Lunchtime on the rock - all characters - Day 1

Brains watched Marselle speculatively before continuing. "Very well, Mr. Qin. I have something in the nature of a small deed that needs to be done.....and rather serendipitously it needs to be done if we are both to continue our stories outside these walls." Brains looked around noticeably at the security cameras in the hall, noting they were pointing away from her table. "The box is about so...big" she holds her fingers apart to show something about the size of a small matchbox. "The man that took it from me is Ardelle Jones. He gets regularly assigned to laundry duty, but I can arrange for a change in your schedules to meet him. It is vitally important you do not disassemble the box. There are light sensitive components inside the box which I cannot replace easily. You should note Ardelle will be tricky to get a hold of. He seems to have a nose for trouble and can disappear quicker than the eye can see. He's also a notorious weasel and hides behind large friends when he has to....... while I wouldn't particularly mind if he ends up with more bruises than when he started, it's important that he not be killed. We do not need a lockdown. If you can do this for me. I'll do everything I can for us to get out of here."


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On the tug AAB/SR/KZ1743-S
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The trip was uneventful. The milk runs to the prison were quiet, they always were. You never had any cargo that was worth stealing. The food in the cargo container that the tug was pulling along was worse than the protein bars. You knew the warden was pulling a fast one. The container carried a hell of a lot less weight than it was reported to in the manifest.....but you could always pocket the difference in the fuel cost, and the difference allowed for the little luxuries that made life sane for any man out in space on his own. Real coffee. Occasionally real food.

The ship......was a mess. It was everything you could do to keep it going. You'd bought it in an Alliance auction about 5 years ago. No-one else wanted it, you got it for barely more than the scrap value. When you got it, you could tell it had been used for some less than legal activities. It looked as though a lucky shot had taken out the relays to the ships computer. one shot was enough to turn the tug into a dead hulk in space.....and thanks to your home recently upgrading its computer you had access to a decent second hand one for free. It was worth every penny you spent. Despite her overall mass rating, she was nimble and had a lot of raw power. The only problem was crew. You had it rigged so one person could run it....but realistically you needed more. It was a measure of how rugged the ship was that it was still running despite all of the abuse.

The maintenance Ben had scheduled was just enough to keep the ship going for this trip. He'd need to overhaul it soon. As he sipped at his coffee, time passed until the rock loomed into view. The space station was a toroid, cheapest way to keep gravity on board. All the docking was done on the central pylon. Ben could see the defence system come online as the tug slowly approached with it's cargo. Broadcasting his identity code immediately took the system offline and a friendly voice appeared over the radio. It was Cameron....they called him DC, the Director of Communications. One of the few guys who was on the good side of the warden.

"Hi Ben, you're an hour early, take up docking bay 3. The Warden is looking for those cigars you brought him."

The problem was....Ben didn't get any message about the warden wanting any cigars.

Still some ways away from the prison was the captain and soul crew member of a supply ship about to make his weekly run. It was a good gig his brother hooked him up with. Not his real brother of course, but when you grow up on a cargo ship where half the crew is related to you by blood, you tend to adopt the rest into the family.

The pay was good. More importantly it was steady. And the trip was long, which for some odd reason, made people not like it. Ben Raynor wouldn't have it any other way. And he loved how no one was bitching at him for the smell of his cigars. Sure, there was some risk of raiders, but people in his line of work get that anywhere. This ship was the first one he ran that was armed. But even without that, he knew how to handle himself. How to maneuver the big awkward things to shake loose magnetic grapplers without ripping apart your own hull. Or how to use a hard burn as a last-ditch attack. His father had taught him that one years ago. Basically, the engines are rigged to store the energy to be released all at once. Any ship directly behind it gets crippled, while you get carried off on momentum. Raynor's only seen that one for himself once though, when he was a kid. The trouble is, at best, it'll wreck your engines, and at worst, especially in a Capson thirty engine, the gorram thing just explodes. Gives folks like him a mean reputation though, making raiders think they'd rather die than get robbed.

Ben floated through the halls to the garden. He knew it wasn't a good idea to leave the gravity off all the time, because muscles will atrophy after a while. But once in a while, there was just nothing more relaxing than taking a nap in mid-air. His bird hated it for the first couple weeks till she got use to it. Saffron, named after his late girlfriend. It was some kind of parrot that got itself trapped inside the air ducts. He had no idea how it got in there, because as far as he knew, there was no hole big enough for it to fit through. Sure made getting it out interesting. Most he could figure was at some point a couple years ago when he was still taking on passengers, someone lost their pet and assumed it escaped while at port, rather than call him.

The garden, and wiring the com for music, was really what made these long trips tolerable. The Alliance paid him enough to compensate for some rations, but he would always spend his on fertilizer and batteries for sun-lamps, and just pocket the rest. Protein bars were fine, but they were expensive as hell and tasted like clay. He was never at dock for more than a couple days, so this ship was his home.

If he was lucky, he'd find himself close enough to the Net to watch a broadcast and keep tabs on the core planets. The Net was essentially the use of all supply ships and a designated com channel as relays for broadcasts that they'd otherwise be out of range for. The signal was fuzzy at best. And if you got within range of more than one, getting them to sync up rather than cause an echo effect was tricky. But once in a while ya get lucky. More often than not though, it's just used for telling each other stories and keeping each other some company. These missions could sometimes last for weeks, and that's a long time without any human contact.

Raynor woke up when he floated head-first into the garden door. He groaned and checked his watch. The watch actually had two little faces on it. One for the planet where he'd pick up the supplies, and one for the prison. Permanent jet-lag was part of the job, but at least that kept him on the right schedule. He then threw his ewight forward to flipped around in midair, pushed off the wall, and headed for his quarters for some incredibly fresh coffee. The ship needed a little maintenance he'd been putting off, and he had plenty of time on his hands. This was looking to be an uneventful trip.