivered to Benastians if they were unattached.
“Are you sure you don’t require a more thorough identity scan before handing over the package?” she asked, making sure to load her voice with as much innuendo as she could, reaching her long blue fingers around the scanning device to delicately caress the back of his hand, letting one gracefully curved hip thrust slightly out towards him. “You could come inside…”
The courier - a man in his late 30s who looked to do his best at keeping in shape - swallowed hard, and for a moment looked like he was going to take her up on the invitation, but then shook his head. “The instructions for this delivery came with specific instructions Ma’am.” he explained. “And a sizable bonus if I report back to the office with confirmation in a short amount of time. If my daughter didn’t need that money for university, I’d love to inspect your credentials in detail Ma’am.” He tilted his hat in a rather anachronistic fashion. “Maybe another time?”
She couldn’t help herself, she pouted. Turned down for -money- of all things, she thought to herself, can this day get any worse?
And just like that, she’d tempted fate, and fate answered. When the courier handed her the small hardened plastic case, she saw the name on the return label and almost dropped it. “Thomas Aacen,” she gasped, the name bringing back many memories, “What in the Void’s great emptiness are you contacting me now for?”
Half a kilokrat later, she was seated on her lounge, long, blue skinned lithe form now loosely draped in sheer drape, and holding a cold drink, she slipped the single data chip that had been in the package into the reader in the side table. Instantly Thomas’ image sprang up from the holographic projector on the other side of the room. “Hello beautiful.” he said, smiling at her, “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I know you won’t believe this, but I’ve been thinking about you a lot, and wanting to get in touch, but just not finding the right moment, or fearing that I'd just trip over myself in not knowing the right words to say after all these years.”
Boudya snorted, “you could have always started with ‘You were right Boudya, I should never have trusted him’”
“What it all comes down to in the end is that you told me so. Barstol was an unscrupulous ass that got 10 people killed, and tried to pin it on me. The only reason he didn’t get away with it was because I listened to you just enough to cover my ass and document everything as it happened on that contract. That documentation was the only reason I was able to exonerate myself. I…tried to reach out to you after the hearings were over, but any contact information I’d had for you just came back as a dead end. I figured you’d washed your hands of me, and left you alone, hoping maybe in a few years you’d be more open to reconnecting.
“But I got wrapped up in trying to help my sister, and figuring out a way to make a living after deciding to leave the guild completely. I just couldn’t go back out there on a job after what happened. I needed time.”
“Unfortunately, I got pulled back in against my will, Boudya, and by that same son of a bitch that made me leave in the first place. He’s found some manufactured dirt on my sister! He’s going after my sister Boudya! Framing her for embezzlement! If he sends that ‘evidence’ to her boss or the authorities…”
“I desperately need your help, I don’t have anyone else I can trust with this.” The image of Thomas side and covered his eyes, “I have no right to ask you this, and you owe me no favors, but I’m begging you to go get my sister and get her somewhere safe. I don’t trust Barstol not to release that file even if I do everything he wants me to. Hell, I don’t even expect to come back from this contract. I’m fairly sure he intends to leave me stranded out there in the black. Just get my sister safe, please!”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I’m setting a few things up to cover my ass, just like last time. And setting it up so it’ll go out even if he does fuck me over. A copy of my insurance plan is set to be sent to you, I hope you don’t mind. If by some chance I manage to get out of this alive, I will owe you big, beautiful. I’ll bow down, kiss your feet and beg for forgiveness. Whatever you want. Just get Jesse safe.”
The recording ended, and was followed by a file that contained information regarding his sister’s whereabouts, details on the blackmail Barstol said he had on her, as well as a current holoimage and a reminder of a code phrase that would tell the woman she was sent by him.
She’d have been lying if she said she wasn’t tempted to just throw that chip in the recycler and forget she’d received it, but Thomas has been a good friend and lover once. Good enough that she’d considered inviting him into her Ansari, her family unit, making him the equivalent to what an Earther would call a spouse. But then he’d accepted that Void damned contract with Barstol, even though she had advised him Barstol set off every single warning bell she had! He refused to listen, the alien ship Barstol was set to retrieve was unlike any seen before. He wanted to be one of the first engineers to get a look at it.
How Barstol had been contracted to salvage the ship was beyond her. He had questionable marks on his record even then. Accidents in previous contracts where the data didn’t quite line up, but there wasn’t any reason to refute it. She was, like Thomas, low in the ranks of the guild at the time, and couldn’t order any further observation of his logs. She was only glad Thomas had been smart enough to listen to her enough to cover his ass while on that job.
But she couldn’t turn her back on him, regardless of hurt feelings. His sister didn’t deserve this, for one. She was also an officer in the guild now, and Barstol was supposed to be blacklisted from ever running a salvaging operation again. If he was running a crew, he needed to be dealt with. These two things were unquestionable in the matter.
But she also did want to see him again; Seeing his face again after all this time brought back old unresolved feelings. “Alright Thomas, I’ll get your sister clear.” she said out loud, “not just safe, but clear. And you better survive whatever that bastard has in store, cause when I see you again…you’re going to pay for running away and not facing the music before this!”
She smiled evilly, thinking of all the ways she was going to make him pay for the trouble he caused her.
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Aboard the M.S. Gladstone, somewhere in uncharted space.
Barstol felt like absolute shit. He’d been running a fever for days now, and Doc Spenser couldn’t say what was causing it. Tests for any type of known viral or bacterial infection came back negative. Best he could say was there was some weird genetic anomaly that looked something like cancer, but it wasn’t showing up on any of those tests either.
“Damn the Void” we swore raspily, then coughed long and hard, bringing up a strange black mucous, “Finally deal with that self righteous bastard, and some alien cancer is gonna kill me? Fuck!”
He looked down at his hands, which were sweating a strange viscous material that clung to him like spider webs. It stuck to him and pulled against his skin every time he moved, raising strange welts whenever it did. The Doc had become so worried about what was going he’d ordered Barstol to quarantine in his quarters. He even went so far as to order the crew to seal the door against his access after he first insisted on going out and checking on the tether status.
“Captain, sir” the helmsman’s voice came over his comms panel, “you have a secure transmission.”
Barstol sneered and barked “Well, what are you waiting for, traitorous bastard! Put it through!”
The face of his employer - immaculately kept, moisturized with some thousand-credits-a-decilitre cream made from some plant only grown off on the edge of known space, harvested by young virgins by the light of the new moon or some shit like that, hair primped and coiffed like a girl ready for their damned prom - popped up on his screen. “Barstol!” He snapped, “I want an update on….”
He cut off, and peered through the screen at him, “What the hell is wrong with you Barstol, you look like Benastian cheese that’s gone too moldy! You haven’t gone snooping around in that ship have you! You know your contract says you give up 90% of your payout if one of your crew so much as sets a toe inside that ship!”
“I know damned well what the fucking contract says!” Barstol snapped, “And I gave my crew strict instructions on that point, even told them I’d space any fucking one of them I caught insubordinating on the order! But a few days ago my XO caught one of the grunts coming back from an EVA. Nobody EVA’s in hyperspace unless they’re up to something!”
“And?”
“And I spaced the damned sonofabitch! I don’t make empty threats!” Barstol let out another series of long wracking coughs, “I don’t abide by my crew goin’ against orders!”
“That really doesn’t alter the fact that one of your men went aboard that ship! And now look at you! You’ve caught some alien contagion, haven’t you?”, the pompous bastard slammed a fist down on his desk. “There was to be no looting of artifacts, no spoiling of secrets. You were promised a hefty sum to bring that wreck back to me unspoiled, which is the only reason I hired you instead of that nosy Salvager’s Guild. They wouldn’t allow an unknown wreck like that coming anywhere near a settled system without a full quarantine and inspection. That’s how artifacts and secrets slip out!”
Barstol leaned forward in his chair, feeling the long tendrils of the not-sweat pulling against his skin and scalp from where they seemed to have adhered to the seat fabric behind him. “There will be no lost artifacts, and no loose tongues!” he growled. “The crap that bastard brought back with him was taken back across the tethers and sealed inside an airlock. My XO did it himself! And I watched him via helmet-cam! And that dim-witted bastard took everything he saw into the void of hyperspace! You’re giving me the full amount or I’ll cut the tethers and leave this damned wreck drifting in hyperspace!”
The man’s eyes almost seemed to go completely black for a moment before settling back to their distinctive ice blue. “Do not forget who you are talking to Barstol.” He warned with deceptive calmness. If he’d been in better health, Barstol would have understood that he was poking the metaphorical bear, “set that ship adrift, and you better hope whatever is ailing you finishes you off. Otherwise, there won’t be a single place in all the Milky Way where you won’t have to fear those I’ll send after you. Get that ship to me without any further infractions, and we will talk about if you should get more than half the agreed upon sum.”
The comm went dead.
“Well fuck.” he swore, leaning back into his chair again, feeling the thready tendrils of his not-sweat tearing away from the comms terminal. Was he imagining things, or were they thicker, more dense than they were before? This fever was just making him so damned tired. He hadn’t been this tired since the days before his hearing.
Blast that fucker Thomas Aacen, he wasn’t supposed to be that clever. The reports he’d gotten had said that while he was a good mechanic and engineer, he wasn’t that great and catching on to a rope-a-dope. He’d been supposed to take the fall for that “accident”, just like those others were supposed to die on that ship. They at least had the decency of doing what they were supposed to!
But Aacen, Aacen for some reason had logged enough information, paid enough attention to what was going on around him during the preliminary survey of the ship to have already put in reports that the work couldn’t begin until they could stabilize the core.
“How’d the fucker catch that the core was unstable anyway!”
The ship was never meant to be salvaged. It was meant to go up like a miniature nova, and those men were supposed to die. They all knew something Mr. Fancypants didn’t want to get out, but were too clueless to realize it. And Aacen? Aacen was just a convenient patsy to pin it on. Or so he thought.
He closed his eyes and slumped down in the chair, feeling sleep begin to overtake his will to stay awake. But I got the son of a bitch! He thought, By now he’s starting to mummify on that rock! Even if whatever this is kills me, at least I outlived your smug ass.