The Great Galactic Score!

9

9

Imblibdor 5 sat in system that had the unfortunate, for Friss and the crew of Zapasnoy, situation of being a waypoint, of sorts, for a multitude of ships on their busy ways from one part of the galaxy to another. An area of commerce and trade that meant that, at any one time, hundreds of ships were parked in the orbit of the planet. The blue-grey surface slipped by as Demi stared at the view screen, holding her breath.

"Isn't this a little ... out in the open for a secret mission?" They eased past an enormous galactic liner that looked like a sizeable city in space, all towers and and zero-G water slides. Demi's chest tightened as she saw several passengers wave out of portholes, taking pictures of Zapasnoy as it floated by.

"It'll be fine. No-one looks twice at a Gal-Navy ship." He switched the view screen to a different camera as the liner passengers raced from one porthole to another to keep up. "Besides, we have stealth tech. Top of the line. Very secrety."

"Stealth tech? Where was this 'stealth tech' when we were being attacked by pirates?" Her voice sounded squeaky. Partly from panic, but mostly because she had only just remembered to breathe. "Never mind. Let's just stealth over to the impound yard."

The conversation with her brother and sister had lasted until Percival's wife, Pashmina, had arrived, whereupon Percival lost interest and left everything to Hemi to explain, removing his bathrobe as he moved out of the camera's line of sight. After a lot longer, Hemi had explained enough for Demi to have a decent idea of what she needed to do and had sent a detailed file for Demi to peruse at her leisure about laughable ancient physics and it's bizarrely workable mathematics.

The call had ended with Hemi saying Demi, or Lap Lodka, as her sister believed her to be, could call them any time to discuss things further. Demi desperately wanted to, but it could only make things complicated and painful. The upshot of it all was that Demi could now stand a better than atrocious chance at cracking the security of the Imblibdor impound yards and getting Friss his ship back.

The view screen now showed a speck in the distance. The navigation console calculated a little over one-hundred thousand kilometres to their target and Demi had to get ready to do the job Friss had tasked her with. A job she still wasn't entirely certain why she took it on. She didn't need money, or fame. She had plenty of money squirrelled away and, with the fake footage of her slaughtering the people in her bar doing the rounds, the last thing she needed was more people seeing her face.

Friss had said he could fix that. He'd added it into his plans but had said nothing about what those plans actually were. He had told her enough for her to prepare for this part of the string of heists, but not about anything else. This, Bognrd BloodRage, something Friss called a 'MacGuffin', followed by 'The Big One'. She could almost see the capital letters at the beginning of each of those words. He offered no further information about 'The Big One', other than it could, would, fix everything.

"Best get down to the cargo hold. Get your things together." Friss spun around the captain's chair and then shuffled it back the other way when he spun too far. "I hope your EVA skills are top notch. We sold the tethers for cans of Water Plus."

Of course he had. Extra vehicular activities without tethers. Like playing Russian Roulette with a fully-loaded automatic blaster. No matter what happened, whether taking the first shot or the last, you lost. Luckily, she had trained in EVA situations, back when she had considered joining the Navy, and, it turned out, she much preferred playing about in space than joining a group where shouting was routine and taking orders was expected. All the time. Demi had a casual relationship with doing as anyone told her to do, bordering on the fervently opposed.

Lap accompanied her as she made her way down to the cargo hold, keeping up a constant stream of rustles, crinkles, crackles and the occasional sound of tearing. The tearing sounds, she had come to understand, were Lap's way of emphasising their point. Except that Demi didn't understand a single thing the Planeian said, so the emphasis, indeed, entire conversations, passed Demi by like some ephemeral thought. Still, Lap seemed happy they had got their point across. Whatever it was.