#RustbucketTales  #Part9

#RustbucketTales  #Part9

Well, this is going to make a mess.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Rustbucket touches down on a landing pad atop a vast city, beneath a looming cloud-deck

…Peregrine tells Kestrel that her niece Phoebe has taken up with the wrong sort of man. “I want her taken offworld. Somewhere nice, like Qahwah or Lyca”. Behind him, the towers sparkle in the sunlight above the cloud-deck…

…Orcha-17 tells Orcha-37 “You’re going to have to make it right. You’re going to have to find me another Greenworlder. Let me know when you’ve got someone”

…Dev walks beside Kestrel down a crowded “street” and says “there’s so many people!”…

…Bryanna Steiger asks Orcha to remind Cornell of who he should be paying tribute to, and in exchange she’ll find him a Greenworlds Priest…

…Kestrel tells Phoebe and Lynard “I’ll get you both offworld and we’ll split the money. Everyone’s a winner”…

…Cornell tells Anvil “For 50,000 and six medical suspension pods I can get what you need”…

…Cornell mutters about sending a message of his own while opening a door; behind him, the partially paralysed Orcha drags his stunner out and shoots him. Then crawls over to the twitching body and zaps him right in the back of the head at close range…

The next morning. Orcha has slept off his stun. Anvil is hard at work refurbishing the suspension pods for Cornell when Sai beeps for attention: “The man you dealt with yesterday has been admitted to hospital with a serious brain injury”. Apparently Orcha’s close-range stunner shot had fried a cortical implant, causing significant damage. And while Anvil had a visual record of their agreement (Synths being equipped for visual recording), with no-one to deal with, its going to be difficult to enforce. Anvil packs a toolkit and heads for city-bottom to try and see what he can find in Cornell’s workshop.

Meanwhile, Kestrel has been busy. She’s had a few too many run-ins with the law recently, so has been busy acquiring some fake identities. When she gets back, she finds Orcha-37 poring over a dossier of newsvids and police reports. Bryanna Steiger has found him his Greenworlder: Dr Lincoln Westcott. The problem is that he’s in maximum-security detention on piracy charges, after he and his congregation stole a luxury yacht from the spaceport. Orcha has to get him out and wants Kestrel to help with the jailbreak. Along the way, he lets slip why his employers are so interested: the Greenworlders think there was a pre-cursor race which seeded the galaxy with green-worlds, like Earth. The Epoch Trust is interested in this, but owing to the oral nature of Greenworlder scripture, they need a priest to give them the data. Dev is dubious; why not just ask them nicely? But asking nicely isn’t really how Epoch operates. Orcha decides to start at the Greenworlder church – a hole in the wall on Deck 31 – but the woman there is uncooperative; when Orcha asks for an introduction so they can visit him in jail and plan a breakout, she rejects their offer and tells them to leave. When they’ve gone, she lifts the phone and calls the police…

Down at city bottom, Anvil bypasses Cornell’s maglocks with a hull degaussing tool and enters the workshop. He plugs his comm into Cornell’s secure network and tells Sai to get to work. Sai immediately reports that Cornell did not keep a stock of synth parts, but sourced them from a contact named Veer, normally paying in bone marrow and stem cells. After checking the fridge and getting Sai to give him authority over Cornell’s accounts, he goes to a cafe to think. He can’t just steal from Cornell – that would be dishonest. But advancing payment for the work he’s doing is OK…

Back on 31, kestrel suggests to Orcha that they’re going about this the wrong way. “How does your fee compare to the income of a mid-level bureaucrat who has authority to order a prison transfer?” Orcha sees it immediately, and suggests that Bryanna might know who’s bent. When they get there, they find that Bryanna is angry. “You were supposed to send Cornell a simple message, not lobotomise him!” Now she has Cornell’s nephews demanding justice from her. Normally, that would mean demoting Orcha down the levels; but since he’s an offworlder, it means shopping him to the police. Orcha finds this convenient; he’ll need an inside man to get Westcott out during the transfer, and it might as well be him. He talks Bryanna into helping him with the break, and he and Evert sit down to hash out the details…

Down below, Anvil places a call to Veer. Veer is suspicious initially, but seems to come round; he’ll sell Anvil a pair or torsos, with payment in biologicals and cash, and tells him to come ot his warehouse on Deck 7 in three hours for the exchange. But when he gets there, Veer is cold; he’s called Cornell’s nephews to double-check, and now Kanu and Braj want a word with him. “You were with the man who injured my uncle. You have value to him”. Anvil spills his guts about Orcha and tries to persuade them that he’s just an innocent bystander. They don’t buy it, but he can see that Veer does and that he might be able to conclude his deal if he gets out of this alive. They escort him back down to the workshop, then have him call Orcha to lure him into an ambush. Orcha is immediately suspicious, and when it becomes clear that he’s not buying Anvil’s story, Braj gets on the phone: “If you want to see your friend alive, you will come to my uncle’s workshop. You have two hours”.

Orcha starts planning how to ambush the ambushers and heads to the ship to get some gear. When he fills Kestrel in, she points out that Kanu and Braj have the justice they want – Orcha is going to jail. She calls them up, and tries to convince them of this. After checking with Bryanna, they release Anvil unharmed, and he scurries back to the ship.

The next day, Orcha is given a cosmetic beating by one of Bryanna’s goons (got to make it look right), then dumped at a distant police station. While he’s being worked over in the cells by Kanu and Braj’s associates, the Rustbucket lifts off, with passengers and cargo, and plots a leisurely course for the jump point. Kestrel and Anvil stay behind with the Shadow, ready for the dangerous bit. The early part of the plan goes off like clockwork – Orcha is sent to a maximum-security facility, then immediately transferred along with Dr Westcott. Bryanna’s crooked associates have stashed a stunrod under the transfer shuttle’s bench for him. At the appointed time, he calls one of the two guards over, reaches under the seat, and tries to take them down. But he misses his initial strike, and the second guard jabs a stunstick into his back, knocking him down and sending his weapon flying. Struggling through the paralysis, he tries to trip one of the guards and knock them into the other, but they sidestep. The last thing he feels is the jolt of a stunstick in his side.

Following behind in the Shadow, Kestrel and Anvil figure that something has gone wrong. Orcha should have taken the flyer an hour ago, but its course is unchanged, and now there is city below them. So, they improvise: Kestrel carefully brings the Shadow into formation with the prison shuttle, then on Anvil’s advice, nudges its right stabiliser. The shuttle lurches and goes into a spin, its pilot screaming a mayday call over the comm. The shuttle lands hard, with the Shadow setting down next to it.

The crash wakes Orcha. He’s piled on top of a guard (neck broken, not a threat), and there’s something wrong with his leg. Next to him, the other guard groans. Grabbing a stunstick in his good hand, Orcha jobs it down until the groaning stops, then rummages for a key for his restraints.

Outside, Anvil immediately disembarks and takes to the shuttle’s rear door with a laser cutter. But its resistant. He’s just reaching for the hullbuster charge when he finds himself staring down the barrel of a stunner and the shuttle’s pilot tells him to freeze. At which point Kestrel steps out of the Shadow, fires a warning shot from his pistol (Jagatikans don’t like actual firearms), and turns the tables. The shuttle pilot keys the emergency release code into the door, but he gets a good look at Kestrel while doing so. After that, its just a matter of hauling Orcha and Dr Westcott into the Shadow, setting a hullbuster to destroy the shuttle’s flight logs, and heading for orbit and a stealth intercept ahead of the approaching police flyers.