I looked up from my book, the harshness of the tone matched only by the acrid bitterness of what passed for coffee in my spare hand. I spied a trio of jackbooted thugs in their red and black jumpsuits.
"Your papers. Now. Before I make you eat your book and arrest you for resisting arrest," spat the one with the largest hat. The pins on his lapels said sergeant, but his voice showed a naked disdain for anyone not in his uniform.
I feigned a blank look as I quickly deliberated between Kenneth Stanford, 35 year old gardener with a Doctorate in Petunia cultivation, and Kristoff Steubenson, 33 year old specialist codebreaker and Captain in the Intelligence Service.
"O-one moment officer," I stammered, reaching into my shirt pocket. "Here it is - I h-hope this is satisfactory."
"Give me that. You stay there and you sit still."
The patrolman reached with a gloved hand and snatched the Ident-Card from my hand, savagely jabbing it into his clearly abused reader. As the reader beeped, the color and the self-satisfied smirk drained from the officer's face. He stood up straight and saluted.
"My apologies, Captain S-Steubenson, s-sir." The patrolman stammered urgently.
The other seated patrons of the cafe began to stare - a patrolman adopting such a tone of voice was both most unusual and intriguing.
"Are you m-mocking my s-stammer, Sergeant?" I managed to say, barely concealing my amusement. Captain Steubenson was a risky choice, but always the more entertaining one.
"What is your name? I would like to s-speak to your commanding officer."
The two patrolmen to the sides looked at once mortified and amused at the Sergeant's gross misfortune. The sergeant himself laid a figurative egg in his metaphorical britches, as he questioned the universe as to how things came to be the way they were. He began to stammer until I felt generous.
"Or maybe, if you allow me to return to my book, uneaten, I think we can pretend this never happened."
The Sergent looked dumbfounded, but relieved at his reprieve. He was quick to shuffle off with his two compatriots, trailing nothing but apologetic gibberish.
"Thank you sir, please have a nice day..."
The onlookers returned to their drinks, and I casually looked back to my book.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
After some time, a well dressed stranger slipped into the seat across from mine.
"That was phenomenally stupid."
"It worked, didn't it?"
"Where did you even get an Intelligence Service tag?"
"Let's get back to the ship, I'll tell you while we bring the package back to base."
"But why did it have to be this borderworld junk?" Ingrid furrowed her brow, her temper flaring as she noticed my attention had momentarily drifted off.
"We had a strict budget," I lied, "we had a Montante chassis handy, and with the war on-"
"Don't give me that again. I can tell you don't even care enough to lie to me - just admit that you like how it looks."
"And I liked how it looked."
"Your selfishness is the reason why I'm not the XO of a proper Oder in the Ukorps. I could have had the beginnings of a good career, but you had to drag me down." I could see the ugly face of resentment briefly peek behind Ingrid's obvious disappointment. It was time for a little flattery to gloss over the situation.
"Now that's not entirely true - your file was at the top of a list of dossiers the Director gave me for this assignment." A half truth - it was quite a ways down, but I needed someone I knew could be the responsible XO.
"Obviously, Director considers you both valuable and capable enough for an important mission such as this," I could see some hope and excitement light up behind Ingrid's eyes, "and there's no doubt you'll get your own ship after this assignment is over." If our Rheinland and the Buro still existed after our assignment was over.
"Captain! I've decrypted the package you picked up." Max kindly broke the heavy atmosphere with his youthful enthusiasm. He gave a habitual salute with one hand as he presented a tablet with the other.
"Ingrid, please take us out of Pecos orbit - but don't burn for Barrier Gate yet. Max, I need you to update our vessel registry and change our colors." I took the tablet and set it aside for inspection later.
"Do you have a new designation in mind, Captain?" Max piped in quizzically. I had hoped Max would take the initiative to find one on his own - but he was much too green to have broken out of his rigid training.
"Something generic and unmemorable. Something just pretentious enough to show we're learned, but not so much to be suspicious." I hoped to offload such on-the-spot mental exercises to a more independently thinking crew.
"What about Wotan?" Max uncharacteristically blurted.
"That's a bit too obvious, we'd never pass for non-Rheinlanders."
"Seinfeld - the old earth philosopher!" Ingrid volunteered.
"What? No."
"Sophocles - he's an ancient greek playwright," said a quiet voice from behind me. It was rare for Constance to weigh in on topics outside of tactical systems.
"I don't think a tragic playwright bodes well for our mission."
Miscellaneous smoke mingled into a thick, acrid, eyewatering soup of bad odors and a certain hazy ambiance that caught rays of the dim lighting.
"Do you have the time, barkeep?"
The bartender's piercing glares had become progressively hostile with every Shirley Temple I ordered. Not that I liked the stuff, but it was supposed to be code for my 18:00 appointment.
"is 'alf pass six," he said, washing a dirty tumbler with his even dirtier apron. I could see he was more annoyed than I was about my extended stay at his hole-in-the-wall on what I assumed was a slow night. I finished sipping my sixth Shirley through the stirring straw, the sound of slurping piercing the low din of slow conversations and clinking glasses elsewhere.
The bartender put set aside his dirty tumbler and rested his massive arms on the bar.
"You gonna order real drink, or you gonna waste my time with cheap child beverage?"
I was starting to feel a bit queasy, possibly from the six sugary sodas with added grenadine sloshing around in my stomach. The bartender maintained ominous eye contact, with uncomfortable amounts of throbbing at his vein-y temples.
"I'd like another Shirley Temple," I began, tracking the further deterioration of the barkeep's mood by the increasing frequency and amplitude of his facial twitches, "but with a shot of vodka this time, if you please."
"You drink entire stock of grenadine," the barkeep said through gritted teeth, "I make you black hole."
"I don't know what that is," I cringed.
The bartender started mixing the contents of various bottles. Moments later, he set down a glass of jet black sludge smelling of cheap alcohol and licorice.
"Doesn't matter. You drink black hole, or I give you black eye. Your choice."
Making a judgement call, I passed him twenty credits and a generous tip, before staring down into the viscous void. The stench of licorice hung stickily in an invisible cloud around the glass.
"That's not a Shirley Temple," said a well dressed stranger, slipping into the seat next to mine. He slammed down a fifty credit chit on the bar.
"Two shots of mezcal for myself and my friend here, please. Keep the tip."
"You again. Why can't you ever be on time?"
"I would have, if you could follow directions and not bungle up a simple drink order. What even is that?"
"It'll be your new cerebrospinal fluid if you keep keep wasting my time with your tardiness."
"Fine. put your right hand palm side down on the bar."
I put my hand on the bar, as he sprayed it with something from a bottle he pulled out of nowhere. I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, as he savagely stabbed a large needle in between my knuckles and then quickly pulled away.
"Ow what the f-"
"Quiet down and stop drawing attention to us," he said, spraying my hand again. The injection site burned, but there was no sign of blood - only a small bump in between the knuckles of my index and middle fingers.
"It's a biometric RF ident-key you'll need for your next assignment. Use it to unlock these sealed orders in your ship."
He slid an odd looking paper drink coaster to me. I quickly pocketed it as the bartender came around with our drinks. He seemed to be in much better spirits.
The handler slid one of the shotglasses towards me and gestured.
I rubbed the injection site gingerly as I stood up.
"Thanks for the offer, but I'm full and I need to take a piss. Watch my jacket for me."
The handler shrugged and downed both glasses before sipping the drink I left behind.
"That's absolutely vile," he winced. I nodded to him with a smile before leaving for the dock. As I walked through the doors, I could barely hear the handler say something to the bartender.
"I'd like to order a Shirley Temple, please."
SEALED ORDERS 8271101 Wrote:ID: BIOMETRIC TAG RECOGNIZED KEY: MAGPIE
You have done well to establish a presence on Barrier Gate in Coronado. You will need to continue your extracurricular activities to build your reputation and to fund your operations.
The appropriations committee has allocated a single lump-sum equivalent of 50,000,000 Rhein Thalers in Maltesian Lira to facilitate your efforts to establish a sustainable revenue stream - but beyond this, any substantial logistical support will be limited to HRIMFAXI.
The last verifiable intelligence briefing we received in the area has detailed a power keg of political tension within the region. We need you to maintain observation of the situation so as to ensure our knowledge of the situation. You will also need to put down roots with some of the adjacent organizations so that we can rapidly re-facilitate relations once the war is over, or if we need to enact Fall Gelb.
Your current general orders are as follows:
1. Maintain a self-sustainable cover;
2. Gather intelligence on the surrounding region and report back;
3. Create and maintain working relationships with the underworld elements in the region;
4. Maintain lines of communication to await further instructions;
If you are able, we would like for you to accomplish the following:
A. Locate and secure operatives CROW and RAVEN - they were dispatched to your operational region before the outbreak of the war, but have fallen out of contact;
B. Establish safe houses in Cortez, and Inverness for future operations;
C. Establish a safe escape vector for Fall Gelb;
Even for a Monday night, the Barrier Gate bar was quite deserted. The low din of scattered clinking, hushed whispers, and the cloud of miscellaneous smokes set a cozy, foggy scene that not even the Bartender's disgusted glares could pierce. I stared into the bubbly swirling of my third Shirley Temple of that night - it wasn't code for a rendezvous, the cloyingly sweet soft-drink started to grow on me, and I liked how it repulsed everyone in the vicinity so that I could be alone with my thoughts.
The war on the home front was over, if the news was to be trusted. The silence from HQ told a slightly different story. No recall orders had come yet, meaning that our contingency protocol was still in place. Or, perhaps something had gone terribly wrong.
Hrimfaxi made regular cargo drops weekly at Barrier Gate on her way to Sabah Shipyard for months, until last week.
Punctuality was almost a universal constant with the Hrimfaxi and Kapitan Evening. Evening was a curious man - always rather anxious about meeting delivery schedules. In over two decades of service, Evening had no record of any missed appointments or schedules. Not even so much as a sick day or vacation. That is, other than a medical stint with a combat wound induced leg amputation - though somehow, he managed to fit the entire process of surgery, recovery, and prosthesis rehabilitation within the Federally mandated two weeks of restructuring following immediately after the war with Liberty. Piracy was not likely at all, either. Hrimfaxi logged more confirmed kills under Evening's zero negotiations policy than the entirety of the logistical wing combined, and even more than some of the Ukorps divisions. There had been no news on the net concerning the discovery of a wrecked Uruz chassis surrounded by mounds of pirate corpses and debris - so the Hrimfaxi is unlikely to have been intercepted.
The harsh cacophony of a straw slurping through a now empty glass pierced the haze of the bar - several eyes turned to me with more than a little ill intent, while the bartender's laser gaze narrowed in my direction.
"Barkeep, I'll have another Shirley - with a cherry this time, if you don't mind"
The Barkeep's snarl was a futile effort to mask some fraction of naked disgust. He growled with some semblance of an attempt of restraint.
"Bozhe moi enough of child drink. Every day with this nonsense der'mom. This is not McRonalds chain, and I do not serve little ***** libertonian burgers and soft drinks to little fat libertonian children."
Veins at the side of his sweaty temples pulsed with each word he spat out.
Eyes continued to watch the debacle unfold, their gaze grew more uncomfortable by the second.
"Err... I'll have a black hole then."