The Nadeau Chronicle|Maine|

[Enkidu]

Brigands. Achille clucked. Nothing more generic, nothing more sordid. The station contained all the old archetypes of a piratical installation; hollowed clunkily out of a splintered cosmic fragment, the barrow lay pockmarked with the debris and detritus of over two centuries of intermittent pounding. Jagged crater marks balled where the micro-meteorites had punctured the scattered layers of the station's active shields; deep furrows where pulse lasers had charred into nothingness wide streaks of solid rock, deep wells where torpedoes had gouged surgical incisions before detonating into furious, twisting shockwaves. Nothing was compatible to anything else, and every piece of fuze, every coupling, was each other's grandfather. Like strapping a turbojet to a carthorse. Ventilation was dubious; the air quality nauseous, the tanks containing drinking water, heavy water, saline and sewage all seemed to be networked to the same sordid sequence of rotting plumbing. Naked tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen-charged compressed oil canisters cluttered the cargo bay, and the station bore with it the atmosphere of some form of megalomaniacal bazaar; just with more hydrogen bombs and less watermelons. Everything that was anything could be purchased here; from rope cutters to throat cutters from food to femurs, organs to orgasms. Marquis propaganda found itself stacked high against the walls, staring down the anarchists who kept themselves mostly to themselves. Here and there amongst the seething fraternity of One Eyed Petes who seemed to make up the majority of the station's temporary inhabitants, lay the odd Council academic, the odd agitator. Achille stepped well clear of the stand that advertised "discount nova torpedoes" in baker's dozens , and headed for the relative safety of the bar. At least in the presence of alcohol people'd be more preoccupied with frisking him than attempting to steal descriptor key for the Indigo's pressure chamber.



"Is this seat taken?" Achille calmly asked of the Norman-but-trying-not-to-appear-Norman separatist staring out of the observation plane. The man looked at him with a startled indignation before nodding his assent, hand cradling the stock of the unfamiliar mass of allumina and lethality that sat hooked to his thigh.

"What are you here for?"

"…It's not such a matter of what I'm here for, but where you've egressed from, ami."


The Norman nearly shot him through the face, then relaxed. "You've got some balls saying that after flying that imperial trash into here." He gesticulated quietly at nothing in particular. Achille shrugged.

"There are lynxes and then there are lynxes and then there are lynxes. You can count them in the hundreds of thousands regarding the GRP alone." The Burgundian stretched, calmly beheading a cigar between knife and thumb. "What of it?"

"Plenty of it. You're full of it, for one." He gestured with a hand more accustomed to a pistol grip than empty space or even a handshake. "Bloody sit down already."



Achille sat. "Aho, somebody with talk in them then." He countered.

"And bite - so what do you need hauling?"

Achille deliberated, and lit his cigar. "Do you purvey human cargo?"

"If that means in, well. Depends who's asking - and if the asker's you, you'd better bloody be a Norman; you a Norman?" He grinned, rhetorically.


Achille harboured no interest in boring this man into a coma with the narrative of his existence. "Yes." He smoked, voice laced with earnestness.


The man laughed, full-faced, full-teethed, truthfully confident yet pointedly fake. "Oh, I'm sure. Norman with a burgundian accent, right. You want to get shot? Now, I have no problem with that. Stand away, fork me a few and I'll make a fetching patten out of your grey fluids right over this blast shield here. What you're suggesting however, is going to get me shot. The scanners they've got on that gate, ooh, man. They can read your blood. See your guts. Tell you things about yourself, read your DNA like it's on CNS."

Achille didn't bother lecturing the gunslinger over how absolutely batpoop his hypothesis happened to be. "So you won't take me." He breathed, self-evidently snorting cigar ash.

The man leaned his boots against the table edge, and became a slab of reticence. "Go tug at yourself or something." He offered. "Only Normans get into Normandy, and only Normans ask. Y'see, I'm being neat to you." The smuggler grinned again, wide, moon-chinned. "Get out of Maine if you know where your head is."


Get out of Maine. Get out of Maine. Where the damnation are the bloody Corse?

---

THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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