Not that there were that many walls, ceilings, and floors on the dropship. It was basically a big box – a bay – with a smaller box – a cockpit – mounted to the front of it. On the outside it looked less like a box, given the massive Xarp drive thrusters at the rear and the high-burn crash-landing gear underneath. But where he was inside the loading bay, it was just a box. And all six sides had that goddamn logo splashed across them.
Cazos was strapped into one of the hanging personnel cages. Not for any reason but the lack of gravity; he was sick of floating around the awkward space of the bay. A few dozen cages, a handful of deflated spacesuits – also decorated with the bent-arrow logo – and weapon racks, mostly empty save the occasional particle blaster or projectile firearm. Healthy paranoia had caused Cazos to stuff himself into a suit and seal it up, despite the bay being completely capable of maintaining pressure and oxygen as normal. At least he hoped it was capable. How many missions had this heap of junk seen? Before and after it fell into the hands of Space Waste?
He itched to wake the handypad strapped to his arm, but it wasn’t time yet. He gave himself a count to wait. Long enough to know the Space Waste command ship, the Longhorn, had fled the system, and long enough to wait out any ModPol sweepers. He knew the Longhorn had already Xarped away, because Rando Jansen was a fucking tool. But any blip of a signal now, and he’d get himself roasted by trigger-happy ModPol fighters.
Just a few more hours, then he could check the contact monitor. In the meantime, he was just a derelict dropship, drifting at the outer edge of the remains of a nasty battlefield.
So he spent his idle time cursing Jansen. Underboss Jansen. Cazos had never met the fucker until he got the Space Waste assignment. By that point, some plan had already been running full thrust ahead. Cazos – the “hacker” – was just decoration. Make them think you wrote this program. Make them think you can make the detection equipment work. That you can find the target when it comes out of Xarp.
And so he’d done what he was told, though he didn’t believe anyone was stupid enough to buy it. Apparently he’d overestimated the collective intelligence of Space Waste. He’d whipped up a phony user interface with lots of graphs and maps and numbers swirling around, and everyone took him at his word. And why not? He was the unassuming Basil Roy, software architect.
And besides, it had appeared to work; because Jansen knew right where that ModPol transport was going to pop out of Xarp. He didn’t need a real detector.
Cazos was sick of thinking about it. Whatever Jansen’s plans were, he didn’t want to know. He was obviously toying with Space Waste, but to what end? The ambush had taken the old boss out of the picture, and that put Jansen at the top of the food chain. Why take command of a band of gangbangers? Why not just arrest them all?
It made no difference. Cazos knew a clusterfuck forming when he saw one, and this was one he needed to stay away from. As far as he was concerned, his debt was paid.
A distant beeping wormed into his ear, slow and persistent. He blinked away heaviness in his eyelids. He looked at the heads-up-display in his suit’s helmet. He must have drifted off, because the hours had rolled by.
“Goddamn zero-G,” he muttered. He could never get used to it. He would do anything for a planet under his feet again.
He shifted his limbs around, trying to drive the numbness from them. Another part of his HUD was blinking in time with the beep. The oxygen had burned down to twenty-five percent and was giving him a subtle warning that the tank needed changing.
It was time. The itch to check his datapad could finally be scratched. He switched the piece on and it winked to life. Diagnostics scrolled by for a moment, then he was flicking through the interface, seeking out the contact app.
Desolation. The battle had gone poorly for Space Waste, that was for sure. Pieces of ships – most of them Waster fighter craft – drifted about the three-dimensional space. No signals of any kind, other than the auto-emergency beacons here and there. And the little camera drones that the Wasters liked to use to record their battles. “BatCaps,” he said aloud when he remembered what they called them. There were a few dozen of those still.
“Shit.” One more signal. A scanner. Well, if he was caught he was caught. He got ready to turn off the datapad and play dead, but stopped himself. “Just one second.” He zeroed in on the scan signal and ran it through the database, just for the hell of it. A lot of scanner equipment contained a signal inside it, like a serial number. This one came up right away. It was civilian.
This information gave him pause. He could continue to hide, but it seemed foolish to hide from a civilian ship. Unless they panicked and somehow reported his presence back to ModPol. He could get on the open comm and threaten to blow them to pieces if they attempted any transmissions. Really though, what difference did it make? Once the Xarp drive was warmed up, he’d be gone.
It was his plan all along. Well, there hadn’t been much of a plan, not really. The primary goal was to get a ship with Xarp capabilities. He’d altered the fleet manifest back before they left the Space Waste base, including the dropship on the carrier. Once the conflict started, only the raiders and fighters were deployed, leaving the lone mistaken and useless dropship in a bay, just waiting for him. Then all he had to do was to escape just before the Longhorn Xarped away. No one would miss him in the heat of the moment. After that, he would play dead. What to do next, well, there the plan got a little fuzzier. He had a handful of caches, two in the Barnard system and one in the Sirius system. A few thousand Alliance credits in hard currency. The stuff was traceable, but only if someone took the time to do it. Something he never worried about, because he had the equipment to scramble the hidden etchings inside the money, inside those slim, rectangular cards printed with algorithmic ink. It made it harder to spend – especially anywhere that wanted to keep a reputation – but not impossible.
“Scrambling Alleys is what got you in this mess, asshole.”
His brain told his mouth to shut up so he could think. The analyzer in his handypad wasn’t much information to go on. He needed to scan that civvy and find out what it was, maybe where it came from.
The O2 level on his HUD dropped another percentage point. At the very least he needed to get out of the cage and turn on the air. So he did, drifting from the wall over to the panel that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. He was going to light up on the other ship’s contact map any moment now, since he had to power on the reactor to generate oxygen and nitrogen. He tried to move quickly, but a part of him wanted to linger just to see what the civilian would do. Just to tempt fate.
He must have been in a good mood. Maybe it was the dawning realization that he’d actually escaped those bloodthirsty bastards.
A sing-song tone trilled throughout the bay, signaling that pressure was nominal. He removed his helmet and climbed out of the suit. Getting undressed in null gravity would have been hard enough for him, but wrestling with the bulky suit added a few more minutes to the process. Finally he got free of the thing and pulled himself over to the cabin door. Pressure inside the small cockpit was already good, so it slid open as he touched the panel.
Floating around without a suit was somehow more nauseating. Probably because most of his body thought everything was normal, allowing the confusion in his inner ear to dominate. He closed his eyes and took a few breaths, his chest swelling, causing him to become all too aware of his increased heart rate. He opened his eyes and shook his head in a failed attempt to shed panic.
He strapped into the chair in front of the main console. Having the screen to anchor his focus on seemed to help. He fired up a few subsystems, letting the proximity scanners and other sensors come to life. This activity would most definitely make his presence known; so be it. He charged the auto-turret but set it to remain in its locked position. This way it remained non-threatening, and anyway, if he opened it up, he’d have to lock it again before he could kick into Xarp. Having done all that, he set the Xarp drive to pre-charge.
All