Sean-Michael Argo - Hard Cargo

“He’s one of us now debt collector,” snarled the ganger who had so savagely wounded Aeomi, while he stood brandishing his bloody weapon only a few paces from where she struggled weakly to sit up and lean her back against the ruined kiosk, “Can’t let you walk in here and take him.”

“Shed his blood for the spiral, now he’s fam Grotto man!” added a brash and skinny youth who looked to Trask like he’d snap in two if he actually fired the massive scattergun he held leveled at Lovat, then added “Post 47!”

The youth’s shout was answered by not just the three men engaged in the point-blank standoff with him and Lovat, but several other voices that echoed through the abandoned starport. The recovery agents had found themselves in the very core of the gang’s territory, where neither they nor he, could back down.

“I promise, kid, if this goes gunplay, you die,” said Lovat, his voice taking on the warden’s edge thanks to his former career. The ex-warden held his force pistol at the base of the neck of a quivering and barely conscious Uri. The former union man turned ganger was coming down off the anti-grav booster, his desperate ploy for freedom only getting him this far, and as Trask had guessed the hangover was going to be brutal.

“Not helping, agent,” spat Trask over his shoulder, never breaking eye contact with the ganger he had in his own sights. “Lock it up.”

In Lovat’s other hand was his warden’s service pistol, a weapon that the agent refused to deploy without having attached to his hip, smuggled off the penal colony when he took the contract with Bond Recovery. It was against regulations for any bond agent to carry weapons that fired hard rounds, partially because killing their quarry was never the goal, but also to prevent unnecessary civilian casualties. For once, Trask was happy that he’d allowed Lovat to bring it along even if he did really need Lovat to shut his mouth, as it was now pointed at the skinny youth’s shirtless chest, the iron sight level with a crude spiral tattoo in the ganger’s dirty skin.

Trask himself had cranked his output to max, and his force shotgun hummed with caged power loud enough that the ganger with the sniper rifle pointed Trask’s head would be splattered against the concrete wall the moment he made a wrong move. The agent could see all the ways in which this confrontation was probably going to go wrong and bloody, but it was his job to make the collar and get his people home. He saw Aeomi slowly awaken, and her hand inch towards her fallen force pistol. The ganger who’d taken her down was ignoring her, likely believing her dead or unconscious.

“That man is Uri Chiodo, we have an official recovery warrant, and if you can’t tell from our armor and weapons, I can show you our badges,” said Trask, hoping against hope that he could push through the typical ganger machismo and reach the human being behind all the swagger, find the young man wise beyond his years from life on the streets, and appeal to his sense of self-preservation. “His brother Martin is gone. He dropped three civilians before we took him. Uri, here, shot another man in the streets. That means the enforcers are going to be looking for someone to blame, someone to punish. Let us take in the men who did it and the ‘47’s won’t catch any heat. We can all get out of this.”

Trask had talked his way out of worse and genuinely did not want this to become any more of a hostile recovery than it already was. The ganger, apparently, had too much riding on the confrontation happening in his own house to back down. As he spoke, Trask could see it, and though he listened to the man, his eyes narrowed on the sniper in front of him, hoping Aeomi and Lovat were ready.

“Frag the enforcers, lawman!” sneered the skinny youth behind Trask, prompting a wicked smile from the man with the spiked bludgeon, who Trask could see thought, he, at least, was going to survive what was coming.

“Your girl came into my house chasing my fam, got what she deserved. After this gonna get a whole lot more,” said the lead ganger, his feet shifting underneath him as he subtly adjusted his stance, a movement so slight that only a professional like Trask took note of it. “Besides, the Spire never sends boots down here, they stay behind their wall. ‘47’s are the law, and you’re busted old man.”

The ganger sprang forward, faster than Trask thought possible, yet the veteran agent could not afford to worry about him just yet. The sniper’s rifle was centered on the agent’s head, and he had to contend with that. Trask was faster on the trigger than the sniper, though the agent would go to his grave not fully sure whether he squeezed the trigger first or if the ganger leaped at him first. Not that who started it mattered compared to who finished it.

Trask’s force shotgun roared as the agent braced himself against the impact, dropping hard to his knees, his armor the only thing that kept his joints from splintering on the hard floor. The maneuver saved him from the sniper’s bullet, which sliced through the air just where his head had been and would have cored his skull had it found its mark.

Trask’s own energy discharge struck the sniper in the chest. The man’s body flew backward, already pulped inside the suit of skin before it splattered against the pylon behind him. The dead man burst apart from the impact and had Trask not seen such carnage twice before he’d have vomited inside his helmet, the way he’d done twice before. He hated to kill, even men and women who deserved it and had truly hoped to collar the brothers without overly harming anyone. The lead ganger had swung his weapon at Trask’s head at the same time the sniper fired, though it too swept through empty air.

Trask racked the slide of his shotgun to drive away the thoughts and prepared to spin around to bring his weapon to bear on the rest of the insanely close quarters fight. His vision was filled with the sight of a spiked bludgeon rushing towards him and was impressed at how swiftly the ganger had recovered from his initial attack and reversed his weapon for another strike.

Trask brought his shotgun up just in time to block the blow, though it had been delivered with enough force that the agent knew instantly that the ganger had dosed with the same anti-grav drugs as Uri. The force of the hit slammed the shotgun into Trask’s chest, the weapon bearing the majority of the impact so that the spike only bit into the first layer of the agent’s armor. The ganger noticed this and followed up his strike with a swift knee to his own weapon, the impact driving the spike through Trask’s armor and into his left lung.

That was when the ganger was hurled to the side by a blast of energy, the backwash of it being enough to knock Trask to the ground. The ganger slammed into the railing, and that was all that kept him from falling down to the first floor.

Aeomi’s quaking hands lowered her force pistol, and Trask heard it clatter back to the ground, the young woman’s strength all but spent. No matter, his weapon was primed, and the veteran agent couldn’t help but growl as he unleashed a blast of energy that hit the ganger so hard that it tore him apart, forcing much of him through the gaps in the railing. This time Trask did vomit, but at least he got his faceplate up soon enough to spill his latest meal across the grimy floor.

“Not to rush you, boss, but we’ve got company on the way,” insisted Lovat as he helped Trask to his feet and yanked the spiked bludgeon out of his armor.

Trask took a shallow and pained breath, returned his faceplate to its locked position, and looked out across the starport. He could see the corpse of the skinny ganger, the scattergun laying unfired on the ground next to him. The former warden had been fast on the trigger indeed, and Trask wondered if Lovat had the same questions about who started this bloodbath, them or the gangers.