Sean-Michael Argo - Hard Cargo

Trask had to give it to those original settlers, several generations prior, for making the most of what they brought with them. Being so far from the conventional trading routes meant that new lanes had to be charted, and for the most part the only traffic on or off the planet, or this single planet solar system in general, was to move gas out of the colony and supplies into it.

Trask looked down at entire multi-story buildings created from the shipping containers that had originally brought materials and equipment to the planet. Now they had been converted into crude hab-stacks, though the metal was beginning to show its age as the constant acid rain ate away at its thick hide.

There was no planning to the settlement, Trask reminded himself as he took in the sight of a dead end street that was blocked off by what appeared to be a tent encampment. On his own home of Uralisk 9 there would be no such haphazard squatting allowed, no obstruction of the flow of human and material traffic tolerated, and the homeless rounded up for work details or eventual penal assignment.

He could see the last vestiges of the wealth that had once flowed through this place. There were advanced personal vehicles in the streets, though most of them were now non-functional and had been converted to storefronts, emergency rain shelters, or stripped out for parts and abandoned. Vending machines offered a menagerie of delights, most of them now broken or powered down.

Trask could see, in the distance, an elevated slab of rock jutting up from the surface, upon which lay the once busy Alpha class starport. He could tell it was abandoned, or at least had been transformed from a starport into something else, as he noticed many dozens of flickering lights, giving him the impression that perhaps it was now just a giant structure in which those too impoverished to afford housing even on this sad rock would go to seek shelter.

The small planet was on the edge of Grotto territory, with everything past it being uncharted darkness or full necrospace. While it was spared the complications of sharing a border with Helion like the Grotto planets on the opposite side of the corporate empire, when the gas pockets were depleted so was Grotto’s concern for the community there.

Trask shook his head, both to clear his visor of the caustic rain but also a reaction to his mental review of the bond recovery file he and his team had been issued some weeks ago.

Drill Post 47 was functionally abandoned, and the only reason there was still some modicum of trade traffic in this place was the modest production of one remaining mordite play. That one play did enough business to keep The Post alive, though for how long remained to be seen. From what Trask was able to glean in the first day on this miserable world was that the play itself was controlled by a criminal element.

Trask put the troubles of the boomtown gone bust from his mind. This was still Grotto space, and there was an enforcer’s spire visible on the other end of the settlement. Local law enforcement could handle governing this place, and in fact, if his time as an enforcer on Uralisk 9 had taught him anything, it was that the law and the outlaw often worked hand in hand to maintain order. Some amount of corruption was inevitable and arguably necessary in keeping the peace. Bond Recovery Agent Jared Trask was not here to fight crime, he was here to maintain the functionality of Grotto society as a whole. As far as he was concerned the enforcers were better off staying out of his way.

“Boss, I have them,” chimed the lilting voice of Aeomi, snapping Trask out of his reverie as he turned his head to look at his subordinate’s position down in the streets below, “They moved right past me. Hard to catch the scent at distance because of this damn rain.”

“I’m looking but I don’t see them,” responded Trask as his oculars zoomed in on Aeomi’s position.

His hardware revealed a young woman dressed in a large overcoat to hide her body armor, holding an umbrella she’d purchased locally to protect her head from the rain, as she could not perform her function for the team from within the confines of headgear.

“Left or right?”

“On the left,” said Aeomi, gesturing subtly with the forefinger of the hand in which she held the umbrella. The agent dared not move from her position on the street corner just yet, still determined to blend in with the press of bodies moving around, all heads down and in swathed in rain ponchos.

“Facial rec will be a problem, they’ve been modified heavily with tattoos and piercings,” she commented.

Trask zoomed out somewhat and continued searching, the task all the more difficult because of the weather and the fact that most people in the streets were in rain gear. Aeomi had been on his team for two years now, and Trask had never been as thankful as he was now.

The young woman was from the Grotto world of Himar, a planet so radically changed by industry that the population as a whole developed a number of universal mutations. There were countless stories of modern industrial technologies blending with the various unique environments of planets, moons, and asteroids to create virulent new diseases, horrific mutations, and as rumor had it, even monsters. Most of that was just talk of the tug, stories falling from the mouths of salvage marines trying to drink their nightmares into submission, but in the case of Himar, it was very much the truth.

Aeomi, like most everyone else from that planet, had a sense of smell that rivaled any conventional predator. Most Himar citizens wore masks that dampened their abilities so that they could continue to function as members of society, as such sensory perception was a disadvantage for those working in factories or the service sector, which was most of Grotto life.

Aeomi had been a promising enforcer cadet and swiftly rose through the ranks, finding her way into the bond recovery field and onto Trask’s team. Without her, this rain would have made the recovery mission much more time-consuming. Like a bloodhound, she was able to lock her mind on the scent of the target and pick them out of a crowd, which was useful considering the tight confines of starships, stations, and urban environments.

Plenty of bond skippers attempted to change their appearance, even going so far as to undergo surgery, but since most skippers were doing so in their position as a result of poverty, such procedures were always black market and often rather cheap.

In an environment where the sun rarely shone through the horrific amounts of polluted cloud cover, the result of unregulated mordite extraction procedures in such massive quantities in such a short amount of time, Aeomi was the perfect hunter. From his position atop the building, he would have had trouble finding them on his own, much less calling out commands to his two agents on the ground. Lovat, good as he was in a gunfight, was not the best at making clean idents of the targets. Aeomi was key here, and she was making good on that responsibility.

Though he was glad to have her, Trask was still upset about losing his quarry aboard the Yin transit station. As his eyes finally came to rest on a pair of individuals, wearing the same bland ponchos as everyone else, he noticed the brightly colored spiral tattoos on their faces, the polished spikes jutting from their labrets, and the barbells embedded across the ridges of their noses.

Trask had tracked the Chiodo brothers to Yin station, a transit hub for long haulers moving cargo in and out of Grotto space. It was the perfect jump point for someone looking to escape Grotto space for the relative obscurity of the universe at large.

“Lovat, they’re closing on your position, walking in tandem, lots of gang furniture,” said Trask as he carefully stood from his position on the edge of the building and clipped his repelling harness to the safety line he’d already secured.