I proceeded through the door to the Hab deck. I could hear Rhys bust out in laughter as the door closed behind me. He said something along the lines of, “Jenz?! Who names their kid, Jenz!?” The sound of laughter faded the further from the Engineering Deck I got. I finally reached the cockpit. Daymar wasn’t that far away. To think, he’d not been far this entire time. We would be arriving within a few seconds. I readied myself at the controls. Once the navigation system released them, we’d be on our way to the Caterpillar.
We reached the wreck site without further incident. The poor Cat was in three pieces. There was no way we were recovering this thing. It was indeed a total loss. I was already starting to see a pattern here. Not one I liked, either.
I landed the Corsair next to the Caterpillar. The terrain was fairly smooth in the place where it had come to rest. The ground had deep ruts dug in it from the impact of the ship. It had apparently been shot down. Rhys and I exited the Corsair through the rear ramp. We closed it behind us, just in case Rothschild was around. We wouldn’t want a replay of the first time, would we?
I climbed inside one of the Cat’s cargo bays. Module Bay 02 was stenciled on the outside of this part of the wreckage. Crawling through was a fairly difficult process. The Caterpillar itself, being mostly hollow, had been reduced to mangled debris. Even the Command Module hadn’t escaped. Rhys went on ahead of me, exploring further back into engineering, toward the ship’s access elevator. That was when he called out to me, “Alexis… get in here. We have a problem.”
I sidled along the same twisted path that Rhys had done just moments before. Shifting between torn deck plating and twisted support beams was the hard part, the easy part was dropping down out of the elevator hatch. There was a nice convenient body there to break my fall! A body? Rhys? I took a closer look as I was getting up. I was right up in his face after all. Definitely a he, as there was a five o’clock shadow on his face through the shattered visor of his helmet. It was Rothschild. Johan S Rothschild III. The son of Johan The Binary Butcher. Next to him, was a flight group patch. One I recognized, matter of fact. It belonged to the Grimlin Space Corps.
I picked up the patch. On the back of it was affixed a data card and a handwritten sticky note. I studied the patch first. It was indeed one of ours. An older patch, but it was still worn by some of our longer standing members. I furrowed my brow, confused. Who in our organization would do this? Better yet, we were the only two from the Corps in Stanton, as far as I knew. I’d sent most of the crew home on our Ironclad. This was getting more odd by the second.
Then, I read the note.
“You took him from me, so I’m taking everything from you. This is just the beginning, Grimm. Hope you’re ready. You should be used to the consequences for murder!”
— Hawk
I was. Only one problem, I hadn’t committed this one. Who the fuck was ‘Him’? I ran back into the Caterpillar as fast as I could, dropping the note in my wake. I put the data card into a, still functioning, terminal in the habitation deck. It flickered a few times as it tried to read the card, however it did eventually do so. What I saw chilled me. They’d pinned the entire thing on me. The murder of Rothschild, the theft of a prized Marok Gem, and the destruction of a Military M2 Hercules with all hands aboard, many had failed to regenerate. I was pretty sure that wasn’t us. What the hell? Just what I fucking needed.
Rhys arrived in the Caterpillar holding the note. He took one glance down at the screen, “Oh shit, Alexis. This isn’t good.” It held a dossier on nearly our entire organization. If what I was reading was correct, then this information had already been sent to all parties involved. Our identities, all that they had known, were disclosed to UEE Law Enforcement and the Gloves. According to this data card, things were about to get even more unwelcome for us in Stanton.
I sighed, my hand dropping to my side from the terminal, “Rhys…. Get us out of here. After the events of the day… I need a nap.” The trip back to the Corsair was a somber one. We’d lost fifty some-odd cases, at 8 SCU each, of Distilled Spirits. That was going to set us back quite badly on the ledger. It would take us months to procure that amount again. I needed a drink and a nap.
We made it back to the ship, and I dragged myself the whole way to my quarters at the front of the ship. My muscles ached from the events of the day, I needed a shower, but it would have to wait. I was too tired to even try. I accessed the storage drawer under my bed, removing a dose of Roxaphen. I gave myself the medpen; it activated with a hiss and a click. The familiar feeling of the inflammation in my muscles subsiding was nice. I tended to overdo it, hence the need for the stuff. Human bodies are only meant to withstand so much.
My head hit the pillow soon after, my body following in an exhausted heap. The vibrations of Drake Interplanetary’s engines lulled me into a gentle sleep…
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