Randolph Lalonde - Frontline

“What? Who d'you think you crossed here? I'll have ye dead with no answer an' sleep just as sound as if ye gave me one and lived to tell about it. Speak up, might be that the Captain'll give ye a kind of mercy I won't.”

“Wheeler! As soon as I got planetside I caught a call from the Stellarnet for anyone just off the Samson. I sent a message, got one back from Wheeler, said he'd give me a place on his ship an' a fair share of the bounty from Jake. We knew if we left you there with no means you'd have to call on him for help, and I gave Wheeler the transmitter codes for the Samson. I swear that's how it was!” Burke answered hurriedly as he felt the air grow much colder, thinner.

“Well that answers how he tracked the Samson so quick. D'you know you almost got all of us killed? That bastard was capturin' Ash an' a couple others for himself an' killin' everyone else.”

Burke shook his head emphatically; “I didn't know. Thought he was takin' Captain on the ground.

Frost just shook his head and let the point rest. “What the hell kept you aboard Triton when Captain took over?”

“It's like I said! Tried a few times durin' recruiting runs, even tried to leave with those Aucharian military types, but they stopped me, said I wasn't in their database. There's eyes on every important spot on the ship!”

“You coulda taken a pod.”

“Even you know Captain woulda caught me an' we'd be right back here or worse!”

Frost adjusted the controls by the door so the compartment wouldn't continue to depressurize, but went on to set another control. “Should be interestin' to see this.”

“What are you doing?”

“Wonderin' if the security team will get here before the temp in here drops to minus ninety. If they do, you'll make it to the brig, if not, well, I'll send a farewell to yer sister for ye.”

“I've told you everything!”

“Where's Silver?”

“I have no idea! He wouldn't turn on Captain! Went his own way!” he was already shivering, wrapping his arms around himself.

“You know we've no ship doc on board yet? Imagine, a ship this size with no doc.”

“Eight years! I only crossed you the one time! I'll make it up to ya somehow!”

“How're you gonna do that? What do you have that I want?”

“Name it! I'll do everything I can to make it happen!”

Frost laughed and shook his head. “Your edge is gone lad, maybe you can crack inta pretty hard info systems, but I wouldna have you on my crew, no matter what you've got for trade.”

Burke's teeth chattered and his body shook as he flexed his hands, blew into them and put them over his ears. “This is it then? Eight y-years and j-just like that…”

“Just like that lad, I get mine and you get gone,” Frost grinned so widely that he wished the other man could see through the blacked out faceplate of his vacsuit.

“Chief Frost, we can see what's going on through the security feed, let us in!” said a voice over the emergency band of his communicator. “This is lieutenant Garrison, let us in sir!”

“Lucky, might only lose a couple toes,” Frost said to Burke, who looked back at him hopefully. His lips were turning blue, white crystals formed around the corners of his mouth and his nostrils. “I'm havin' trouble with the door, can't remember my code in the excitement, you'll have to override,” Frost replied back at the security team before re-muting his end of the transmission.

“We're already on it. Can you adjust the climate controls from your end?” asked the Lieutenant.

“They're locked behind my code too. Sorry, looks like I can run a gun deck, but when it comes to these damned ship systems I'm just daft.”

“We'll be inside in a minute! Can you materialize a vacsuit for your prisoner?”

“Oi, dinna think of that,” Frost replied before muting his end again and bursting into laughter.

“G-god, p-please F-Frost!” Burke's skin was turning bleach pale in large patches, his nose and outer extremities were turning red.

“P-Please w-what B-Burke?” Shamus mocked, some of the old venom creeping back into his voice. “Don't leave you to freeze to death with no one to mourn your fackin' passing? One good turn ye daft bugger! They get in, you'll live, they don't, you get what you got comin'! Either way, it's been a hellofa show!”

“You b-bastard! I've s-seen you go, go over the edge b-before b-but come on! This isn't you!”

“You fackin wrecked me! I was at a God damned end after I walked offa the Samson, an' if Captain didn't come back for me I was done! Prison then death, or livestock for Nan's cannibals! This is real payback, an' if you get out alive, you're on borrowed time, I'll still be gunnin' for ye for as long as you're breathin'.”

Burke let his head fall down and vainly struggled to keep warm as Frost just turned the safety back on his sidearm, set it back to stun and dropped it into his holster. As the freezing man fell forward onto his face the door beside him opened. Security and medical personnel rushed inside.

Shamus Frost left the room and headed straight for the express tube. After just a few minutes he was on the main Gunnery deck getting ready to run the morning briefing.

Blue oceans, green-brown islands and white, gossamer clouds covered Pandem. Its gravity was only marginally heavier than standard and there weren't any visible dominant continents, but large and small mountainous islands interrupting a vast ocean of blue. If that were all there was to see as the Silkworm IV emerged from hyperspace, it would have been a relief.

Unfortunately, there was a great deal more to consider and Jason started to sweat as soon as the small Navnet hologram came up. “Now this is a busy port. I thought we were in fringe territory.”

“Looks like they're having a boom time,” Oz said as he took the pilot's seat. “What's on the comm?”

Jason checked the communications traffic and shrugged. “A few standard advertisements and a basic acknowledgement from Port Control. They keep the waves pretty clean from what I'm seeing.”

A flash caught Oz's eye and he looked at a container ship several kilometres long. Something in its cargo hold had exploded, there were fragments scattering from the listing wreck into their trajectory, but nothing large enough to cause concern. Some of the debris cleared long enough for him to see that they had been struck by a much smaller ship. “Anything about that on Navnet? Any advisories?”

Jason scanned and shook his head; “My filter should put that kind of thing at the top of the list, I've got nothing. Do you have the trajectory the station recommended on screen?”

Oz double checked the trajectory assignment on Navnet and nodded. “I'm in the pipe. Pretty easy considering how busy this space is.”

“I'm going to keep scanning for extra wireless traffic. I don't even see the usual spam on my scanners, it's just strange.”

“Maybe check in with port control?” Oz guided the ship at a modest pace along side a long passenger liner, its smoothly curved, white and blue painted hull was much larger than their small prototype ship. “They put a lot of trust in the pilots, we're being directed within two hundred meters of that transport.”

Jason looked up for a moment then back to his communicator. “Need my help navigating?”

“Don't think so, Navnet says there's someone from port control watching our approach.” Oz looked to the starboard side and saw that the damaged cargo train's back end was starting to slowly drift out of line from its forward hauler module. “Don't like that though,” he nodded in its direction.

Jason looked up, his eyes went wide. “That's going to hit us.”