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« on: January 15, 2025, 06:18:02 PM »
"See, yer gonna buy this Kite."
"Hatch" Beru looked dubiously at the specs. "So you've been good to me, but you know I asked you to find me a good reliable Hound. You know, with shielded cargo?"
"Yer gonna buy this Kite," Eight Gun said. Hatch didn't want to argue with the portboss. He didn't like coming to a pirate station in the first place, but what were your options in this day and sector?
"You said I was going to buy the phase ship." Hatch shook his head.
"This is better than the phase ship," Eight Gun said.
"Yeah? Why's that?" Hatch retorted.
"Because sure, you can knock a phase transport down all the way to where it gives off no more signature than a random rock," Eight Gun said. "But the minute somebody tracks your shuttle to and from your parked ship at the dock and sees you're running a phase stealth rig with an insulated core, all it takes is some basic bribery and sleuth work to see what your run is and where you're going. Phase doesn't stop somebody from shock-rodding you on the gantry, after all."
"So why," Hatch sighed, "is a Kite any better?"
"Because it's a shuttle. It's expected to run people."
Hatch frowned. "And that makes it better why?"
"Because," Eight Gun insisted, the cyber augmentation at his temple whirring with some kind of high-speed data feed Hatch couldn't even guess at, "in spite of my every offer, you've refused to carry recreational drugs for me. You've even put yourself deep in the hole to avoid doing. Far enough I thought you were hard-vac'd for sure, but you came back. You've got... ethics and stuff."
"I do," Hatch nodded. "organ transplants can be abused but they're also medically necessary, particularly for research."
"And," Eight Gun leaned in, "you've got two daughters on Eochu Bres with Mairaath Syndrome."
Hatch grimaced. Hadn't realized that'd gotten around. Rads. Of course it had. "There may be a cure."
Eight Guns nodded. "For your sake, I hope there is. Even I won't do business with Joze Mingalar's lab. Those people are sick." He shook his head, repulsed. "Point is, I know you're desperate, and this ship is going to be yours."
Hatch shrugged. "I don't want it." He looked over the technical readout. "Augmented drive...specialty augmented drive, specialty solar shielding, additional fuel supply, insulated engine assembly, downgraded missile mounts, automated light machine gun mount...." He didn't care about the armaments. His relationship with this station was good enough that nobody tried to harass him. His problem was Heggie patrols, and a Kite's armament wasn't going to make a difference there.
"You don't care about the weapons," Eight Gun murmured. "You never have. You're the guy who told a Heggie patrol you were parked in an asteroid field so you could read a book."
"It was a good... Deprecated storage? Sleeper cabin? Shielded flight deck?"
Hatch pointed at the sheet and looked up at Eight Guns quizzically.
"Yeah. So you can move people around in sleeper pods rather than having them be bored all flight."
"Why would I want to do that?"
"Because," Eight Gun said, looking pleased with himself. "Nobody scans a sleeper pod, and nobody IN a sleeper knows or cares if you take a little detour on your trip, long as you arrive on time, which you can with this configuration. And with that deck, nobody can scan your pods. They have no way to tell whether you're running a skeleton crew or a full manifest unless they do a full inspection.... which you're too smart and careful for them to ever bother with.
And because the hatches are sealed, nobody coming on board knows whether thirteen out of your thirty berths are actually carrying organs for Joze's sickos to play with. It's the literally perfect ship for the ethical smuggler who specializes in laundering legally sourced organ cargoes at a specific port where such cargoes are very strictly forbidden. Any other cargo wouldn't work, but with this ship, you can smuggle organs all cycle long and so long as you're the quiet, polite, extremely careful little neb you already are, your cargo is literally undetectable by mechano-tech means."
Eight Guns smirked at him.
"And," he smiled, "you can put the ladies to sleep and bring them with, without having to worry about them getting snagged on somebody else's raid-and-grab."
Rads, Hatch swore under his breath, the possibilities opening to him.
"You're gonna to buy this ship," Eight Gun said. "I'm making it available to you at a price you can't refuse."
Hatch instinctively looked at Eight Gun's bodyguards. "What price is that?"
"Free!" Eight Gun grinned. "Except, I'm going to need a little favor. You see, I need somebody picked up on Umbra and taken on a discrete little one-way trip to Sindria...."
