///UNAUTHORIZED_TRANSMISSION///
I’m Orion Galatea. I do whatever the company needs me to do. Sometimes? They need a chemist. I’ve got a history working medical out in the rim-systems, so I’m happy to help. Sometimes they need me to run security on an NT station. Sometimes they leave me flapping in the wind, and I end up building a little food stall to try and brighten up people’s days.
But most times? Most times they need a cleaner.
Now I’m not talking about Janitorial duties, though I’m not above it. No, when I say “cleaner” I mean I’m the guy they send out when an asset needs to be permanently expunged. This can be a lotta things, for a lotta reasons. Wiping out a lost station in a blossom of fusion fire. Ending a Syndicate agent’s activities on a listening post in a hail of laser fire and well-placed breaching charges. That kinda thing.
It was on one such shift that I finally hit the job that got the better of me.
The shift had been going well so far. Mostly demolition jobs, cleaning out blobbed up hulls and making bank for the home station while I was at it. I grabbed a standard assassination mission as it popped up on the feed, and since I was flying solo I called in an old friend, Ulric Osterwise. Solid fella. Good moral compass (but I don’t hold it against him). He was working security that shift, so he was geared to assist, and agreed to come along on the job.
The ride over was calm. We knew what we were doing, and the only sounds on the shuttle were the sounds of Ulric switching his headset to incorporate my comm frequencies and me getting a spare las-pistol for my knight in crimson armor. We brought up the target details on the shuttle’s main screen. Ulyssa Duncan. Former NT assistant. Armed and dangerous. Nothing we couldn’t handle, or so we thought.
I brought the shuttle in to land at the derelict in a standard throttle down manoeuvre, and boy, was this derelict a blasted heap. Few of the station’s sectors had atmo, and fewer still sported functional powernets. Tracking the target’s likely location would have been a cinch even if she hadn’t neglected to turn off her GPS. But apparently our target had left it on. A trap? Or maybe she’d decided to make it easy on us. Either way, something had started to stink.
We blasted and cut our way through the derelict. A nest of Space-Adapted spiders, AKA Vaccnids had set up shop, and had multiplied on the corpses of the unlucky crewmembers that had once run the derelict station. Our arrival sent them into a feeding frenzy, and they clambered over each other to try and snap us up. We served as too costly a meal, however, and in no time at all we were climbing over the carapaced corpses of the station’s current residents, tracking our targets’ location.
The only sector of the station left with both power and atmosphere was the robotics facility at the far end of the station. It was odd. It looked like someone had been trying and failing to build a bluespace transmission array from all the scraps they could find or print on the still barely functioning lathes and fabricators. We were so taken aback at the display that we almost didn’t spot Ulyssa as we cut through the final internal wall to her little domain.
There was a moment of tense uncertainty. I’m used to going after hardened criminals. Fighting Syndicate agents, going up against people fighting tooth and nail to stay alive.
But Ulyssa? She was just standing there, eyes wide, holding an old, half-charged stun baton out. It wasn’t even on. Barely moving except to shake in fear.
We should have shot her. Quick laser, right between the eyes. She wouldn’t even have had time to feel fear.
But as Ulric and I stood there in the dark of the derelict, looking like a pair of hardsuit-clad nightmares covered in spider guts and scratch marks, neither of us made a move.
Tears in her eyes, Ulyssa began to speak. Crying out about Eridani 5. The tragedy that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. An entire planet rendered uninhabitable. Another reason to hate the Syndicate.
Or was it?
In a voice shaking with adrenaline and crackling with fear, Ulyssa explained why we were sent to kill her. The words tumbled out of her mouth like they had a mind of their own, and like the spiders infesting her station, Ulyssa wove us a tale.
NT caused the tragedy of Eridani 5.
NT and it’s damn cheap budget-cutting bureaucratic lethargy killed all those people.
And Ulyssa could prove it.
Ulric stood stoically as I talked her into handing over her weapon, and… She did. She just tossed it over to Ulric.
That shook me. More than anything she could say, that motion, that hysterically terrible move, proved she wasn’t a syndicate asset. No sleeper agent would give their only weapon up. It was the kind of bluff that you’d have to be suicidal to try.
Suicidal… Or untrained.
I ask her to let us cuff her and… She did.
I half-heartedly joked about not expecting that to work. Ulric let out a nervous laugh. Ulyssa was shaking like a damned leaf. I found myself trying to search for reasons to not do my duty. To find another way.
I could barely think straight as we walked into the derelict robotics facility’s medical bay. We knocked her out using anaesthetic gas. I think I’ll remember the way her eyes locked with mine as she lost consciousness until the day I die.
After the girl fell into unconsciousness, Ulric broke his silence.
“This doesn’t feel right”.
I wanted to round on him. Yell at him. Did he think I was a machine? Did he think that he was the only one feeling that way? What choice did we have!? If we left her alive, Centcom would know, and we’d be the next ones coming up on mission consoles to expunge as exommunicado from the company. They had a lock on her for as long as her heart was beating. No way to get out of this one without killing a girl for the crime of knowing something she shouldn’t.
I flash Ulric a look and he gets it. He’s good like that.
I think about my sister. Lily. She’s on Mars now. Valles Marineris University. She’ll be 21 in November.
Ulyssa’s about her age.
There was surgical equipment. Medication. A full modern suite. This wasn’t a thousand-year-old hunk.
I paused. I looked at Ulric. “We have options.”
Our eyes met, and I knew we were of one mind. The procedure to stop the girl’s heart long enough for her to be verified dead, releasing the lock on her vitals, would be difficult without killing her.
But with the equipment in that medbay, it was possible. Even for a backwater sawbones like me.
We got to work. To prevent brain damage I had Ulric waiting at the girl’s neck with a pair of Perfluorodecalin pens and subcranial micromanipulators.
I cut into her chest and began to work.
