Lodestone TLR-99
The fixer and the tunneler
A few drinks into the night, a bespectacled man, barely five feet tall, took his seat at the bar, just one seat away from the stool at the end where Sascha Geelen took their roost every night. He scratched his nose nervously, and ordered a shot of water. The barman sized him up a bit, as if wondering if this scrawny, frail-looking thing with the ash grey hair and coke-bottle lenses was really one of Sascha's business partners. He filled the little thimble glass with cool water, either way, and set it on the bar, with a clack like a little Mahjong tile.
The visitor turned to his right, glancing at the leather-skinned, mil-surp-clad enigma next to him. "You the Stork?" he asked tersely, trying not to look at them too much.
Sascha Geelen, alias "Cap'n Stork," elevated their own highball - root beer, spiked with creme de menthe - and answered, in a smooth and smoky voice like the singer of a jazz club, "Who's expecting?"
"Tanngrisnir Shipping Company." He slipped a small paper leaflet out of his tattered suit sleeve and laid it on the bar, a copy of the encoded job posting from the board across the room, written over in the finest of marker tips to decode it. The usual array of industry code-phrases and jargon had been cracked and simplified into, Stork seeks pick-hand. Meet at the end of Holdout '87. "Hear you've landed some salvage and were looking for someone to help get you your money's worth."
Sascha brushed the dusty, curled hair away from their face and took a swig of their drink, one of Holdout '87's house specials. "That I am - but I never mentioned where it came from."
The prospective hire slipped another thing out of his jacket sleeve, a photograph of a freighter in a large, sandy crater. "It's the only cargo ship this size that's been reported missing in this sector. The Magnús Ver Magnússon. Largest ship in Tanngrisnir's fleet, and I hear what you're after is digitized."
It was probably too late to keep the nature of the job under wraps, if this guy already knew about it. "Don't blab about it too loud, around here, if you want to get paid at all. Whether you get a piece of the action or not is down to whether you can do the job, and if someone else takes off with what's on that ship, neither of us get anything."
"Am I hired?"
"You're the only hit so far," Sascha admitted sheepishly. It had been several hours - the loot was wasting. "What do I call you?"
"Mikkel, the tunneler. I can be ready to go by morning."
"Don't get too ahead of yourself, Mikkel. There's one other moving part to this job, and your schedule hinges on theirs. There's the matter of your fire support."
"Don't need any if I can get the job done discreetly."
"You're not going without some heavy armament to back you up. I've got a two-man mechanized assault team on retainer, you'll be joining them. Just in case the SAF or their op-fors up north have got anybody out there looking for the same wreck."
"You talking about that dirty pair from the army base down south?"
"Doesn't matter where they're from. They've got the hardware and the expertise, and I'm more than happy to pay their rates." Sascha gulps down more of their drink. "They're the loveliest of angels, by the way, if you ever bother to meet them in person. Only pair of scrappers I've ever dealt with that actually bother filling out the paperwork."
"Don't see what it's got to do with me."
"I'll tell you now: if either of them are here in this bar right now, you're going to regret speaking ill of them."
Mikkel, not wanting to find himself in another altercation, flags down the barman and orders an actual beverage this time, electing not to reply to Sascha's threat.
"I have another request on this job, by the way."
"Keep my mouth shut?"
"That, too, but." Sascha lets the empty glass down to the bar with a clunk, signaling the barman for a refill. "I want you to know, as much as this is my op, you're taking orders from them. They're calling the shots. You have grievances with them, take it up with them. Reasonable?"
"No promises."
"Me and them, we have an understanding, we do business, but I'm not in charge of them. They're in charge of themselves. Rare thing in this business."
"And?"
"Means, if you screw this up or try to stab me in the back, the consequences are for them to decide. I control them about as much as I control the weather, you get me?"
"Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"It can be. Long as you do what I'm paying you for, and don't tick them off in the process."