Prologue
Once, Long Ago, On A Planet Far Away, A Crew Of Very Bad Raider Mercenaries Crash Landed...
Stuck in Green City for five days too long.
This damn adventure started with a luxury cruiser with an arms array like that of the meanest dreadnaught he'd ever seen. His little gunboat had got shot up. With the ship's life resources damaged and leaking fuel into space, Boss was thankful his navigator found the slipstream to Dorsus and Bable's Skyport 6.
After assessing the damage, they realized they were short on money for repairs. Boss decided to create teams from his crew to hire onto local Under Leaders in the city. They'd make some money. Get repairs, get off the damned little planet and back into the sky where they belonged.
But the city of Bable had a constant influx of workers and idiots through their ports. The tax-free, undocumented positions he hoped for, the kind done right under local authorities' noses, were not to be found. He couldn't get a decent price for a single job. Before he knew it, his ship was sold for fees incurred, and he and his men were tagged and chased out of that city. Told not to return until they had credit to clear the tags.
His hand wanted to rub at the back of his neck where that tag sat, itching, itching, itching at his brain. They'd crossed a bridge into the next city, Tandem'dor, on foot. Two days in that city, with its spires reaching to the sky like the bony fingers of alien dead, he and the team kept their ear to the ground. Their best bet, still an Under Leader in need of temporary blood and muscle. Broke, always hungry, they robbed a couple of old ladies and drunk students on the main promenade just to get a meal and a place to sleep.
Then, Boss finally got his meeting. He woke up looking into the eyes of the quadrant's Under Leader, two of his own men missing, looking down the barrel of weapons that would disintegrate his DNA into untraceable dust.
His first thought had been,When the hell did those become available on the open space market?And the second was,it’s time to leave Tandem'dor. Hopefully alive.
Finally, after clinging to the barrel of the night train with the regular urchins and maggots of Steel Cities underbelly, they found work for half the crew in the city named for the color of its favorite resource, Green. Work in the mines. Work in the fields. Work in the machinery towers and downs–but it was all grunt and grind for half-cents, not fit for war heroes like himself and the men.
There was no other choice at hand.
With nothing to do in their off-hours, the former intergalactic pirate crew was drawn back to each other like magnets. Boss found his men every evening in Garden Square. The open area was a working man's all-hours kind of place, with shops, food, and alcohol. There was a park-let with benches and tables for sitting and complaining about the plight of life. Thick with pickpockets, too low on the Dorsus pedestal of who-had-what, it was the kind of city space Boss had occupied a hundred times in his life.
He knew what to watch for when it came to the pickpockets and grifters. Different planet, different culture, some of them not human, it didn't matter. Survival always had the same taste. He'd joined up with the Trenneth Corporation Fleet thinking to escape that particular flavor and rise in the ranks—make something of himself. A brainless kid then, Boss signed his life away. Made himself a slave instead of agreeing to something better. Trenneth Corp used him and thousands like him however they wanted—sent them into war zones to protect company interest, pumped them full of drugs and called it food. Kept him awake and alert for days at a time, obeying the command to kill.
Boss discovered he had a knack for the killing. There was only so far he could rise, but his successes earned him a modicum of respect, and made him a cohort leader.
A couple of years ago, some new biggity-big came to Trenneth's head and took over the entire company—wanted all the old shit cleaned out, replaced with clean, shiny, and new. Boss and the men who had survived job after job of Fleet dirty work watched from the sidelines, standing at attention while fresh troops boarded a new state-of-the-art frigate. The experienced soldiers were given a final paycheck with a tin gratuity for thanks. That was all, after twenty-fucking-five years of service.
It wasn't even enough to buy a ticket to the nearest human habitation.
So, he'd formed his own crew, called himself Boss, convinced everyone to use that last check to buy in on their own little ship. At least they had been taught how to get shit done, so Boss and his newly minted crew would do their own dirty work. Muscled in or hired on where necessary.
This current ten-hour day, week in, week out bullshit in Green was the life they'd tried to escape. The day-to-day, back-breaking empty that turned death into a hope.
Runk, his former navigator, dirt-covered from his underground job fixing breakdowns, eased himself onto the stone bench next to Boss with a creaky sigh of a dying man. They were the same age to the day and had served together under Trenneth Company policy the longest.
"Heard something over there, early," Runk said, tipping his head to indicate a booth on his right.
Busy staring at nothing, Boss didn't turn to look.
"Might be something for us," Runk continued. There was a gap in his teeth, giving his S's a slight whistle. While under the Trenneth Corporation's Fleet, food and medical was taken care of. It was all bland, but top quality. Runk had lost the tooth after they'd been booted out in a fight with a big berserker. The helmet and gear had not protected his face or right arm from the hand-to-hand combat. He'd come away missing that tooth and with his arm bent backwards.
"What you hear?" Boss asked.
"That guy there, he is a guide. He takes tours through the mountains to the Peace River Valley. This place is like no other. They got a special license to be there that goes back a few years. People there are isolated, and act like they don't know how to turn on a light. They do everything by hand. Real rustic and shit."
"You want to go on a tour, Runk?"
"No, sir, no. I had some time. Thought I'd check it out. This place is like that plummy little settlement the Corporation wanted us to take out. Y'know, quiet and isolated. Peaceful. Pacifists. Out all by themselves. With their food and their houses and their women."
Boss remembered. That place had been like a vacation. Trenneth dropped them and wanted it done in three days.
He and his crew swept in like a knife through butter. That little cluster of brick and wood called a town was out there alone, begging for it. No weapons, just pitchforks. Most of the people had not even resisted. They had set up a sweet little life right where Trenneth wanted to do some deep crust digging and their town was in the way, oh so innocent, so determined to escape the evil of the world only to land themselves in the worst of it.
Three days. They'd done the work in one. And by the time the shuttle came round to replace them with a cleaning crew and the survey team, Boss and his men used every hole of every female and a few of the boys, drank all the alcohol and medicinal herbs they could get their hands on, and dirtied all the clean feather beds with their filthy selves.
Mention of the place made his mouth water. "Here? Where? Every city has a fisheye camera for the authorities and where the pressed uniforms don't have eyes and response teams set up, the Under Lords have triple."
