[color=silver][h3][sup][sup]The I.S.P.S. [i]Cimeter[/i] docked as do all starships: slowly and then all at once.

As one speck among dozens crawling along the skyscape of Andrastea-1, going and coming, backing and forthing across the viewports—and bitting and byting no doubt across some security room's autologger screen also—it neither demanded nor deserved any extraordinary attentions: meandering no faster than a tailless asteroid or a satellite knocked adrift, its nav lights blinking out no more Lumens than another dim star, a routine log check raising little if any concern. No malice. No urgency. Just another dot among the millions and millions freckle-sprayed in every conceivable direction across the skin of the Black.

Likewise, as Andrastea-1's .beaconFire protocol locked on to the [i]Cimeter's[/i] autonav, and a few bursts of retroburn dampened its speed and corrected its tri-axial coords, and it coasted toward the hangar's burnshields smooth as imitation [i]foie gras[/i] butterknife-swiped across a crust of sourdough, coming into view was the perfectly unexceptional silhouette, spawned by the kind of unimaginative design ethos which inspires no songs—no wistful, sighing romances. Command bridge up and aft; gyroscopic gun towers jutting; em-sphere generators smoothed and flush and recessed. Sleek, aerodynamic for atmo work, yet stout, staunch, for the shrugging-off of orbit junk and other detritus. This too roused little scrutiny.

It was when the prow first slipped through the shields and the incinerated residue began to float therefrom in ashen heaps that the first among the hangar's worker-legions took notice. They did not concern themselves with the mess, tousled from the ship like snow off a skier coming in from the cold—the sweeper bots attended to that—no, instead these employees ogled what was left behind. A leprous shell of ablative plating, cratered with drift-junk impacts, scorched and slagged where a chance few lucky particle shots had bypassed the em-shields. Began the speculation, the whispers, that the [i]Cimeter[/i] had even survived a blow from a N.E.M.E.S.I.S. gun (a glancing blow, but nonetheless)—a great gash running fore-to-aft along the portside bilge, huge and jagged and gaping—for no other weapons came to mind, and indeed very few existed in realspace, which could inflict such devastation as that which the [i]Cimeter[/i] wore like a battle-wound. In all a ship as pocked and scarred as its crew no doubt, shaking off this cosmic dust the way a well-traveled stranger steps into a saloon, and yet here it was, all but sauntering into their little glorified refueling station. Those expecting trouble examined the murderous black paintjob—what remained of it—made their excuses, retreated toward the neutrino poisons aisle or the stabilized xenon kits, buried their noses in busiwork as if restocking this-or-that pallet and taking here-and-there inventories was all the sudden the most important and noble task in all the galaxy. Others remained unfazed; or at least too curious to be unfixed from where they stood. They wanted to see for themselves what kind of crew chases down that kind of trouble—shot at with such intensity and such frequency that they hadn't the time, or the heelies, or the simple patience to keep their armor shipshape. (Not mentioning what kind of stim psycho banks in range of a hostile N.E.M.E.S.I.S. gun and lives.) They weren't gawking, these hangar workers. Never gawking. Their furtive glances they stole sidelong; and they measured well their distances from the landing pad. Not so close as to invite the instigations of whoever was even then stepping down from the boarding plank (depressurizing with a hiss, hydraulics whining). Yet still near enough to see. To overhear.

Little did they know that behind his unconcerned swagger and his unflappable smile, Captain Zardok of the [i]Cimeter[/i] observed them likewise. In fact he had gleaned quite a bit about them—about their operation—from the moment he swiped a match across his moonboot and lit a cigar.

His skin matched his ship's: swart and starburnt, striped and streaked with pinkish wounds; some fresher than others. These however were his only embellishments, the rest of him unassuming, unceremonious. No medals or patches or any other insignia. His dark, thick hair cropped short, not for style but for keeping a good seal on his atmosuit helmet. A pleather duster, as scratched and shabby as its wearer, guarding the joints and pivots of said suit from the ubiquitous regoliths and lunar dusts. Zardok's rictus-grin didn't falter. Not as he took his first deep breath of atmo in maybe two weeks, maybe more (not month-old farts pumped out of the cabins and scrubbed and pumped back in in a closed loop but real air, clean, decent air, or as clean as it got out here). Nor as he noticed the station wagies staring, trying to figure him out, chewing on him like a bully stick. Not even as one of those wagies barked at him to put out the cigar, that it wasted oxygen and poisoned the air for everyone else and besides, didn't he know there were dangerous chemicals always venting around, some of them volatile others flammable, was he some kind of idiot? Zardok simply shrugged, did as told—and kept on smiling all the while. Maybe whatever extrasolar radiation had singed his skin to that queer shade of dirty-engine-oil brown it had also shrunk the muscles in his face; raisined his brain. Or maybe he was ruminating on the hiss, the flare-up leaping from his match (the O[sub]2[/sub] enrichment levels); the way the cigar smoked blobbed and billowed outward (the station's art-grav and air pressure settings); and of course the security protocols, amounting to little more so far than a few teenagers at their first-ever part-time jobs, still swallowing all the training video mantras, still spewing the company slogans. Utterly unaware of who they really worked for.

Zardok gave the air another taste to be sure—smack, smack—fresh, dry, a little floral; like candied violets.

Snuffing the cigar against the durasteel plates lapped over his barreled chest, he dropped it into the handwarmer pockets of his duster, into which his balled hands followed. He walked with unhurried purpose. Catching in his leery gaze the CCTV glint up in the ceiling corners, following their circuitry into the greebling of the walls, these converging at a single point and terminating in a kind of panopticon which monitored the entire hangar from some three stories up. Zardok gave a mirthful little skip, even clicked his heels, but found the grav conditions lacking: a hair too strong to just boost himself up there and melt through the smoky aluminum glass. So he exited across the hangar, left his ship to its fate in the hands of the underpaid attendants and fixmongers. Strolled his way through the first employees-only door to throw a warning flag in his face: [I]I.D. REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT — TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE[/i] yadda yadda, blah, blah. He marveled at how easy it was. A little too easy. Even the elevator wasn't hard to find: a corridor, a switchback, a scanner which didn't prompt him for the aforementioned employee card, buttons which didn't trace his bios through the cross-osmotic membranes of his gloves. Already cracked. Already disabled. Hmm. A bad feeling by then was coalescing in Zardok's gut, and a bad feeling meant out came the nailer from his thigh holster once the doors had closed behind him. He checked the magazine and the pressure gauge, tucked himself behind the doorwell, reached up to the side of his face where he pressed the button hidden in his temple, activating the RetNet visor shrouded over his right eye. He started recording; pushed the relay through to the central closed-server node transceiving from the [i]Cimeter[/i]. Didn't sense any sniffing or tunneling afoot as the first packets went out. Good. The bounty having a real-deal coderunner under his employ would have complicated things considerably. But there was still the security room; the cameras and the alarms and the maglocks.

The doors opened and Zardok ejected himself from the elevator, standing then in a cleaner, more garnished kind of employee area. Not clogged with Engineering's vent and pipework confluences, not with IT's wire nests and server farms but with conference rooms. Human Solutions offices. Break areas with bad coffee and stale lemon loaf and imitation potted plants standing plump and erect in wads of very real coconut rusk. Whatever office supply storage rows and cubicle corridors he walked in search of a late-night manager shredding CVs at a pulpwood desk, all the usual slogans slathered the walls. In every direction every format every font.

[i]Welcome to a Culture of Caring — refer a friend into our family and earn up to* a ħ50,00 bonus!

Great Benefits, Competitive Pay, & Flexible Hours — We're Here to Help You [b]Thrive[/b].

Driven by Values; Powered by People.[/i] And so on. He couldn't help but grimace, which to his rictus-stricken features meant only the faintest downturn in the corners of that pig-iron grin.

"Can I help you find something?"

Hurriedly stowing the nailer within his coat, somewhere beneath his opposite armpit, Zardok turned to face whoever had caught him sniffing about. Much to his relief this figure wore the frumpy trappings of middle management: an ill-fitting lapel jacket over her standard-issue Mackee's boilersuit, her left breast emblazoned with the chipmunk-cheeked and eminently punchable countenance of the chain's beaming mascot. Were it not for her weary and ragged expression Zardok might have made the mistake of speaking to the patch and not the person forced, by threat of corrective action, to brandish it for every minute of her every 6.49-hour shift. The ones who said shit like "If you've got time to lean...," who guh-hyucked a bit too hard at their subordinates' wisecracks, who sighed and nodded in solidarity at the very same grievances they'd turn around and relay to their bosses later—those were the ones gave Zardok the shivers, more like feeding queries into a particularly convincing droid than conversing with a natch.

"Well, sure!" he wheedled, grateful for the strands of hair fallen out from her dress code-compliant bun, the bags under her eyes, the milky-coffee-tinge to her teeth. These were the little things what broke the Turing test, telling him there was someone in there still worth pitying. "I'm the new muscle Van Zantz sent for. You could point the way for me."

"He's not here," said this burnt-out thirty-something. "Doesn't leave the upper levels much at all in fact." Zardok scoured her features for any sign of relief—or if not relief then anxiety, terror, any reaction whatsoever to that name—did she fear him?—hope her prayers had been answered?—did the gang even prey on people like her, the drones that is, or were they only operating down in the bathrooms, the greasy spoons, the drydocks, these two worlds coexisting without ever colliding?—nothing. At least nothing he could glean from this insipid little meetcute. Unreadable as a mossy old Buddha.

" 'Course. Everyone knows [i]that,[/i]" he sighed with a twinkle in his teeth, continuing the gambit. (After all it had gotten him this far.) "I meant he told me when I arrived I'd be checking in with the boys in the peep-room. Gotta get briefed before I can get started."

She turned and gestured, the cheap synthetics of her jacket violinning the cheap synthetics of her boilersuit, their music swishy and shrill. "Right...down that hallway. The double doors shouldn't be locked but you can come and fetch me if they are."

"I just might. Thanks." Zardok took his first few steps, then planted, pivoted. Met her stare with his again. More to learn. More he needed to know. "Oh, hey. Between you and me. If those boys find out it was the cutie downstairs waved me through, I'm not getting you into hot water, am I?"

"With Van Zantz or with my bosses?"

Bingo. "Either, or, all of the above."

"He doesn't touch us. Says employees are off-limits," she said. "Doesn't stop the occasional shakedown so some fiender can score a fix, but once Zantz finds out, suddenly there's no more fiender. Someone finds him the next day strung up by his guts."

"You're deliciously calm about all this. Is it really that safe with us gangers running amok? Or has working corpo just got you jaded?"

"You? Dangerous?" She shook her head with a belabored smirk. "Nah, Zantz just knows they'll send someone in to 'handle' him if they start receiving a million and one claims all from the same franchise. Comprehensive for the robbery, medical for the injuries, whatever."

This mousy little thing really had it all figured out, didn't she? And so did the quarry for that matter. Zardok couldn't help a laugh escaping his roomy lungs. "Sounds like a lot has changed since his Tytania days. Well. I've got more to learn than I thought."

"That you do," she teased. "I'm Krynn, by the way."

"Vakar." He reached for that errant strand of hair; pulled away mere centimeters from tucking it behind the alabaster folds of her ear. "Oops. Almost forgot. Look, don't touch, right?"

"You're awful."

"That I am. Unfortunately, I'm also in a bit of a hurry." Zardok smiled wider if that was possible; tipped a hat he wasn't wearing. "You have a good night now, Krynn. You've been mighty helpful."

"Mm. Sounds like we'll be seeing each other," she said. "You should start thinking of ways to repay me."

Making his way to the second elevator Zardok was all coquetry; all glances and chuckles and little flutters of his fingers. Once inside, with the sliding doors closed behind him, he exhaled with something resembling relief. He drew and checked the nailer again—the first dart glinting at the top of the magazine, good PSI readings on the tank—not because he didn't trust his equipment. Really it was more habit than anything. A kind of ritual of his.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]