Call Me Moss – 2 – The Easy Job

“I see you made it back, Mr. Foote.”

“Call me Moss.”

My contact on board the station technically worked for the Feds, but he was little more than a middle man with delusions of importance. Honestly, everyone has those delusions, even me, as I recently found out.

“Did you get the item?”

“Oh, I got it all right.”

“Excellent. My superiors will be most pleased.”

“What say you buy me a beer at the bar and we’ll settle things up?”

“Very well.”

My contact led me to the bar, and we took a seat. It took a while for the bartender to notice us, though. She was too busy shoving enough crap to fill a yard sale under the counter and giving some guy a bag full of credits.

Guess working at a bar didn’t pay all that well, because every drink slinger I’ve met on this side of the Orion Spur had a side hustle of one kind or another.

Finally, she came over and asked us what we were having.

“Two beers. Nothing fancy.” I gave her a nod she recognized, this not being my first time on this station.

I may have dumped off a few items here before.

“So, the item?” the contact asked.

“Relax. Don’t you want to know how it all went down?”

“Successfully. That’s all that matters.”

I smirked. “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

The drinks arrived, and I nodded my thanks. She gave me a wink.

I may have dumped off a LOT of items here before.

We raised our glasses and drank.

“You said it would be an easy job,” I said.

“I take it there were complications?”

“You mean aside from the ones you imposed? No one gets hurt? No alarms?”

“I made our position clear. It was vital nobody knew the item was taken until it was too late to do anything about it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that. Besides, killing’s not my style. I prefer to make friends. In fact, I spent a lot of time making friends since I got here.”

I may have dumped off a crapload of items here before.

He took another drink. “Yes, and you leveraged that to ask for double the offered pay. Which you got, I might add.”

My tone started to harden. “You know what I didn’t get? A proper briefing about the settlement layout. You said the item was in a locker in the power station. You failed to mention there was no direct access to the power station from the outside. I not only needed to copy top level access unnoticed, I had to sneak through two labs and three research bays that had restricted access, avoid the guards in the corridors, get into the power station. Then the code you gave me for the locker didn’t work, so I had to cut into the locker without being heard, and backtrack the whole way again. That is NOT my idea of easy.”

The man took another swig. “Given how much you’ll be paid, l assumed you understood the risks. Now, do you have it?”

“Already gave it to your bosses. Told them the whole story.”

The man frowned. “Then why are you here telling me?”

I smirked. “How’s your drink?”

The man froze and looked at his glass. Then at me, fear growing in his eyes.

“You got about five minutes,” I said, pausing for effect. “To get to the bathroom.”

Like I said, killing’s not my style. But I do love me some revenge.

The man fled, already feeling his intestines gurgle. I saluted him as he left, then waved the bartender over.

“Thanks for that.”

She smiled. “He’s a lousy tipper, anyway.”

The first thing I do when I move into a new system is make friends. Friends make everything easier.

“Call Me Moss” is not set in the Get Lost universe, per se, but the game that inspired my love of the genre: Elite Dangerous (which is where the screenshots come from). Writing little bits like this is just one way I get in the right mindset for the next big adventure in my world. Consider this Moss as being from an alternate universe 😉