Rhett reached out and picked up his glass, then stood up, holding it out before him. Vitrian did the same after a moment. Captain Estrada picked up his glass and looked at John for a moment as the former marine picked up his.
“You’re filling the mag-boots of a good man, John Kratos,” Estrada stated before standing up to his full height and holding his glass out before him, mirroring Vitrian and Rhett.
“Journey well, Vader Burien,” said Rhett, knocking back his entire drink in one gulp. Then, instead of swallowing all of it, he spits some back into the glass, in keeping with the Delcan tradition of leaving some in respect for the dead.
“Journey well, Vader Burien,” echoed Captain Estrada and Vitrian, repeating the Delcan farewell saying, before they too drank and spat.
“Journey well, Vader Burien,” mimicked John awkwardly, his radically secular Grotto upbringing making him visibly uncomfortable with any sort of funerary ritual beyond the pragmatism of cremation or jettison. “Journey well.”
The next day, their heads foggy from too much drink the evening before, the crew found themselves awakened to a terse supply order from the captain and notification that they were shipping out.
“It’s a strange thing, Rhett, I’ve been on board a few stations like this in my time, but never when it was alive. Everything is so, I don’t know, colorful. It’s almost too much,” mused John as he watched the vessel deck’s endless hustle and bustle of merchant ships, traders, and long haulers going about their daily commerce. “Diversity is unnerving for a lifelong Grotto man, truth be told.”
“It was a lot for me, too, though I think the penal colony forced some of that on me early. Everything here exists in a sort of balance, and while we might be the lowest of the low, that’s its own kind of defense,” Rhett explained as he grasped the other end of the heavy case and helped John lift it off the deck and into the cargo skiff. “We belong to something larger than ourselves. The table girls are part of the station, they even take the name of whatever station they’re on, and nobody will lay a finger on them that isn’t consented and paid in full. We are indentured men, so we have the protection of Aegis even though we aren’t citizens. The accredited citizens have whatever corporation they owe fealty to. As long as you can pay your way, nobody will mess with you here, no matter how much you might stick out as a newcomer.”
“That’s what the headhunter told me after I woke back up,” laughed John. He shook his head. “She said that I’d have been better off hiding back home on Kratos 3 than trying to blend in with the rest of the universe. Apparently, citizens of Grotto, even those on the run, are exceptionally easy to distinguish from among the other corporate peoples.”
“What were you running from, if you don’t mind me asking?” questioned Rhett as they finished loading the last of the crates and began to walk the skiff back towards the Six, “Same thing everyone is, I imagine. War, oppression, lack of opportunity.”
“Good guess, Calibos, but no. It might be hard to believe considering what you might think you know about Grotto, but most of us just accept our lot in life and do our best. I didn’t join the Reapers to escape, and I don’t hate my former corporation. I just wanted a better pay grade and to see something other than the smoke stacks of my little polluted hab-block on Kratos 3.” John and Rhett moved the skiff through the crowded vessel deck and up a narrow plank that leads to the docking chamber which held Vulture Six and several other mid-sized starships. “For me it was the Gedra, I wanted to get as far away from them as I possibly could. Even if that meant going AWOL.”
“You’re kidding, right? The Gedra? Bogeymen from the other side of the Ellisian Line,” spat Rhett incredulously while keying in his access code to lower the cargo hatch on the underside of the Six. “The talk is that they’re made up, more disinformation to feed the masses while Helion and Grotto finish cleaning up the mess their trade war left behind.”
“Headhunter said the same thing, so believe what you want scrapper,” retorted John as he put some extra muscle behind hefting his end of the crate so that Rhett had to pump his legs to keep it steady. “Doesn’t change what I saw, what happened. Anyway you asked, so there it is.”
“No offense intended, John,” replied Rhett, stopping his work to extend his open hand to the former marine. “The talk is good, but sometimes tall tales get told as truth. What would I know about it anyway? I’ve spent the last ten years either in lockdown or on the Six in necrospace and lived my whole life in the Tardis system before that.”
“Yeah, I guess it does all sound like something from an old vid,” John said. He smiled, then pumped Rhett’s offered hand. “I forget how crazy it sounds, you just live with something for so long it all seems normal.”
“Wild. So you’re an Ellisian trade war vet, eh?” asked Rhett as he and John continued unloading the skiff, moving cutter combustibles, welding gel, and sealed foodstuffs into their appropriate areas inside the ship’s cargo hold. “Fleet must be congratulating themselves on your acquisition.”
“The headhunter seemed pleased with herself,” agreed John before slotting the skiff back into its wall mount, the work finally done. “I went AWOL just after the Reaper strike, so technically, I was unionized prior to being captured. The headhunter made more selling me as a Vulture than she would have returning me to Grotto. This sure beats breaking rocks on some tomb world, which is where I’m sure they’d have dropped me.”
“At least with us you’ll have a torch in your hand and a paycheck,” nodded Rhett as he closed the hatch and engaged the pressure seal. “We represent a sizable investment on the part of Aegis, high capacity people aren’t cheap. Considering the alternatives, this can be a good life, while it lasts.”
The vulture walked over to the comms panel and keyed the bridge.
“We are buttoned up and ready to shake dust,” Rhett said to the tiny screen which showed Vitrian in the pilot’s chair nodding as he worked a series of controls off screen.
“Roger that, Calibos,” said Vitrian as he began to warm up the engines, “Holt out.”
The two men left the cargo hold and took their places next to the rest of the crew, who were already strapped into their flight seats.
9. THE HUNT
Vulture Six sped through the void, its course plotted and the autopilot engaged so that the ship could make micro-adjustments should the sensors pick up any unforeseen obstacles while Vitrian was away.
Rhett wiped his face with one of the moisture panels that sat next to the folding sink in his modest berth. In the small mirror he looked at his face, checking his skin to make sure he hadn’t missed any spots during his shave. He folded his mirror back into the wall and rubbed his clean-shaven face, something he’d taken for granted back in his cor-sec days.
The former trooper saw shaving as something of a luxury, one of the holdovers from his time in lockdown, where convicts were groomed by machines.
Groomed was a nice way to say it, thought Rhett with a grim chuckle as he ran the panel over his face one last time. Rhett had been serving his sentence on a penal labor colony without a name, just a designation code of TPC2229, located inside a small moon with a wide orbit around Tardis 2. Rubicon wasn’t about to let human resources go to waste, and so the convicts were used as manual laborers.
The moon was home to an ink-rock refinery, where, in place of the expensive equipment that accredited citizens would use to work the stones, the convicts were equipped with crude tools and little in the way of safety equipment. Doing the work they did meant that the convicts were often covered in raw ink and stone dust by the end of a shift. The company that operated the colony was not about to tighten the profit margin by providing the water needed to allow the convicts to clean up, and so an alternate hygiene solution was implemented.