Thread: Heartless Alliance (Mr Master and Oreo)

His eyes caught the flicker once again with the zap of the self-test diagnostic releasing the capacitor charge the sound must have startled her. Then it was his turn to be startled when she seemed to... dissolve, somehow, and take his power cell away and into her own hand, somehow inside the very skin. He blinked at her as she said I will return it when you leave. You may retain possession of your weapon. Thank you, he responded, holstering the pistol. And with abilities like that, I doubt you need a weapon as much as I doubt you're actually defenseless. That was okay, though he had some hidden capabilities himself, but there was no need to draw attention to them. The more aces he had up his sleeve, the better. He listened to her speech about salvage rights, and nodded, but held his tongue. He didn't take her offer of removing his vacc suit, and indeed, tongued off his outside speakers so he could replay some recordings on his helmet heads-up display while he listened to her justify her actions. He raised an eyebrow when she addressed her ship AI array and told it to cease the deadman protocol, whatever it was. A wise precaution, one he himself might have taken in her position, though he more likely would have avoided her first pass through his cloaked space, just to see what she'd do then. Finally she asked, Now, what was it you came all the way out here, risking a flight to nowhere, to see me about Mr....? Dizzy's mind flashed to the ancient novel he'd just been reading, during the crash and during all the down-time he'd had in between. He'd just read the part where a nome de plume was required, and what would this woman know about old Terran literature? Underhill, he said, Frodo Underhill. And yes, let's get right to it. You're right about the laws of salvage. Fifty percent damaged, no beacon or local net notice or guard. Doesn't matter that I was alone in the ship, and the crash fried every operable piece of electronic equipment attached to the hull that wasn't shielded by the jump-drive casing. So, you know, a beacon was impossible, a guard was impossible, contacting the colony datanet was impossible. What was I gonna do, leave a note? The crash was far enough away, the colony retrieval team wouldn't have gotten to me for at least a week, possibly two, and my automat was out with everything else. So I had no provisions, and you might notice Daltron Delta 7 has atmosphere, but the biosphere is still native nothing I could eat. So I had to hike ten hours up to the top of the nearest mountain just to get line of sight for my wimpy little personal array to contact the colony's geosat and call for a pick-up and register the downed ship. And that, actually, is kind of the crux of the matter. Yes, you're right, what qualifies as salvage is the same or similar in sectors across the galaxy. But the Terran Sector Federated Alliance has this thing about record-keeping. It's just about pathological, I can tell you that. What you didn't do is log your salvage with the local authority before taking possession, and that means my crash report remains the first citation on the record. In fact, the first record the local authority has of you is your requesting docking permission, and then fleeing when informed of standard inspection protocols. Array, make those records available to the local ship, would you please? He'd already instructed the array to offer whatever intrusion resistance it could, though, judging by the extent of the technology, that probably wouldn't amount to much. Still, he had to offer the token resistance. Legally, that jump-drive is still mine, and any Fed court would back me on it. Even if you had a salvage claim, the courts would most likely look favorably on the extremity of my circumstances, in the specifics of the crash, and that's not even counting the suspicious actions you took coming up to the spaceport. He paused, but continued before she could say a word. But wait, you say! How could I possibly know the jump drive was here? How could I possibly have determined that the jump-drive I flew with for a year, with the leaky shielding in the exotic matter containment that released a regular, repeatable pattern of tachyon bursts, a pattern well-documented in the ship's repair logs, for identification purposes... how could I have possibly ever known that was here? Tachyons, like neutrinos, were nearly impossible to stop or mask once released from whatever generated them, and they were utterly harmless on their own, so it didn't matter, but in this particular instance, they caused an issue, as Dizzy hefted his tachyon tracker, letting her get a good look at its standard parts, enough so she could figure out what it most likely did. I have a timed hardfile back at the colony. If I don't check in appropriately, it'll get downloaded to the law enforcement net, with details on the jump-drive flaw and my theories on the theft. The tugboat captain who let me off up here kept his sensors on me, at my request, so he saw me vanish. If you're still here, you'll be floating around with a tachyonic beacon saying 'here's the stolen goods! come get me!' I'm not saying you couldn't run or fight, probably do a lot of damage, but that'd be a whole sector of suckers and customers you would lose access to. He looked her in the eye. You're probably revising your opinion on whether or not you mean me any harm, at this point. Before you do something drastic, let me just say, you can have the drive. I have no use for it if I had a ship to fit it in, I'd have flown that up here instead of kicking around in this suit. So I'll sell it to you, cheap. You can probably just barter something you've got lying around, the high tech equivalent of Mardi Gras beads, but it'll still be higher tech than we've got here. Whatever price we fix on, I want to take a look at my property first. That was the crux of the matter, but he kept his poker face calm. He couldn't tell right away if she was at all concerned about any of his mostly factual recitation, but he knew he had to deal from as much of a position of strength as he could manage, because she held cards he didn't even know existed, and this was her table.