Penny

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

June Bug Cyckali was a methodical woman and although she was capable of acting with instant and complete brutality, she preferred to consider her options when the opportunity arose. So it was that she first considered drawing the shock rod she had concealed in her boot, the shock rod which had so easily evaded the earlier pat down, and beating the would be pilot, her would be pilot she supposed, into twitching unconsciousness. It was unfeasible for a number of reasons. There was no way of knowing how Gorlan's people would react to a sudden movement and a concealed weapon. The fact that she could not herself fly a ship also loomed large in the list of flaws and although she could probably find another pilot, this one did have a perfect right to be here under the terms of the contract.

"You aren't impressed by my generous inclusion of the weaponry Captain?" Gorlan asked with an arched eyebrow.

"Seems a little pricey at the cost of 50 percent of the ship," Sayeeda replied in a flat tone. Grolan laughed and slapped his paunch in the traditional Hodiernan gesture of a point having been scored. His skin, an unhealthy pallor at the best of times, was beginning redden from exposure to the intense sun.

"Well in any case," the Broker wheezed, "My people have loaded everything you will need into the ships computer. You should lift before sundown." Junebug arched an eyebrow.

"In a hurry to be reunited with your son?" she asked sarcastically. Gorlan chuckled again.

"My dear Sayeeda my heart breaks with every moment I am apart from him," Gorlan theatrically put a hand to his forehead like a Calian pantomime. Then the amusement drained from his face as quickly as it had come.

"More practically if I have discovered my bastard whelps location, then others will have well, there are others who would use what he knows against me. Lift by sunset or the deal is off." With that he spun on his heel and walked away into the shadowed interior of one of the warehouses, wiping at his face with a dirty handkerchief he had produced from somewhere.

"If we are quite done playing with the hardware, we ought to get to work," Sayeeda said, a slight coolness creeping into her tone despite her best effort. She extended one of her hands, palm still covered by the fingerless shooters gloves.

"I am Captain Sayeeda Cyckali," she introduced herself.

@POOHEAD189

The Sunday Group

I have spent nearly a decade of my life in tertiary education of various sorts! I cant make it on the outside.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Sayeeda smirked at the suggestion that she might occasionally be forced to do a little shooting. Heaven forbid. It was good that he was thinking about weaponry though, particularly if this Sarvan was anything as big a ratfuck as it sounded. It had to be bad to be worth half a ship to a Penny pinching bastard like Gorlan.

"Alright," Sayeeda said after a few moments.

"I suppose you have a deal." She thrust out her arm in Rhuani style and Gorlan clasped her forearm and shook once. The sharklike grin grew wider and she couldn't help but feel that whatever they were getting into on Sarvan was worse than he was letting on. Still this wasn't a completely negative turn of events, this sounded like just the sort of work she had imagined doing and she tried not to let the fact that she had essentially been tricked into it sour her completely.

"Now if you will follow me..." Gorlan said, gesturing grandly and leading the way out of the hanger. The guards trailed along, keeping wary eyes on Sayeeda as they did so. The outside light was blinking after the hangar and the air was redolent with the sour smell of spices. A large tractor rolled passed, disel engine coughing black smoke as it hauled a load of freshly cut... something into one of the other warehouses.

Very few moments in Sayeeda's life had taken her breath away but the sight that beheld her as the walked around the corner of one of the vast prefab warehouses did. Sitting on concrete which had long ago cracked under the hammering of starship engines was a vast metal vessel. The ship was perhaps fifty meters from its pointed nose to its squat box like stern with two pairs of engines mounted along the frame, each the size of a small armored vehicle. It wasn't new or shiny, its dull grey finish was scuffed and burned, and here and there rust stains ran down the points where rain must have drained off her when she was on the ground, but she was undeniable a star ship. Stenciled on the side in large block letters was the name UAK-S21 HIGHLANDER. For a moment all she could do was stare in awe, since the day Andor had made himself President of Kylura, more through bullets than ballots it was true, and disbanded the unit she had dreamed of owning her own ship. Now here she stood in the shadow of her very own, or mostly her own, vessel.

"By the Gods blood," she said, her eyes drinking in the sight.

"By the Gods blood."

@POOHEAD189

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Name: Sayeeda Cyckali

Nickname(Optional): June Bug

Age: 33

Gender: Female

Physical Appearance: Sayeeda is a medium sized woman of middle eastern extraction. She has the wiry build of a swimmer or long distance runner. Her eyes are dark and almond shaped and focus slightly beyond the horizon most of the time. Sayeeda keeps her hair just longer than a buzz cut in order to facilitate wearing her helmet. She has a large tattoo of several owls in flight on her right shoulder. Sayeeda does have feminine curves but her breasts are on the smaller size of average and she does very little to emphasize her gender.

Clothing: Camo pants and a tank top are her civilian dress. She wears a ceramic breastplate if she is expecting trouble and also has a commo helmet which she uses in battle and for technical tasks.

Personality: Sayeeda is a former mercenary soldier and has a fairly relaxed view towards life. Anything and anyone not currently shooting at her is the second priority. She is very tightly wound when it comes to people doing what she expects them too in dangerous situations and she is extremely punctilious when it comes to fulfilling any sort of formal contract.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

The pat down the guards administered was prefuntary. Both men, slack jawed and sweating in the heat of a tropical afternoon, looked bored and a little disappointed that the visitor's body armor deprived them of the opportunity for a more intimate examination. The guards, it would have been a mistake to call them soldiers, wore jungle pattern fatigue pants and light shirts of some local cotton. The camouflage was much too dark to be effective in Hodierna’s bilious green foliage and had clearly been manufactured off world. That hardly mattered of course, as the point of the uniforms was not to conceal the gun men, but to draw attention to the fact that they were gunmen.

“She’s clean,” the taller of the two men muttered as though the notion offended him. He had a short greasy goatee that he probably imagined made him dashing. The other soldier, a slimmer blonde man nodded and made a show of keying his radio.

“Guest coming in to see the boss,” he said with a surly glower.

“Thank you gentlemen,” Sayeeda ‘Junebug’ Cyckali responded magnanimously and stepped through the improvised checkpoint in the coiled barbed wire fence. She was a medium sized woman with vaguely middle eastern features, although such things mattered little outside the few original Terran colonies which still maintained notions of genetic purity. Her hair was dark and cropped short like a man’s and her skin, darkened by more suns than she could remember was the dark brown of strong coffee. A tan ceramic breastplate was buckled across her chest, its once smooth finish scuffed and burned in places. Her dark arms were bare save for fingerless shooters gloves on her hand and for where an owl tattoo slipped beneath the ceramic surface at her shoulder.

The compound that Sier Gorlan had directed her too was not a prepossessing place. It consisted of a dozen or so ugly building, mostly prefab concrete warehouses of a very generic type. A berm of earth had been erected around the complex with bulldozers and then sprayed with a plasticizer to harden the loose packed soil. Whatever they had used gave the soil an unpleasant purplish opalescence. Although the berm was topped with razorwire Junebug guessed that it was more of an attempt to contain a crashing starship crash than a serious attempt to defend the place from more than thieves and local racketeers. Not that those weren't real enough threats on a world like Hodierna of course.

One of the gumen trotted along beside her long legged stride, a look of irritation on his face.

“Slow down their missy,” he whine in a suprisingly nasal voice.

“Listen pongo, if you want to explain to your boss why I am late for me meeting thats your look out right but I doubt he is going to take it to kindly,” she said in her clipped Bahasa. Many worlds, including Hodierna, used Bahasa as their primary trade language. Junebug had heard that it had its roots in ancient Indonesian but who the fuck knew. For her it was one of a score of languages she had learned via sleep induction in jump space. Mercenaries could be expected to do business all over the human galaxy and had to be able to converse with the locals to at least a basic level. Few mercs ever learned anything more than the standard knowledge cubes though because once you could order booze and buy companionship how much else did you really need?

They reached the warehouse without further incident and to her surprise she saw that her host, or more accurately his guards, were holding a young men down while *BLANK* finished speaking to him. He spun at the sound of her boots ringing on the concrete and smiled an oily self satisfied smile.

Sayeeda’s eyes scanned the warehouse and the occupants. The guards were a step above the trash at the gates but they weren’t up to the standard of professionals. Ex millitary or perhaps ex gendarmerie judging by their stances. The plasma rifles got her attention. Plasma rifles were a first rate weapon, not to dissimilar from the models she had used during nearly a decades service with the Andor’s Armored. Colnel Andor, President for Life Andor as he now styled himself, had been an asshole, but he made sure his troops never wanted for good equipment. Plasma rifles fired bolts of electron stripped ions, usually copper but occasional strontium. The weight was very low but even a micrograms packed a hell of a punch when accelerated to lightspeed down the mirror polished barrels of a plasma weapon. The drawback, especially on less developed worlds was the ammunition. Unlike simpler chemical or electrochemical weapons, manufacturing the poker chip like rounds was a high technology endavour and that made them expensive to run. Plus you hadn’t lived until you had an automatic weapon jam and several megajoules of plasma cook off and gangfire a few meters away. Junebug had lived, in both senses of the term.

“Ah Captain Cyckali Gorlan,” said in his oily, salesmans voice, “we were just talking about you.” From his gesture as well as from context she assumed he meant the man his guards were currently keeping pinned. He was a nondescript man, she guessed in his mid twenties and he had an air of competence about him even being held at gunpoint. What he had to do with her she had no idea.

“Ok,” she said noncommittally, folding her arms across her chest. Whatever reaction Gorlan had expected this was clearly not it because his face soured at the lack of reaction. He glanced at her in annoyance. Junebug’s dark intense eyes met Gorlan’s and the broker turned away first.

“I’m here for my ship,” she said bluntly, lifting her chin in the direction of the captive.

“Your other bussiness is none of mine.” Did Gorlanreally think she cared if he executed the man? She had seen, and done, much worse and more besides. The oily grin seeped back on to the brokers face like petroleum spreading over a puddle.

“Ah but this is your business Captain Cyckali, indeed it concerns you intimately.” Junebug kept her arms folded and said nothing, forcing Gorlan to go on awkwardly. She had been a Captain in the Armored but the job of leading others into battle was probably not something this snide bussiness man could really understand.

“You see this is the new part owner of your ship,” the broker said with a grin. Again Junebug didn’t react giving the news a few seconds to sink in before responding.

“I’m not looking for a partner,” she said because the sitaution clearly dictated some sort of a response. Mentally she was gauging distances to the guards, wondering if disarming them would be practical. If they hesitated for more than a heartbeat it might be possible, use Gorlanas a shield and take the weapon from the closest man. It wasn’t a good move though, not without more motivation than she currently had to risk it.

“Ships are expensive things, Captain and as you said yourself you need a crew. I believe your credits will be sufficient to obtain a thirty five percent share in the Highlander. This good gentleman,” he paused to kick the younger man although his shoes didn’t really lend themselves to the job, “can contribute fifteen percent. Giving the two of you a joint fifty percent share.”

“With you remaining a fifty percent partner?” she asked, arching a dark eyebrow.

“A senior partner yes,” Gorlan said with a simpering smile. He held up his hands as if placating her. Junebug began to wonder if he had practiced these lines before hand. He certainly seemed happier to be back on script.

“Of course I will give you a chance to buy out my interest in the venture. Fair is fair of course.”

Junebug considered it, the last thing she wanted was to be tethered to a slimy bastard like Gorlan, on the other hand, once she was in space, possession could be ten tenths of the law.

“I should point out before you make any hasty decisions Captain that this… excellent fellow, is a qualified pilot, and quite a good one I have heard.”

“And if I decided to take my credits and go?” she asked, her voice level and emotionless. Gorlan spread his hands wide, his teeth gleaming like a Caldovian Shark.

“Why you are of course free to do so Captain, but let me assure you that you wont find a ship on Hodierna or anywhere else in the sector cheaper than this, I’ve uh made enquires on your behalf you see.” He meant, of course, that he had made it known that he would be professionally displeased if any other ship dealer sold them a ship and he had enough clout to make the treat a credible one. Even if she found someone willing to risk his wrath, it would drive the price up well beyond her meager means. She was silent for a long moment, five seconds, ten, then she turned her attention to the young man.

“Well, how about it kid?”

@POOHEAD189

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Awww I'm sorry. Here I am ruining perfectly fine discussions on how Chinese people pollute the pure blood of Belarus and how, sure, Nazis are bad, but the real problem is a radical conspiracy of alt left LARPers. I'm going to go home and think about what I did!

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@The Harbinger of Ferocity Will do!

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

You can mock, belittle, poke fun at

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

Sure can! Now if you will excuse me I'm late for my satanic sex party at George Soros' house where we plot a new world order that is simultaneously atheistic and hard core Islamist.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

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Have you learned nothing from this thread?

@Dynamo Frokane

Don't tell anyone, but I am a member of this secret leftist conspiracy so I have to push the validity of CNN wherever I can

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

My God you are right! All the pieces fit! I'll be on 4chan warning everyone.