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Maine. The void stuck to her like a cyst.
The system hung upon the dark attic spaces of the Gallic Core Worlds. She was an excitable system where the excitement lay in strands, webs and tangles; her lanes throbbing like aortas with the flush of her cargo, her twin inhabited worlds saturating their surrounding with all the EM waves that spoke of civilised life. Small talk, spamware, dance music, dating sites, quibbling traders and screaming escorts, police taking bribes as the reserve fleet lumbered ambiently amongst the twilight lights of the sarscape. Only the smugglers marked the silence. Maine remained young; furious and bright as her stars combusted thirst fully in the full youth of their fusion. And yet, she was also cold - black and void of any nebulous tints that speckled the distance. What fields there were - expansive, latticing things, lay well beyond the ridged lines and tracks made use of by respectable agents of commerce. What installations there were, were expansive, rambling steel, palladium, nanotube trellises that throbbed with industry and spoke of a wiser, more dignified time long past, tugs, barges, elephants and cows pulling away their waste products to the cluttered chaos of salvage and the salvaged that formed the central dumping ground. Her product would have formed a familiar mythos for humans a millennia past; cracking, viscous, rindful slabs of jellied bitumen.

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Achille Augustain Nadeau did not enjoy nostalgia; he found the sentiment redundant - catharsis filled. And he especially did not enjoy the presence of the enterprising Gendarme stitching up the lane traffic between the Le Mans to Mayenne lanes. Grumbling, he jimmied the thrust leavers to the negative and awaited his turn, the twin turbo pumps of the JX-3 pushing him against his restraints in an stately, two-G break.

"This the Gauloise Police Royale to Eta seven Zulu, cut your engines and submit to a transponder check, Eta seven Zulu." Came the bored, languid tones of the fonctionnaire. Achille loathed the man immediately.

The temptation to comply literally to the official's request and genially drift into the lane's capture area was not lost on Nadeau, but neither was the probability of finding himself in a permanent resident of the Chateau d'lf. The gendarme's Auroch closed upon him like the plague. Achille's shields imitated seltzer as the freighter's sensors probed him invasively, and wondered what could be so fascinating about the several ration packs, holoentertainment bands and chemical commode blocked up against the compartment walls. Perhaps the officer was scatologically inclined.

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Losing patience, he fired up the communicator. "Eta seven Zulu to GRP actual, I am a self-employed, self-motivated, selfless citizen of the one true kingdom." Achille soothed, dulcet, stewing. "My flight plan brings me from New Paris and takes me to planet Mayenne. May I proceed, monsieur?"

The silence wasn't so much golden as gangrenous. Finally, the good citizen stirred. "Citizen Nadeau, your documents show a failure to report a charted domicile." The officer finally uttered, a little triumphantly. "You have no stated residence, Citizen Nadeau. Are you not a taxpayer?"

Achille silently cursed all civil servants and their underlings. "Yes, as those miraculous 'documents' will reveal. I have a personal income of five hundred and eighty million credits, per annum of dull, disinteresting, incredibly conventional credits. I pay a ridiculous quantity of IR, VAT, THP, PT, ISF and even succeeded in losing a sizeable margin of my inheritance to inheritance tax, to boot. My sojourns into taxation fiddling amount to zero; all are drawn from an account in the Sorbonne, held inside Banque nationale de Paris".

The guardarme elicited a reverential silence. "Citizen Nadeau… ham, Monsiuer, pardon me Sir, but you lack a place of residence, Sir."

Nadeau shrugged, and deliberated excreting a mine. "Guardarme? Is there a reason why I should be loitering in the traffic here? I have a Vache to starboard causing me to feel rather uncomfortable."

The Guardarme pondered if he should be more strident with the man. After all, he was searching for a bribe. "…Sir, ah, without a residence, you could be viably charged for vagrancy. That is to say sir, you may have to pay a fine. Along with the fact that you are currently flying a craft registered to the GRN, Sir."

The temptation to obliterate the Gendarme had Nadeau reaching for the fire selector leaver, before he realised that Commonwealthian ground crews weren't in the habit of strapping firearms to the hard points. He slapped the dash profanely.

"A fine?" Nadeau gawked, or at least, struggled to. The actual sound was more of a retch. "As in, an immediate fine, collectable by your person right here, right now?"

The officer became more confident here. This, after all, was his territory. "Yes, Citizen. In my capacity as an intermediary of the crown."

Achille Augustain Nadeau was repressing a chuckle so urgently he'd considered suicide to relieve the itch. "…In your capacity as an intermediary of the crown… Hm. A black box is a wonderful thing, is it not? A rather extensive reel of audio data I have here, Sir Guardarme. Perhaps I should hand it to someone to the defence at the magistrates, no? A fine record for an intermediary of the crown, correct?" He let the nothingness hang.

The officer suddenly decided that his wages were enough to contemplate retiring over, after all. "Very good sir. Move on."

Achille suddenly became extravagantly compliant. "But oh, monsieur, should you not arrest me?"

The gardarme silenced the communicator. "Citizen Nadeau, you may now enter the lane at your discretion. Now, please."

Nadeau grinned, and killed the feed at its roots. The lane flared nightmares.

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Brigands. Achille clucked. Nothing more generic, nothing more sordid. The station contained all the old archetypes of a piratical installation; hollowed clunkily out of a splintered cosmic fragment, the barrow lay pockmarked with the debris and detritus of over two centuries of intermittent pounding. Jagged crater marks balled where the micro-meteorites had punctured the scattered layers of the station's active shields; deep furrows where pulse lasers had charred into nothingness wide streaks of solid rock, deep wells where torpedoes had gouged surgical incisions before detonating into furious, twisting shockwaves. Nothing was compatible to anything else, and every piece of fuze, every coupling, was each other's grandfather. Like strapping a turbojet to a carthorse. Ventilation was dubious; the air quality nauseous, the tanks containing drinking water, heavy water, saline and sewage all seemed to be networked to the same sordid sequence of rotting plumbing. Naked tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen-charged compressed oil canisters cluttered the cargo bay, and the station bore with it the atmosphere of some form of megalomaniacal bazaar; just with more hydrogen bombs and less watermelons. Everything that was anything could be purchased here; from rope cutters to throat cutters from food to femurs, organs to orgasms. Marquis propaganda found itself stacked high against the walls, staring down the anarchists who kept themselves mostly to themselves. Here and there amongst the seething fraternity of One Eyed Petes who seemed to make up the majority of the station's temporary inhabitants, lay the odd Council academic, the odd agitator. Achille stepped well clear of the stand that advertised "discount nova torpedoes" in baker's dozens , and headed for the relative safety of the bar. At least in the presence of alcohol people'd be more preoccupied with frisking him than attempting to steal descriptor key for the Indigo's pressure chamber.

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"Is this seat taken?" Achille calmly asked of the Norman-but-trying-not-to-appear-Norman separatist staring out of the observation plane. The man looked at him with a startled indignation before nodding his assent, hand cradling the stock of the unfamiliar mass of allumina and lethality that sat hooked to his thigh.

"What are you here for?"

"…It's not such a matter of what I'm here for, but where you've egressed from, ami."

The Norman nearly shot him through the face, then relaxed. "You've got some balls saying that after flying that imperial trash into here." He gesticulated quietly at nothing in particular. Achille shrugged.

"There are lynxes and then there are lynxes and then there are lynxes. You can count them in the hundreds of thousands regarding the GRP alone." The Burgundian stretched, calmly beheading a cigar between knife and thumb. "What of it?"

"Plenty of it. You're full of it, for one." He gestured with a hand more accustomed to a pistol grip than empty space or even a handshake. "Bloody sit down already."

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Achille sat. "Aho, somebody with talk in them then." He countered.

"And bite - so what do you need hauling?"

Achille deliberated, and lit his cigar. "Do you purvey human cargo?"

"If that means in, well. Depends who's asking - and if the asker's you, you'd better bloody be a Norman; you a Norman?" He grinned, rhetorically.

Achille harboured no interest in boring this man into a coma with the narrative of his existence. "Yes." He smoked, voice laced with earnestness.

The man laughed, full-faced, full-teethed, truthfully confident yet pointedly fake. "Oh, I'm sure. Norman with a burgundian accent, right. You want to get shot? Now, I have no problem with that. Stand away, fork me a few and I'll make a fetching patten out of your grey fluids right over this blast shield here. What you're suggesting however, is going to get me shot. The scanners they've got on that gate, ooh, man. They can read your blood. See your guts. Tell you things about yourself, read your DNA like it's on CNS."

Achille didn't bother lecturing the gunslinger over how absolutely batpoop his hypothesis happened to be. "So you won't take me." He breathed, self-evidently snorting cigar ash.

The man leaned his boots against the table edge, and became a slab of reticence. "Go tug at yourself or something." He offered. "Only Normans get into Normandy, and only Normans ask. Y'see, I'm being neat to you." The smuggler grinned again, wide, moon-chinned. "Get out of Maine if you know where your head is."

Get out of Maine. Get out of Maine. Where the damnation are the bloody Corse?

Enkidu

Enkidu