Sean-Michael Argo - Hard Cargo

Given the Halo’s sales records with the exchange desk, Trask had narrowed down the number of stations and market colonies where the Halo might appear to offload their next haul. The agents had held their position for nearly a week, posing as civilians taking a bit of R & R from life in the black. Time had grown short, though from the first moment the prospectors entered the central deck Aeomi had picked up their scent, and the agents scrambled to put their plan into action.

Trask and his team had been close to the frontier, having just dropped a collar off with an Aegis headhunter who bought out the bond of their prey and intended to make a vulture bounty scrapper out of him. Based on the information in the acquisition order, which went to Grotto channels a full week before it was disseminated to outside sources, it had not been difficult to find the dilapidated homestead that the Hyst family had once occupied.

While every other bounty hunter and enforcer was combing through nav logs and passenger manifests, Aeomi had familiarized herself with the scent of the Hysts. In this technological age, it was the raw senses of a born hunter that had given Trask’s team the edge.

Aeomi landed hard right behind Orion, and instead of attempting to draw her pistol and shoot him she closed in and put the youth into a grinding sleeper hold. With her arms constricting his blood and oxygen, she kicked his knee out from under him and the boy was out in seconds. As he fell to the ground Aeomi swiftly affixed mag-clamps around the boy’s wrists, and then a moment later slapped a carabiner across the center of the clamps. The carabiner was attached to the same rappel line Aeomi used to descend, and the moment she put it into place it drew taunt as the drone hovered above. With practiced grace and professional alacrity, Aeomi stepped back and tapped a command into her wrist module, and a moment later Raptor Two began to lift Orion off the ground.

Trask fired one more shot at the merc, missing again, though successfully keeping the man engaged. Trask saw out of the corner of his eye that Lovat had put down one of the other mercs. That was when the agent saw a flash of steel and turned just in time to see Captain Dar thrust the blade of his sword through the remaining mercenary’s torso. The captain was shouting into his comms as he slid the blade free, before firing a pistol he must have pulled from one of the dead men with his off hand at Lovat. The warden went down hard, though Trask could see him moving moments later, wounded but still in the fight.

The captain moved to engage Trask, though his attention shifted upwards as Orion’s unconscious form rocketed into the air, with Aeomi holding onto the mag-clamp with one hand and rising as well. The captain shouted and fired the remaining two bullets in his pistol at the drone, though they pinged off its armor and did nothing to hamper its rise. The captain screamed and hurled his pistol in frustration before being knocked to the ground by Aeomi’s force pistol as she took a long-range shot. It wouldn’t put him down for long, but it bought the agents a moment’s reprieve.

“Lovat on me!” shouted Trask the moment he saw that Orion was firmly in the clutches of Raptor Two and sailing up the central deck towards the pre-established rally point.

Trask fired one more shot at the prospector merc, this time taking out the cargo crate he’d been hiding behind and knocking him to the ground, leaving him temporarily stunned and giving Lovat enough time to sprint towards the maintenance hatch that the team had planned for use in making their exit. Lovat had become quite the slicer and had been able to bypass the mechanized lock without being noticed by the station’s own security forces.

In seconds this place would be crawling with first responders, and while the agents were righteous in their execution of an acquisition order, they were far from Grotto space and so there was no expectation of reliable assistance. If local security wanted to challenge them, the agents would either have to fight or bribe their way out of there and back into Grotto space. Might made right on the ragged edges of necrospace, and no corporate authority would do them any good this far out.

Trask and Lovat pounded through the maintenance corridor, having memorized the most direct path to their ship. Above them, Aeomi would soon be shutting down the drone and putting it on a grav-lift alongside Orion. She would move through another maintenance corridor that opened up onto one of the five hangar decks, where Recovery Ship 78 awaited their return. The wound in Trask’s sideburned, and he knew he was losing a decent amount of blood. Lovat too was wheezing badly, and Trask could see that the former warden had taken that shot from the captain in his left lung.

“I sound like you did back on Post 47, wheezing like an old man,” joked Lovat through a grimace of pain as he struggled to keep up with his superior. “I hope your plan works Boss, we haven’t gotten this beat up since the Chiodo brothers.”

“It will,” assured Trask as they pointed their weapons at a pair of tech staff who went scampering in the other direction.

“I wish we’d been able to keep that merc from stabbing Hyst’s wife,” admitted Lovat, his voice low and if it wasn’t for their shared comms system Trask might not have heard it over the sound of their armored boots stomping over the deck as they rushed to their ship. “I read the files on our collar for once, shocker, I know, but damn has that family been through some hard times.”

Trask stayed silent, choosing to say nothing, as there was little of value in any words he might use. Sura Hyst had been the key to his swift investigation, and he felt awful that she’d met such a poor end. She had survived the massacre on Pier 13 somehow and disappeared for several years afterward. When she resurfaced it was to purchase and license the homestead on Longstride.

She had found some way of maintaining an income to achieve the funds required to make such a large purchase, and since she’d been off the grid for so long it stood to reason that she was making her way in the black amongst the spacefarers. It was only a process of elimination to determine which of the handful of ships that escaped the brutal fighting on Pier 13 was still active and in operation.

There were twenty ships upon which Sura Hyst could have earned a reliable living, and considering how common it was for such operations to use multiple idents, Trask counted it as an old agent’s intuition that he had pegged the Rig Halo as the most likely berth. If she had a good relationship with the captain and crew of the prospector ship, then when the Hyst family made a run for it, the Halo was likely the only ship out there who could have made them disappear so swiftly and kept them hidden for so many years.

Not that anyone had been looking for them until now, and Trask had to admit that he should have expected other hunters to have come upon the prey just as quickly as he and his team.

From the snippets of conversation he’d picked up, it seemed that there had been some uncomfortable history between the roguish merc and the prospector crew. At least the presence of the mercs made for a spectacle, even if Trask was saddened by the untold bystander casualties, and like Lovat, after pouring over the life and times of the Hyst family, he felt sick that Sura’s journey had ended in such a way. His intent had been to capture her as well as Orion, though perhaps there was yet something to salvage, based on the captain’s reaction to her demise.

Lovat and Trask soon exited the maintenance hatch and found Aeomi already in the process of loading Orion and the drone onto Recovery Ship 78 . Costly and violent as it had been, the agents had what they’d come for, and without running afoul of station security or tipping their hand to any other hunters before the trap was sprung.