“Ain’t she a beaut?”
Reese shrugged. “It looks exactly the same as your other missile system.”
I smiled. “Ah, but looks can be deceiving. You’ll see.”
The Cosmic Cow had done her duty and tilted the numbers in my favour as far as the Sirius Corporation was concerned. I bought a Packhound missile system and had it installed on the Back Bacon Express right away, then bought two more and had them delivered to Wurango—just in case. You never know when having a spare might be handy, and I probably wasn’t going to have access to them again any time soon. After all, I had just defected to the Empire… on paper, anyway.
When I brought up that little detail, Reese’s jaw dropped. “Why not just lie low for a bit before switching sides?”
I shrugged. “Eh, I took some proprietary information with me about Sirus’s recent movements—namely ours. That scored us some rep with them straight off the bat.”
“And the thought of the corp sending their so-called Adjusters after us to even the score?” she asked.
“Hey, why do you think I hired you in the first place? I prefer to make friends, but, let’s face it, I tend to make enemies.”
“Imagine that.”
“Shaddup. You want to take down some pirates or what?”
“Anything but lugging more information packages in the Cow,” she said.
A station official came off the lift and headed for our ship. That was new. I only ever saw dockworkers here.
“Maurice Foote?” the official asked all official like.
I tried to be friendly, for all the good it was going to do. “Call me Moss.”
“We tracked a major recycler malfunction back to your ship. There seems to be tons of information packages, all marked from the Sirius Corporation, and it’s jammed up the works. You do realize there are tonnage limits on the mass recycler for a reason, don’t you?”
Blast, it was my paper route all over again.
I grabbed Reese’s arm and dragged her in front of me. “I’m really sorry to hear that, sir. It must have been my new employee here, Reese. She’s new to this system and is still learning the ropes.”
I grit my teeth and hissed, “Act innocent,” to her so only she could hear.
Reese, caught between being angry and playing along, decided to bat her eyelashes and say “Sorry,” in the meekest way possible.
Sadly, it didn’t work. I was written up for a half million credit fine for damage to the recycler system.
Reese rolled her eyes when she saw the damage to the credit account. “Still think the missiles are worth it?”
“You’ll see.”
We dropped back to the part of the nearby gas giant’s ring currently favoured by miners. There were patrol ships around protecting them, but they were spread thin, and lots of opportunistic raiders tried their luck at hit-and-run raids. Lobbing hatch breaker limpets at the mining ships, stealing what they could, and vamoosing before the authorities arrived. So our presence was welcomed.
It wasn’t long before Reese saw some action, taking down the shields of an eagle fighter that had bitten off more than it could chew.
I wonder what the expression on her face was like when she saw not one, but twelve missiles come swarming in and taking out the Eagle’s drives, and then the Eagle itself. But her voice over the comms said it all.
“Holy [bleep]!!!”
“Told ya.”
“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 😉
Is ‘Make Enemies’ a skill in the game? 😀