Sean-Michael Argo - Carrion Duty

The Actuary skipped through the logs to the last several weeks of the ship’s data. He pulled the final course plotted and saw that the ship had been moving across the bleeding edge of the frontier, much further out than anticipated. They were heading towards Cardisk, the first civilized planet one would encounter if coming from the frontier back into corporate space. To anyone investigating transit logs it would have looked as if the Tasca ship docked in Cardisk to sell off its cargo, and then could enter corporate space with a multitude of potential destinations, getting lost in the crowd of the highly-trafficked region.

However, the ship never made it. Somewhere between its last contact on Urik Station and Cardisk something went wrong. The Actuary brought up charts of the region, and though they were incomplete, he had three hits on his search.

Two were lonely dark planets on far orbit around one of the solar bodies that were still in their infancy. Both had small compounds on the surface, though were little more than cheap rock breaker settlements, barely scraping together enough from their prospecting to pay the corporate fees. The other was Londstride, a registered co-op, up to date on their dues to the Currency Control Complex.

The Actuary pulled up population records and his breath caught in his throat as he saw a familiar name in the list. A former salvage marine from the Baen Reaper corps, the very marine force responsible for purging Fiat Lux only days ago.

The Anointed Actuary took a deep breath and let it out slowly, thankful that the macro was masking his brief loss of focus. Years before he had physically been in the same room with this individual, and that physical connection to the situation came as a shock to the Actuary, so used was he to being far above and far removed from the events of the universe.

The name burned in his mind as the Actuary calculated the astronomical unlikelihood of the cascading connections at work. As the Actuary drafted the acquisition order and added a deadly force authorization he could not help but feel haunted by the web of synchronicity surrounding this man, knowing that he, himself had been touched by it.

“Quantum entanglement,” whispered the Anointed Actuary as he sent the order across Grotto space.

Then he sat and stared at the Reaper profile of Samuel Hyst.

Thank you, once again, for taking this journey into the vast and treacherous expanse of Necrospace. I have always thought of this series as something of a noir take on military science fiction, and this particular novel represents an intentional attempt to capture that ‘hardboiled’ feel that one gets from the works of authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. More dark adventure is on the way as new characters appear and exciting developments unfold in the lives of some familiar characters.

June 18, 2147 (Earth Calendar)

1433 Greenwich Mean Time

Location: Troop Transport Franklin Dixon , Near Ganymede

Marine Heartbeats Detected on Ship: 54

“Bad news, kids,” a voice said through the overhead intercom. “Shore leave’s been cancelled.”

The Recon Marines in the mess hall collectively groaned. Many of them cursed. One of them, although Marsden didn’t see who, angrily threw a wad of synthetic mashed potatoes at the wall. Marsden, however, had the opposite reaction. He laughed.

“Told you!” he said to everyone else that had been sitting at his table. “Pay up!”

“Man, you’re a sicko,” Llewellyn said as she unclipped her personal data monitor from the front of her uniform. “What kind of twisted bastard actually bets against us getting shore leave again?”

“The kind of twisted bastard that knows how things work around here and likes money,” Marsden said as he unclipped his own PDM and held it out over the center of the table. “Come on. Mossier, Chunda, you too. I believe that was five hundred scripunits each?” Mossier and Chunda both grumbled as they took out their PDMs, keyed in the amount of money they needed to transfer, and passed them over Marsden’s PDM. Once Llewellyn did the same, Marsden checked the PDM’s screen to make sure they hadn’t shorted him. He had fifteen hundred more scripunits in his personal account now.

“Laugh it up while you can,” Chunda grumbled at him. “One of these days you’re going to bet against shore leave, and then you won’t be coming back from that particular mission to spend your ill-gotten gains.” He put his PDM back and stood up. “See you all at the pods.”

Axel, the only other person at Marsden’s table, shook her head as the other three left. “I don’t understand why they haven’t learned yet. The odds of any Recon Marine ever getting to experience a full shore leave are twenty-three to one.”

“And when did you have time to calculate those odds?” Marsden asked her with a grin. She cocked her head as if that was the strangest question she had ever heard.

“Just now. Why?”

Marsden just shook his head. He had no doubt that she had indeed just figured that out in her head over the last several seconds, and that she honestly couldn’t comprehend why no one else could do the same. Unlike the others, who hadn’t bothered to put their lunch trays back into the cleaning unit as a sort of petty revenge at their situation, Marsden and Axel both properly disposed of their trays. A cleaning robot would be around to take care of any mess that got left behind while the marines were all in dilation-sleep, but Marsden felt bad about leaving messes behind for others to clean up, even if the one cleaning was a bot with no programmed personality. Axel, he assumed, took care of her own tray simply because it was the most logical thing to do.

“You sure you don’t want to make any bets on what the mission is this time?” Marsden asked Axel as they left the mess hall. Everyone else had already gone and would now either be in their sleep pods or else prepping for them. Marsden didn’t see any reason to hurry. Although the ship would be set to jump in the next ten minutes, it had safety features in place that would keep the ship from light jumping if it didn’t detect that every living being on board was tucked away safely.

“You don’t fool me, Marsden,” Axel said. The woman couldn’t really be said to have friends, but she said the words with the closest thing she was capable of to affection. “You always win your bets. Always. That sort of thing is statistically impossible, so it stands to reason that you either somehow manipulate the events ahead of time or, as would be more likely in this case, you have some prior knowledge of what is happening.”

Marsden kept a straight face. “Don’t be silly. How would I know in advance about something like this? Even the command pilots don’t know where we’re going until minutes before they have to get into their pods.”

“I don’t know,” Axel said. Her tone clearly indicated that she was annoyed that there was something she couldn’t figure out. “But it’s the only possibility.”

When they reached the main sleep pod chamber, Axel silently broke off from him and went one direction to her own pod while Marsden went the other. There were only a few marines that hadn’t sealed themselves in their pods yet. Marsden was completely unsurprised to find that Bayne was one of them. Bayne had the oversized pod next to Marsden’s. The pod were designed to be as cozy as possible around the marines while they were in dilation sleep, which meant that there had to be several different size pods to accommodate them all. Marsden’s was the average size, and Axel’s was among the smallest that the Recon Marines provided. Bayne’s was the biggest, and according to rumor had to be custom ordered, as none of the off-the-shelf models would fit his height and shoulder-width.