A Captains Job
Captain Astarte Maidens-daughter looked over the dossier the Contact had presented her while quietly sipping the warm cup of Uq’ot, which her crew lovingly called Xeno-joe. It was a decent drink, but it lacked some of the full-bodied quality of coffee and it failed to properly stimulate her brain like real coffee could. Matched with a slight waxy texture and the fact that alien mouths couldn’t handle the same heat as human, and Captain Astarte was wishing they were closer to Mars to refill the ship’s supply of real coffee. Despite her preference for the Deathworld bean native to her homeworld, the cup in her hand was as perfect as Uq’ot could be. Considering that the contact and his brother ran their real business behind the front of a Café she really wasn’t surprised.
What did surprise her was the seemingly perfect contract before her, there were a few risks but it seemed that the contact had done enough scouting to minimize those threats. She had passed up many ‘perfect’ jobs before, they usually had too many strings attached. But this particular contact had an exceptional reputation. He was the only real reason she brought the Astaroth to port in Femeri, the pickings out here were too slim, and the station security was to thorough for any smuggling work. He always put together the best jobs and only gave them out to the right crew for the job, which was increasing becoming her and her crew.
Her reputation for professionalism and discretion were her ship’s main selling point to people like the contact. That and the impressive nature of the Astaroth herself.
Most other ships in her line of work were regular small freighters sloppily repurposed for more devious work than cargo shipping. Matched against a sleek purpose-built warship like the Astaroth they couldn’t compare, and against other ships of comparable tonnage she could punch well above her weight class. Aster had relied on her ship’s impressive abilities time and time again to narrowly escape certain doom and eek out a decent profit. If it weren’t for her ship and her equally impressive crew she would have never gotten this far in her career.
The job being offered to her was essentially corporate sabotage. A new mining company had set up shop in a trans-platinum rich asteroid field, and had dropped an impressive amount of credits on the best equipment. With time this new company could easily tip the market balance in their favor. Femeri station and its governor were particularly interested in the mines success and had lent out impressive defense assets and diverted the course of a few lane runners to keep the shipping lanes safe for the mine.
Only problem was that the contractor who was funding this job didn’t want them to tip the market, likely a rival mining operation and their powerful investors.
Hence the need for her ship and crew. According to the specifics of the contract she was to disrupt the new mining base in a way that made their investors pull out and for the company to default on their loans. A simple smash job. All cut and dry, but a little below the contacts normal interests. Meaning he had another angle to the job.
She finished her third reread and glanced into the primates two central eyes, developed for decent binocular vision to assist his early arboreal ancestors as they swung from tree to tree. “And the rest of the job?” she asked.
The contact smile, exposing long fang like incisors “Ten thousand credits”
Aster grunted, fiddled with the personal assistant on her wrist, and transferred the money into the discreet account he used for her.
A ping of confirmation on his wrist and he slid a second paper file folder over to her. Inside she saw a very detailed list of all the brand-new equipment the company had bought, a map of the facility, and where each machine was stored. She also found that the foundry had an attached warehouse were the refined metal was kept and a list of all the shipping days and how much to expect. At the end she saw the lane runners patrol schedule, with a particular weakness highlighted. A time and place where a well-equipped ship could jump a runner and leave the facility undefended for two and a half-ish hours.
She smiled “numbers like this and I’m thinking I should invest, why should I take this job.”
“Because the contractor really wants them gone, their stock is beginning to drop. And I know you have a significant amount of credits invested in their future, as opposed to a new upstart with little credit or history. Not to mention I know a much safer investment that would really like some of the listed equipment, one that allows your current investments to thrive and open up a whole new sector in space to exploit. These upstarts are just looking to supplant the status quo and take over, you would in the long-term gain little, and short term lose a lot of money. To borrow and bastardize a human phrase; this is a two in the hand, one in the bush scenario.”
It didn’t surprise her that the contact new as much as he did, he was a ridiculously thorough man. And she had borrowed that calm cool mind of his to start making investments here in Femeri. Stations like this served as both a focal point for shipping and a center of stock exchange and banking. The problem with stations like Femeri was that all the powers that be were well established and made it hell for newcomers, and on much older core world stations it was nearly impossible to start a new business without explicit approval.
She took another sip of her drink to think things through. She thought through everything she new about the contact and his business, not an easy thing considering how cautious he was. But she had been working with him for a while, long enough to slowly catalogue his personal assets and watch the market to guess what the others might be. The only problem with that was he likely knew what she was doing, ugh working with smart people was such a headache. It was so much easier to run circles around low level smugglers, but low level meant small payouts.
In the few seconds it took to sip her Uq’ot she had run through any possible way he could screw her and pick over her remains, not many. She knew it was very unlikely for him to give her a bad job or set her up for failure, but it was good policy to be cautious.
Satisfied she nodded her consent “Everything seems in order, standard rate?”
“I’ll need five percent more for the information on the other mining company” he countered.
“Deal, send the details over by the end of the cycle.”
“Of course, a pleasure doing business with you Captain Astarte of the Astaroth” he said with a strange wry smile.
They shook hands, his grip was firm, while her own was weaker so as not to break the weaker mans hand. She normally gave everyone a firm reminder of her species innate strength, but a man as successful and competent as the contact also tended to have strange egos that didn’t appreciate being reminded of their weakness.
With things settled she left the well-furnished office through a secret hatch into the station’s labyrinthine maintenance tunnels. She quickly maneuvered herself around, the privacy provided by the station ‘crawl’ space allowed her to use her Hellworlder physicality to race through the maze of pipes and wires.
Aster emerged unseen from a hidden hatch, joined the crowd of lumbering aliens, and was on her way to her other business. The swelling masses of aliens were far taller than Astarte, they pressed and shoved up against her without even glancing down, annoyed she employed an old trick she had learned for clearing space in crowed walkways. She raised her arms and set them up behind her head so that the sleeves of her robes fell down exposing lean hard muscles and started whistling a jaunty tune, one that started off artlessly and quickly fell into something more refined yet still somewhat unrecognizable. And like magic everyone around her pressed against each other harder and gave her a good ten paces worth of space to walk in. Aster smiled to herself and picked up the pace, and no less than thirty seconds later a group of station security fell in behind her.
A part of her was annoyed by their presence, and she considered taking these officers on a long stroll throughout the bowels of the station’s slums. She could easily exhaust them by walking just a little faster, her human stamina would easily out class a lot of the Uplifted aboard her ship, to say nothing of these non-deathworlder aliens tailing her. If she wanted to be mean she could just vanish into the crowds and start stalking the poor officers instead, switch up the roles between predator and prey. But she had other things to do today, which meant she wouldn’t get a chance to toy with her stalkers.
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Most mail and info came from the nearby net work of Wake comm relays which could send out FTL messages. In the denser populated sectors of the galaxy like the ‘core’ worlds where the Union was founded one could send a massage out to a thousand lightyears away, each one being relayed by other nearby Wake comm relays. But life did not spawn evenly across the milky way galaxy, or the United spiral galaxy as the Union called it. It was born randomly across the vast amount of stars in the galaxy, some closer to each other capable of forming solid unified sectors of space. While others like the Orion sector, or Femeri sector as the Union preferred, were backwaters with only a handful of native sapients and habital worlds for the Union core worlders to settle. With less prospects for stellar ‘urbanization’ came less Union presence making it a place where enterprising pirates and raiders could flourish, not to mention a place the horrors from the void found appetizing.
Predicably that meant any mail that came in from out of sector had exorbitant shipping fees. But some business was worth it. A quick check in from the Icutoo postwoman, who was two seconds away from pissing herself in fear from Aster’s friendly grin, resulted in a single data chip the size of her pinky tip. Solid state data was harder for customs to check without damaging the seal. She cracked it open and set it into a hidden slot on her PA and received her mother’s bi-yearly check in since they were out of coms range.
Shits gone to hell. Caladon war of succession has turned into a six-way civil war. Active genocides. Neutral border worlds have been involved. Running medicine and food stuff to affected worlds. Not much more to do out here. We’ll make way for Orion soon. How’s the fleet?
Her mom for a women of such passions wrote no more than she absolutely needed too, which made her messages short, lacking lot of crucial details, and always brought up more questions than answers. At least she wasn’t making as many spelling errors as she used too, the software always had trouble unscrambling those messages. Or more likely her lieutenant John had decided to proof read her messages.
The news wasn’t very good to hear. It was going to take months for the Lucifer and Beelzebub to return with the rest of first fleet, at least half a year. Half a year those very expensive ships and their crews wouldn’t be earning any money. Blockade running up in the inner Sagittarius sector was supposed to have been a gold mine, a six-way civil war however was not something she wanted to touch. That meant it was on Astarte and Karega to make up for the loss in revenue.
She passed the needlessly terrified postwoman a sealed hard drive filled with one hundred terra bytes of encoded data and left for the ship. It was a good thing she just took a very promising job, Astaroth’s refit was coming up and all the new hardware for the seven-year-old ship was going to be very expensive.
On her way back she didn’t employ her trick for clearing crowded walkways, this time she kept a low profile and snuck past the waiting security agents by hiding in the shadow of a large shaggy Zxx’thi male. She walked just slightly behind the giant sloth like alien,out of sight of the officers, and in the alien’s blind spot. When she was certain they hadn’t spotted her, she slowly made her way to a maintenance tunnel and once again slipped into the restricted area with none the wiser.
She was currently in the upper reaches of the station’s central structure, while her ship was deep within the lower berths of the hanger core. Getting there the normal way would involve several packed elevator trips, or one ride aboard the stations internal tram-system. Either way would take her about an hour of waiting before she could get on, an hour which would give the Station security plenty of time to muster up the courage to frisk her. That wouldn’t have been an issue five minutes ago when all she was carrying was her ‘ceremonial’ swords and plate armor. But now she was carrying sensitive information that could expose their whole operation, or at least create the basis for launching an investigation into her business.
For those reasons she had decided that the quickest and safest way to her ship would be to use the internal maintenance shafts. A station this big and complex had a lot of equipment and systems to keep the harsh vacuum of space from killing all their residents in an instant. But all machines failed at some point, and needed repairs. Some repairs were small, but others involved entire truck sized components that needed to be swapped out. To cut down on maintenance costs over the long lifetime of these stations the Union had opted to build these stations with thick outer shells placed around the core of the habitation modules, and in between the outer armor and the habitation modules they built vast networks of pressurized tunnels that were large enough for some medium sized repair ships to fly through.
They were also a very convenient way for someone to move around unseen. Entire tunnels that were supposedly closed off for repairs actually acted as a highway for the undesirables and criminals of this station to do business. Those who were homeless and didn’t want to be evicted from Femeri found solace in the stations maintenance tunnels. And for people like Aster these tunnels were a great short cut between the upper levels and the hanger core.
She leaded against the back wall and took in one deep breath before she took a running leap into the depths of the station. Air whizzed by her ear as she began to accelerate, the station gravity was roughly seventy percent less than her native Earth’s gravity, that coupled with her excellent reflexes gave her all the advantages she needed to grip the rail of another platform. She felt a jolt in her shoulders, had she been on Earth that drop might have been to much for her body, but here on Femeri that little jolt only slowed her for a second. She kicked her legs forward once, twice, and on the third she used that momentum to swing herself forward. She let go and felt her body gently fall onto the next platform, she bent her legs just a bit to take the force of the fall and sprinted forward once again to repeat the maneuver once again. Humans may have been excellently adapted for life on the African plains, but a bit of their simian nature never went away. And with a bit of training they could swing and jump around just any other ape.
Only a fully arboreal primate like the four armed, four eyed, Carkic could best her when it came to swinging about the station despite not having her deathworld muscular advantage. Within only ten minutes of hair raising leaps and bounds she found herself before a tunnel that would lead her to the Astaroth. She was about to stroll right through when a prickle crawled up her neck, something buried deep within her instincts alerted her that she was being watched. She stopped just within the entrance of the tunnel and turned to see that three large shadows were blocking her way out.
She let a hand drop to her sword hilt as she turned to fully face whoever had cornered her. All three aliens looked thin and haggard, and they stunk like old fish, they stood a few heads taller than Astarte, had tough gray skin with some inch long thorn like spines sticking out of their forearms. They were bipedal, and vaguely humanoid, though no one would ever mistake their flat crab-like head for a humans. These were Ceshix, an unsavory race for her human sensibilities since everything about them made her want to look away.
“Hand over your personal device” the lead one said as it’s three fingered hand at her wrist.
Astarte blinked in surprise “Are you, robbing me?” she asked in confusion.
“What’s it look like, now hand it over” the lead one growled.
Astarte only felt her bewilderment grow. Ceshix were from a class six world in the core systems, among other non-deathworlders they were considered pretty hardy, but compared to her they weren’t really much of a threat. She glanced to the side and realized that she was standing in the tunnel’s shadow, not a problem for her eye but for the Ceshix she might as well be standing in complete darkness. They had likely only seen the barest hint of her shape along with the glow of her PA. She slowly stepped forward into the light so that her would be attackers could get a better view of her.
An air sac around their necks bulged a little in shock as they realized they were trying to mug a human, the only species known to evolve on a high class deathworld like as Earth. Earth had a habitability rating of fourteen on a scale that was only supposed to go from one to ten, one being an ideal paradise and ten being the highest possible rating for a world to still support life. The rating system first based its ruling on a worlds gravity and background radiation, any world ten point one or higher was considered a deathworld and wasn’t supposed to be able to support life due to extreme gravity and high radiation. But those were the standards of non-deathworlders, who had evolved with a silicate bone structures instead of collagen, had only one factor immune systems, and little natural resistance to higher UV radiation like that emitted by Earth’s sun Sol. For the non-deathworlders who had founded the Union it had been impossible to imagine anything surviving on a deathworld. But then they found life baring deathworlds, and then they found sapient deathworld species who seemed to thrive in the hellish conditions of their homeworld’s. Earth wasn’t the first deathworld to be discovered, but it was the highest class deathworld known to date, so high that it had been crowned with the moniker of Hellworld. And these Ceshix had just tried to corner the only species to naturally ascend to sapiency on such a world.
Astarte saw their fear and grinned, not the friendly one that she used on the Icutoo post women, but a fierce grin that exposed her bright predatory teeth. “Now, I’ll give you one chance to reconsider. Leave now, or else.” She said threateningly. When she had first detected them she had thought them to be assassins, not desperate vagrants who had fallen through the safety nets provided by the Union.
The two on the sides backed up, but their leader held his feet in place. He reached out and held his companions in place “There’s three of us and only one of her, we’ve got her outnumbered.”
Astarte’s grin fell from her face “You’re wrong. There only three of you against one Hellworlder, you’re outclassed.” She said, turning his words against them.
She had given them a chance, and they squandered it. Faster than they think Astarte darted forward, spun on her right leg, and raised her other leg up for a kick to the leaders chest. Her foot connected and extended her leg explosively, the leader despite being larger than Astarte was launched up and other the railing of the platform. It let out a panicked shriek as it fell over, until it stopped suddenly. The other two turned to stare at where their leader had fallen, and were too distracted to see that Astarte hadn’t stopped her attack. She got under the distracted Ceshix on the left and used its bulk to throw it off balance and over her shoulder. With one downed she charged at the next one and threw a hard left hook, there was a crack that bounced of the metal walls of the tunnel and it dropped dead.
She heard struggling behind her and turned to see the one she had downed was trying to role onto its side so that it could get back up. She slowly walked over and casually placed her foot on its chest, it struggled harder but couldn’t resist her strength. It tried to scream but Aster was pressing on its chest in a way that restricted its breathing. She shook her head slowly as she pressed her foot down a little harder, its frantic struggling increased until she heard a soft crack from its chest area. After that it stopped moving and Astarte knew that it was dead. She lifted her foot and let out a soft sigh.
Glancing at her handy work she could only muster a little bit of pity for these poor creatures. Desperation and hunger had pushed them to try their luck at mugging a Hellworlder, and not just any Hellworlder. They had the misfortune of trying to rob an accomplished space pirate like Astarte, who had been a pirate since she was fifteen and had little mercy for anyone who stood in her way.
She quickly tossed their bodies over the edge and strode away as if she hadn’t just committed three murders. She still had one more thing to do that day, and she refused to be late as her ship greeted its first non-Terran crewmate.