Hard Times

Glass shards crunching under foot. He lifted his boot up off the broken picture frame and looked down.  Destroyed, just like the rest of the place.  Books from the shelves were everywhere, their charred remains underpinning his emptiness at the destruction around him.  He’d liked the books, volumes of knowledge, some more rare than others but all of them interesting and a luxury few even bothered with in this day and age.  The tattered curtains were breathing in and out with the wind, like wraiths haunting the memories contained in the picture under his raised foot.  The place was empty.  He’d known that before he had walked up to the building.  Nobody would bother one way or the other, either he had been killed in the blast or he hadn’t.

He scooped the picture up out of the glass and looked at it.  It was a picture of the shop just after he’d finished fixing it up.  He was standing behind the counter smiling, the books behind him, trinkets of various uses contained beneath the glass case in front of him.  Things he’d come across over the past few years.  Not really worth much in themselves but crafted into useful items for the people that would frequent the shop.  One of his customers had taken it for him the day he’d opened.  Now it was all scorched and barren.  What hadn’t been destroyed in the blast had burned until the rains leaked through the cracked ceiling and put them out.

There wasn’t really much to save by the time the civil services units had arrived.  That was four days ago.  He’d be away looking for some new inventory, the place wasn’t exactly a high security enclave.  He even didn’t think it would have come to this, not after all this time.  It was over.  He’d finished.  This was just a quiet place, a sanctuary from the more traveled space lanes, a dust bowl compared to many other places a few systems closer to the core.  That was why he’d stayed.  He was stopping by to refuel for another jump at the station and decided to go planetside.  Station food was disgusting anyways, who the hell would eat noodles from a vending machine? Desperate people, certainly.  He wasn’t that desperate.  He wasn’t that poor either – well, now he was.  That was only temporary though.

Nobody had questioned much about him.  He’d worked hard to get enough extra to buy this place, not that he’d needed it, but it was nice just to be hired on and accepted for who you presented to other people.  Just a simple man wanting an honest wage for the day.  It had been nice the last few years – not really being anyone special to anyone else.  Just a place to be, to work quietly and anonymously.  It was a nice run, but maybe a foolish dream for him to have indulged in.  Maybe he should have just stayed and kept doing the jobs.  He’d made many enemies over the years.  Most of them dead now, but not all of them.  Most of the rest were smart enough to leave the ‘verse well enough alone, but this was different.  He’d burned everything about himself.  His past – he didn’t exist anymore; a ghost.  Ironic, someone wanted to make him a ghost, though maybe not quite.

In this line of work, people usually just killed you if they found you.  An energy weapon to the back in a darkened alley, a ballistic round to the head from the next hill, a nice stun and a pounding headache when you woke up, right before they started going to work on you in front of the boss while he hit you just to make sure you could still feel for the last few hours you’d still be alive.  This wasn’t that.  That would have happened right afterward.  This late in the game, who would have the resources, the motive, or more realistically, the nerve?  It was usually a close friend or family member coming back for revenge but who was left?  Nobody,  or so he’d thought. Somebody, though, somebody still.

He sighed and looked to the left where the blast happened; the west wall.  It was easy to survey the area from where he was.  His bedroom was now more or less a part of the yard newly furnished with an open floor plan that let you have an amazing view of the sky.  Considering there had been a roof there the last time he’d seen it, the contrast was impressive.  Maybe he should have put in the skylight after all.  Surveying the damage, the crater the explosion had left behind had toppled three of the four walls.  Deeper along the northern wall, the blast had come from where the bed was.  It was a simple building, not designed to withstand more than the occasional storms that rolled through later on in the sun cycle.

It had been nice while it lasted.  He turned his attention to the rest of the shop.  The other wall had fared much better.  The shelves on that side of the room were still intact, though the books were no less damaged on that side of the building.  He walked to the small room off of the main entrance, debris scattered everywhere.  Soot covering the floor just under the layer of water that had collected, sending eddies away from his boots with each step, circles everywhere the drop were falling, like the irises of some weird creature staring up at him from the floor.

He knew what he would find before he glanced into the room.  There, on the far wall the safe was open.  He walked over to it and looked inside.  There, while he squinted in the fading light, where the few credits he’d put back for savings had rested, next to the data chips that were now missing, was a holopad with a flashing blue light.

Someone had left him a message.

The bang woke him up.  Hand reaching inside his jacket as he sat up, eyes wide and looking for the danger.  His hand clasping but nothing was there as he stood up and looked through the glass at the door, looking to the left first and to the right.  Nothing.  He pressed the lock on the door and it slid sideways with a hiss of hydraulic pressure.  He glanced left down the corridor, nothing in site as he slid right and glanced around the corner toward the cargo bay.

There, was the source of the noise.  A crewman had opened an access panel and was in the process of trying not to fall inside while looking for who knows what that seemed to perpetually plague the ship as it drifted from one system to another leaving behind little else but cheap merchandise and more rust.  That was fine, he’d needed the ride, had little to spend until he got closer to a more civilized system, and didn’t want to use the more high profile space ports where one’s face is more likely to be recognized by every scanner out there trying to make a credit off the next piece of intel.

The jammer in the collar of his coat would help with that, anyone scanning him from a distance would detect the facial structure of a poor soul from the last bar he’d visited when the captain had stopped the ship to drop more cheap cargo off to procure a drinking binge more fuel for the ship.  He’d rarely seen a hive with more scum and villainy, generally preferring to do his business with more connected, and lucrative people, but sometimes you just did what the job demanded and going low was occasionally the path of least resistance.  The man had been sitting at the bar, drinking heavily.  He’d waited until the man stood up and was heading toward the sanitation rooms before he started walking, glanced towards the display showing the local races and took a slight stumble to the right, just enough to put his path inline with the man in front of him, then he continued to step around the man as the ocular lenses he wore on his eyes did the rest, scanning the man’s features as he went by.

The man pushed him out of the way with a few choice words and headed off towards the sanitation rooms to relieve himself.  As he spun out of his way, he also spun a few of the the man’s credit wafers out of his pocket and offered an apology as he headed for the door to the bar.  They still used hard currency this far out, not as sophisticated as the aligned systems, but who could you trust out here?  No one.  The device inside his collar could project a field in front of the wearer and use subtle electromagnetic interference to shift how the scanners perceived him.  It wouldn’t make him someone else, especially at close range where you could be studied, but it would make him someone similar enough to not immediately set off a series of red flags in more than a few factions.  Better scanning equipment wouldn’t be fooled so easily but these people didn’t look like the kind that could afford much anyway.  Then again, neither did he.  He’d used the credits to purchase a lift from the captain to the next stop and there, he’d leave the man to his down drunken devices and be on his way.

He headed past the crewman and towards the sanitation room, opened the door and hit the lock button as it hissed shut behind him.  The dim lights had come on as he’d entered, flickering occasionally, presumably in rhythm with whatever the crewman was playing with in the access panel.  He passed his hand under the tap, at least the hydro-station still worked.  Water poured out, best not to drink it, the recycling systems in the ship were probably as old as the captain and about as reliable.  Splashing the cool liquid on his face he stood and looked at himself in the mirror.  He’d not slept very long, thinking about the recording and what it meant.

It was like going back in time, except they were both older now.  More gray, more lines, they both looked like they had ages earlier, just older, like versions of their fathers before they had entered the service together.  Service was what every citizen went through to earn the right to hold the status.  It granted you more options than the average person, a bit of extra credits for a few years afterward, better pay at many places closer to the aligned systems and contacts you wouldn’t have otherwise.  They weren’t career men and had joined as soon as they were old enough.

They had scored high in their studies and were athletic enough to survive training.  That had been ages ago and before they had parted ways.  He could have found Chase if he’d wanted to but he’d always figured Chase didn’t want to be found.  They’d decided to hit the registers together after their tour was up, hardened from service by keeping the outer systems from ambush and raids by the Vanduul who were pretty common around the edges of aligned space.  There were always raids, always skirmishes.  If it wasn’t Vanduul, it was pirates, it was always somebody.

Factions in the non aligned systems were always at each others throat or anyone else unlucky enough to be within scanning distance – sometimes other criminals, sometimes just people tired of life in the inner systems.  Sometimes aligning forces long enough to take out an adversary before spiraling back down into rivalries among themselves.  There never seemed to be a shortage of people signing up to get a cut of the action.  Credits drove everyone’s motives that far out.  Most everyone anyway.

Bounty hunting.  It seemed like a good enough idea starting out but they hadn’t really thought out the long term effects.  Once you start hunting in the outer reaches, people start to notice.  Sometimes that’s good, if it’s lining your pockets with credits, but with more credits, comes more notice.  Nobodies are a dime a dozen in the reaches, somebodies bring a hefty price.  Once you get a reputation going for yourself, the credits starts coming in regularly, provided you don’t get killed, which happened daily for the unwary, and frequently enough to the wary to give everyone a healthy paranoia.  Once you start making more credits, you start making more enemies.  They preferred to take their targets alive but sometimes the targets didn’t want to play along.  They’d been scorched and shot at more than a few times, usually the armor helped, sometimes it didn’t.  They each had enough scars to show they’d been in the business long enough.

They had worked good together during those years, sometimes riding shotgun in a cargo container with a stealth casing past check points where you could still bribe the nice man in the uniform to not scan it’s contents too deeply.  They would get back the same way with an extra passenger or two, though the fee was always more expensive coming off planet than going in.  The scales never lied.  The pilots knew enough not to check the container too closely or else their payment might get terminated, along with any of their long term goals.

As time went on, the jobs got more lucrative, but they also got messier.  It went from ideological notions of who deserved to get caught and who didn’t to just going after whoever paid the most credits.  It got colder.  He got colder.  After a while it was “take the credits and do the job”, it didn’t matter who it was or what they wanted done, they just did it.  It didn’t really bother him but after a while, Chase started acting different.  He’d manned the ship more, he’d talk too much to too many people, ask too many questions about the jobs.

He could see it in Chase one day.  Like he’d woke up from something haunting him.  He just looked tired.  Tired and like he’d resigned himself to some inner bargain.  Funny, he looked like the man in the mirror did now, just younger but the same look was still there:  There had to be more to it all than this.

One day he was just gone.  There wasn’t anything said, no message, no nothing.  Chase just wasn’t there.  He knew it was coming, they had both known for a while.  He’d been angrier, meaner as things had progressed while Chase had just sunk deeper into himself, saying less and less.  They had both been stocking their credits and when he’d checked the account, half of it was gone.  Not surprising.  He didn’t need Chase anyway.

Things just went on.  Nobody to get in the way, nobody to argue with.  He’d just done the job and done it well.  The ship could be modified and outfitted in a variety of ways and if it couldn’t he could always rent one and provide a fake ID for it.  The years just passed by like the flashing of the stars overhead; constant and unnoticed after a while.  It was usually some pirate chieftain getting revenge on another, a wealthy business client knocking off a rival, a smuggling deal gone sour, political revolutions.  Nothing but a world of hate and indifference.  Just more empty space.

There was a scraping noise and a slight thud.  He blinked and focused his eyes.  The light had stopped it’s flickering, crewman nobody had finished his repair.  The water was still running.  He waved his hand and it stopped.  He headed back to his room thinking of what was on the recording.  It had been Chase looking hard into the holo-lens and saying saying three words he hadn’t expected to hear:

“Come find me.”

He’d have his answers soon enough.