"I don't like the looks of this, Rogers," Dorsey said in a sort of depressed whine. "There are pirates here."
"Of course there are pirates here," Rogers said, looking out the window at the formation of ships floating in front of them. "I invited them. I invited two groups of pirates here. How the hell else do you expect us to make money off this transfer?"
Dorsey looked at him, mostly expressionless except for the heavy-lidded stare that he seemed to have been practicing all his life. He punched a couple of the instruments on the panel and sighed.
"I don't like pirates," Dorsey said.
Dealing with intergalactic space pirates was difficult enough; dealing with intergalactic space pirates with the most cowardly copilot Rogers had ever hired was a whole new level of ass pain.
“They don’t really advertise themselves as likeable people,” Rogers said. “And I didn’t hire you to like them. I hired you to help me make a lot of good money off a lot of bad people. So just keep the controls steady while I work my magic.”
A beep on the panel told him that he had an incoming transmission, and Rogers keyed it in. A gruff, inarticulate voice crackled over one of his several independent communication systems—Rogers had it configured so he could hear everything at once but had to switch channels to transmit. He didn’t want either of the two groups to hear what he was saying to the other.
“You sure this is the right place?” asked a member of the Purveyors of Vitriol, one of the pirate groups.
“Of course I’m sure it’s the right place,” Rogers said with a practiced scoff of indignation.
He wasn’t sure it was the right place. The military had trained him in navigation a bit, of course, but he was an engineer, not a pilot.
The Fortuna Stultus galaxy had been humanity’s home for a thousand years or so—since they’d accidentally collapsed the Milky Way—but that didn’t mean he knew it like the back of his hand. If he was reading the charts correctly on his holosphere, this should have been a desolate little location on the edge of Meridan territory, just outside of an Un-Space drop point that nobody ever used because it led to absolutely nowhere. And if there was one place that Rogers preferred to do hard work—like brokering a deal between two of the system’s most devious pirate groups—it was absolutely nowhere.
“Just give them time,” Rogers said, though he wasn’t sure if he was reassuring the Purveyors or reassuring himself. “They need these supplies. The Garliali will be here.”
A terse grunt was the only reply, which didn’t surprise him at all. The Purveyors of Vitriol weren’t known for their eloquence; they were a pirate organization, after all. They were decent chaps once you got to know them, and Rogers knew them well enough. He’d been pretending to be a spy for them for months too.
The Garliali Mercenaries for whom they had been waiting, on the other hand, were not fine chaps. Some of them had been trained by the military, but most of them were just common thugs and cutthroats looking for a quick buck, and were pretty indiscriminate when it came to picking targets. Rogers would know; he’d been pretending to be a spy for them for months too.
“The Garliali?” Dorsey asked, his lilting voice cracking with nervousness. “You invited the Garliali Mercenaries here?” His face might have been flat, but his body looked like it wanted to jump out of his seat.
“Were you not even listening when I briefed you on this mission?”
“The Garliali are the biggest pirates in the system! They’ve knocked over armed Meridan patrol units.”
“Yes,” Rogers said, “and they’re dangerously low on medical supplies precisely because they keep knocking over Meridan patrol units.”
“How do you know they’re low on supplies?”
“Because I stole them. Then I gave them to the Purveyors to sell back to the Garliali so that we can get a kickback.”