"It ain't much, but it's honest work" aka "The freelancer's woes"

[Demonic]

Finnean MacRory
Waterloo station
9/19/830

---

Finnean’s first thought was he really overdid it with the drinking last night. His second thought was a confused realisation that he hadn't been drinking. His third thought was focused on his body and its inability to move. The fourth thought never came, because it was pushed out by a strong anxiety bordering on panic. Why does his head hurt like he got hit by a ship to ship missile? Why can’t he move his hands and feet? No, scratch that, why can’t he feel them? And why can’t he see anything even though his eyes are open?

For a few excruciating seconds, panic overtook all control and he thrashed around, desperately trying to move, to escape this nightmare. Then the panic waned, replaced by fear. Not a fear of something in particular but a more primal, encompassing, bone chilling fear, driven by the total lack of control and senses, nourished by the absolute lack of understanding. What has happened to him? What stripped him of his ability to move, to hear, see, feel and smell?

He sat there, frozen in darkness, for what felt like eternity, even though somewhere deep inside him, his pilot’s instinct for timing was telling him it wasn't more than a minute. Then, finally, something broke the total lack of everything. A female voice, coming seemingly from all around him. It was unsettling, and yet welcomed, for it showed him an important thing. He hasn’t lost his hearing, there simply was nothing to hear before.

“Ah, I see you are awake, mister.” said the voice. “Good. We feared you were dead for a moment.” Finnean tried to move his head, to figure out where the voice was coming from and, surprisingly, he was able to do so. Sure, he turned for maybe an inch to the left, but that was still a vast improvement over just a minute ago, when he could move at all.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You could fall over and break your neck. That would be a shame, don’t you think?” the voice warned him in an amused tone. “Don’t worry, you’ll recover. Eventually. Nasty things those modern stun guns, wouldn’t you say?” the women chuckled.

A stun gun. That explained the headache, paralysis and lack of feeling he was experiencing. He was never hit by a stun gun before, but he read about its effects. The descriptions were pretty spot on from what he could tell, though they didn’t really convey the intensity of the headache or the horror of not being able to move. That train of thought almost made him laugh at the absurdity. He had been stunned, abducted and he probably won’t survive the next few hours, and yet he mused about the inaccuracy of some article about stun guns he barely remembered.

The female voice pulled him back into reality.

“Now, if I may have your attention, mister. The effects of the stun will wear off and I want to tell you a few things before they do, so listen carefully, I don’t want to repeat myself. You stole from us. We want our shipement back. In about a minute or so, the paralysis should weaken enough for you to be able to speak. When it does, you’ll tell me where the cargo is. If you do, you might live. If you won’t, you will die. If you lie to me, you will suffer, and then you will die. So don’t lie. We’ll know.”

The panic was back. Stole from them? What in the hell was she talking about? He never stole, he never cheated, hell, he didn’t even lie… well, most of the time. Some small lies, maybe. But stealing? And from whom? Who were they? What cargo was stolen from them? Why did they think he, off all people, stole it?

He felt his feet and fingers tingle. The effects of the stun gun were indeed wearing off, just as the woman said. He mustered all the courage he had, what little he had, and managed to push a few worlds through his still half paralysed vocal chords.

“Didn’t… steal! Got… wrong... guy!”

Sharp pain manifested in his lower back and arced his spine in a way he wouldn’t think possible. His muscles cramped, jaws clenched, his word shrank into a nanoscopic, razor sharp needle, puncturing all his nerves at once. Then, as fast as it started, it was gone. He slumped and panted, feeling exhausted like he just ran a marathon around a space station.

“I told you you’ll suffer if you lie to me. But you still had to do it. That’s not smart.”

The woman's voice lost its smoothness, gone was the playful tone, now there was only anger and steel in it.

“Then again, you are not a very smart man after all, if you thought you could get away with pocketing our property. I’ll admit, your relocation to Bretonia threw us off at first. So did renaming the ship. But you forgot one thing. We have a complete scan of your ship’s emissions. That serenity you moored at dock six is the same one which ran away a month ago with our crates. We found the ship that took our cargo and so we found our thief. You. So drop the act and spill the beans. Where. Is. The. Shipment?”

Finnean’s mind raced. Month ago? But he didn’t have the ship then. Hell, Ol’Reliable was his for little under two weeks! And then it clicked. All the little oddities about the ship he could explain, the enthusiasm with which the previous owner bet the ship in the game, or the strange lack of emotion when he lost the round and the ship with it. He wanted to lose it! He planned to! And Finn was his scapegoat. Sh*t.

“Please, I didn’t steal your stuff!” he blurted out, “I didn’t own the bloody ship then! I won her in poker, a week ago, from a weird bloke with a libby accent! You have to trust me! Look up her registration, you’ll see she was re-registered in New London!”

He fell silent. His paralysis was gone, his headache too and yet he couldn't move, just cover in fear in the chair which he was bound to by the restraints he could now feel on his wrists and knees. The silence grew. Finn couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or bad one. On one hand, what he said was true and it could be easily proved just by looking up the transport’s registration in the public records. On the other hand, they, whoever they were, could just decide to kill him and be done with it.

“Well, mister,” said the woman after an uncomfortably long moment of silence, the edge gone from her voice, “it looks like you’re lucky. My colleagues pulled up your ship's registration and to our genuine surprise, you didn’t lie. Of course, you could’ve just re-registered it to a different false identity, but we decided to give you a benefit of doubt.”

Finnean couldn’t believe what he heard.

“So… so that means I can go?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“Oh, you’ll live,” laughed the woman, “but you’re not off the hook. You see, you may not have stolen from us, but your ship definitely did. In our eyes, that makes you responsible for her actions, regardless if you owned her then or not. You helped the thief to get away with our possessions, albeit unknowingly, and so you will have to compensate us.”

“Co… compensate you? I.. I can do that, I have some money…” Finn said, but the women cut him off.

“Keep your money, we don’t need it. What we need is the artefacts which were stolen. Now, we don’t expect you to track down that particular shipment, but you’ll get and deliver us a new one. Full hold of genuine Xeno relics from the corsair space. How you get them doesn’t matter, but you’ll get them and deliver them to the New York, then you’re off the hook. We’ll send you the detailed coordinates when you obtain the cargo. And don’t think about legging it. We found you once, finding you again will be much easier. And we’ll be keeping tabs on you anyway.”

Suddenly the lights turned on. Finnean blinked, blinded by the sharp light after sitting in complete darkness. He felt his cuffs open, someone grabbed him and shoved him through a door and out of the room. When his eyes finally got used to the light, Finn found himself in a narrow maintenance corridor. He took a few moments to calm down, then he sighed and started walking. He wasn’t looking forward to the job he was just given, but something told him he really should do what the mysterious people wanted. He simply haven't got the guts to argue with them, no matter how stupid and nonsensical their ‘logic’ was. Winning a ship in poker certainly didn’t mean he won it’s past sins with her, but Finn was quite certain his... 'employers' didn't care.

Which meant only one thing. He will have to get them their relics. As for how though… he didn’t know. Not yet at least.