An Unrefusable Offer (Part 2)
Posted on Sat Dec 14th, 2019 @ 2:36pm by Fordyce Kirschler PhD
Mission:
Mission 10 - Temperance
Location: Various, Lithios Prime
Timeline: MD 10 01:54
1518 words - 3 OF Standard Post Measure
Previously, in "An Unrefusable Offer (Part 1)"...
"The Bank appreciates your efforts thus far on Lithios Prime. But we have need of your services one final time before extrication. The Primarch has been an invaluable associate to the bank, but we have need of an item in his possession. We anticipate he will be reluctant to part with it. Our agents have planned an operation to acquire the item. Follow the instructions precisely, and you should be fine, barring any extenuating circumstances. No delays, doctor. Bex out."
And now, the continuation…
The files Lucienne sent turned out to be a pretty big data package, so he queued it all up in a text-to-voice program on his wrist device for playback while he walked to the destination outlined for him. He'd been working with incorporating nanites in the synthetic leatherwear that was generally his clothing of choice, and he'd managed to figure out how to program them to make the clothing water resistant. He got a little thrill out of seeing his hard work in action - the rain was sliding right off his hat and his clothes. Underneath, he was warm and dry, which meant a couple miles worth of walking in the rain could be comfortable, informative, and maybe even meditative.
The first file was the largest, and it detailed his escape plan. It was some of the craziest shit he'd ever heard, which made him eager to dive right into it and get the hell off Lithios Prime. The second one outlined how he was supposed to lift The Item from the Primarch. He was a little less eager about that one given the likelihood of weapons fire. It looked like it was being stored in a high security complex in the government district, which made sense. But it also made him nervous. He was an engineer, a roboticist, a programmer, even a criminal. He wasn't much of an undercover operative, though.
Before long, the walk got his blood pumping and his mind working. And since it seemed like he was going to be able to make a clean break with the Lithians and evade the Starfleet blockade in orbit, he figured there was little harm in conducting some side business. So he stopped the text-to-voice playback and started tapping into the contacts he'd made on the planet. He didn't want to mess with the official government - somebody might decide they didn't value their relationship with the Bank of Bolias enough not to whack him if his name kept popping up and reminding the wrong people of his presence - so he jumped feet first into his connections with the criminal syndicates.
Notorious for its street gangs, Lithios Prime had an active "underworld" that was tolerated if not occasionally encouraged by the authoritarian regime running the planet. The bosses of the two gangs in Ford's district - Dijkstra the Funhouse and Iron-Arse Maarten - had been more than pleased when he offered up his services as a mechanical sawbones. It kept their cyborg boys out of the government clinics, off the books, and patched up to carry out their never-ending battle for control of this block or that block. The whole 'territory' thing was pretty asinine, but the battles for it had been keeping his pockets heavy with latinum and his knowledge of bio-tech interface sharp. So he tried not to care so much about who was frying whose circuits and just focused on patching them up.
Most of the way to the government district he spent working out a deal with someone from Dijkstra the Funhouse's outfit. (Iron-Arse Maarten had earned his iron-arsed reputation, and Ford didn't want to take the time or trouble to try to negotiate with him for moving goods off-planet.) When it was all said and done, he had a verbal agreement worth sixty-seven bars of gold-pressed latinum to move something of unknown provenance past the Starfleet blockade to a rendezvous on a rogue moon turned pirate outpost in the Francien Nebula. With a little extra bounce in his step, he stepped off the sidewalk and ducked into one of the many cafes in the government district.
He ordered the house brew - an earthy smelling drink that he thought might be a distant cousin to peat moss - and slumped down into a window seat. He reactivated the text-to-voice program and let it roll back to the first file, pumping information directly into his cochlear nerve. When the file finished, he queued it up again. And a fourth time after, making sure to reference schematics and other visual data displayed on his wrist device.
Theft required preparation.
The case in his right hand felt especially heavy as he walked back to his flat. The whole operation had gone textbook. In fact, it had gone so textbook that he'd started to get paranoid and think it was a trap. Maybe he'd tripped a sensor back at the entrance. Maybe Lucienne Bex was tired of him. Maybe the item itself was a time-delayed explosive. But literally nothing had gone wrong, as occasionally happened for him. Sometimes you infiltrated a heavily guarded facility, lifted a single unknown item of extreme importance, and walked away with no consequences. Not often, but sometimes.
At this hour, the thinned out streets were almost completely silent, which didn't do much for his nerves. Every footfall sounded like the Primarch's darksuit thugs trailing him, even though he knew there was no one behind him. By the time he got to his flat, which doubled as a workshop, it had stopped raining. But the air still felt oppressive and thick like it could start again at any moment. That was the general atmosphere of this swampy planet, but he felt it bearing down on him especially hard knowing he had stolen property on him.
The alley leading to his rental space was dark, illuminated only by the holographic sign at one end. He really hated that damn sign. The owner was too cheap to fix the holoemitters so it made a kind of buzzing sound; of course, the guy was so thick-skulled that he probably couldn't hear it, but it kept Ford up at night. Drove him crazy. That constant buzzing. Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
There was a shadow in his doorway, somebody waiting for him. But then again, he knew that. He'd known that for the past five minutes thanks to the device in his pocket. It ran on some pretty remarkable predictive A.I. software that tapped into the city's traffic sensor network. It identified and tracked humanoids and calculated the likelihood that they would need to use his alley as a shortcut or to access one of the back entrances of a business on the block. Anything over a 60% probability that they had no business walking down his dark alley triggered an alert for him. Half the time they were drifters or some clueless mook who didn't have the sense to stay out of dark alleys on Lithios Prime. But sometimes they were the kind of people that needed to eat a disruptor bolt. So, in those cases, he was thankful for the device.
At the doorway, he stopped. Two men huddled in the corner. He could smell synthetic fluid, charred flesh, and something strangely chemical. Ford pulled something out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He pulled a tab on the end of the Lithian smokestik and the flash briefly illuminated the two faces - one looked like shit, and the other one really looked like shit. Both were easily identified as Dijkstra the Funhouse's boys from the tattoos on their temples.
He'd never gotten the point of inking yourself like that. Why'd you wanna roam the streets announcing your allegiance to everybody and their mom? Only kids wanted to do that shit, strut around with their ink and their chests puffed out like they had a pair of balls the size of a Tarkalian unx. Ford thought it was better to play it safe, keep your cards close to your chest. The longer nobody knew who you belonged to, the longer it'd take 'em to decide whether or not to shoot you. It gave you the opening to shoot first.
A long drag on the smokestik made his eyes water a bit; he exhaled the waste product through a narrow aperture between his lips that funneled it into a long thin stream. He punched in the code to open the door, scanned his thumb, scanned his retina, all the other bullshit that didn't amount to anything for a dedicated software jockey hellbent on getting into his lousy building, and grunted at the two men once the door slid open.
"Run into a little trouble on the way over, boys? Bring him in. But don't let him leak on my damn floors."
OFF::
Dr. Ford Kirschler
Engineering Consultant
Bank of Bolias
