There were five of us in the room once I entered, if you included the old man, which meant a four man job. This was strictly bad news, and I was accumulating a lot of it. You could tell a lot about the difficulty and risk of a contract from the number of people working it, and more than two was almost always a mistake. Either the danger was so great that you couldn’t go it alone or the reward was so massive you could afford to split it. But mercenaries were never particularly fond of that, and there was always an airlock nearby for you to get sucked out of. Someone usually got rich, but odds were never great it’d be you.

The four others were scattered about the room, a questionable assortment of degenerates and lowlifes. Against the back corner of the room was the hulking brute I would come to know as Nesti, wearing armor plating as thick as I’ve seen to this day, and with a face so weathered it was hard to be sure at a glance that he was actually human. He didn’t react when I entered, and I figured that was just as well.

On the sofa was Vos’go, a teal-skinned Sarvallan, deeply reclined, paying more attention to his own equipment than anything else. He had a half dozen tools laid out on the table next to him, idly reaching over from time to time to grab a different one and tweak something on his suit, or on the small holdout pistol he kept strapped to his thigh.

The last was sitting at the main table, looking much more invested in the job, which was a bit reassuring. Rada, the only other obviously human member of the crew, lacked the build of a combat veteran, but was as clearly disciplined and regimented as any soldier I’ve met. She was watching the old man patiently, ready to begin, and sat up a bit straighter when I entered, knowing it was time.

Vel rose from his chair by the wall and motioned with his hands like he was trying to get our attention, a pointless gesture since everyone but Vos’go was already listening. I took up a spot by the door, leaning against the wall. I didn’t like to have my back exposed and I always liked to be near the exit, habits I admit I developed long before I became a mercenary, for one reason or another.

“Thank you all for coming,” the old man started, like he was giving a rehearsed lecture. “As some of you already know, this is a rescue. My daughter’s husband, specifically.” He paused for a moment, like he expected a reaction, but there wasn’t any to be found. “He flies shipments for me, from here to the hub on Nazvar mostly. That’s where he was going this time. It was roughly a week ago that he left here, and three days ago they found his ship at a jump point, stripped down, drive core removed.”

There was a noticeable tension in the room now, a subtle shift in mood that you can only experience when everyone realizes at once how bad things are. Most pirates were only interested in the cargo they could pillage, because keeping the routes flowing meant more to steal later on. But the worst of the cartels chopped them down to the hull and took the crew. They were the sort who didn’t bother with ransoms because it was more work than simply selling their captives as slaves in the Cluster.

“Probably already dead.” The statement from Vos’go was casual, but lacked malice. Sarvallans are like that, if you’ve never known one, detached from the emotional weight of words and focused on the literal truth of things. He didn’t even look away from his gear when he said it.

Rada shook her head dismissively. “They’re slavers, he’s worth more to them alive.” The words seemed to soothe Vel some, although they probably shouldn’t have. I’d rather have my throat cut than be taken alive by a frontier cartel, and if you ever find yourself in that situation, you’ll choose the same thing.

“Besides,” she added, “they wouldn’t have disposed of bodies, he’d still be on the ship. They don’t care about leaving them behind.”

Vel was, to his credit, taking this conversation fairly well. I have been in rooms like this on the core worlds, rooms with sheltered aristocrats that were naively optimistic about how things would go, and jaded soldiers of fortune who either lacked the tact or the sensibility to soften the news for them. I suppose his experience as a soldier must have prepared him for these kinds of situations. Still, most got angry when their loved ones’ lives were mentioned so casually.

“Probably on his way to the Cluster already, then.” Vos’go spun the tool he was holding around in his fingers as he talked. It was a habit, I assumed, but it sent the wrong message. It’s fine to not care about the job, but you still have to pretend like you do. I’ll admit, it worried me. This was not likely to be a contract where we could afford any carelessness.

Vel nodded slowly. “Maybe. But I think there’s still time. Think about it: it’s a long trip to the Cluster, they’re going to want a full shipment, cuts down on overhead. Same reason it takes forever for me to get supplies out here. And that means warehousing until then.”

“So put trackers on a shipment and wait for it to get hit. Then you’ll know where their base is and you can call in the armada.” Nesti added from his post in the corner, sounding far more reasonable than I expected.

Vel sighed and shook his head. “We’ve tried that. Kai had one sewn into the suit he was wearing when he was taken, but it went dark almost immediately after we lost contact. Same with the ones we planted in the supplies themselves. Somehow, they’ve prepared for that.”

It made sense. The cartels feared very little, because no local group was strong enough to counter them, and the feds couldn’t afford to put escorts on every route. But, strong as the pirates were, none of them could stand up to even one battleship. If their location were discovered, that would be all it would take to wipe them out. Their continued existence was proof they had planned for that contingency.

“So how are you proposing that we find him?” I had figured out the answer before I asked, but it’s good to make them say it anyway. Shows you how honest they are, for one, but also how naive, in the event they haven’t actually thought it through yet.

The old man paused, rubbing his hands together, knowing it wasn’t going to go over well. A frustrating gesture, and one you should avoid if you ever find yourself in the situation. I get it, bad news can be hard to break. But it wasn’t his life on the line.

“You’re going to have to get captured, too.”

There was no noticeable shock on anyone’s faces, which was the first piece of good news I had gotten. That meant that everyone had already done the math and eliminated the other possibilities. The location stayed hidden because no one talked, and none of the pirates ever spent any time on stations like this, so there was no way to torture one for information. And infiltration through membership might have been possible, but would take too long. Plus, members of illicit groups like that were rigorously tested, and anyone whose loyalty seemed questionable was shot. We’d have a better chance if we were viewed as potential slaves. Nobody wants to destroy their own merchandise.

“So we get there, then what?” Rada joined in. “We have no idea what kind of containment we’ll be in and we won’t have any gear. How are we supposed to get out in the event that we find him?”

Vos’go sat up straighter, and released one of those awkward, wheezing Sarvallan laughs. “Can get out of cell easy. Any cell.”

“And how are you going to do that without your gear?” She motioned to the pile of tools and equipment that was increasingly scattered in front of him.

“Give me a day, will have everything we need.”

“None of this accounts for the fact that we have no information about what we’ll be up against when we get there.” Rada’s irritation was obvious. “Say we find him and get out of containment. So what? We’ll be in the middle of a pirate fortress with no layout of the facility and no weapons.”

Nesti scoffed. “You ain’t done this much, huh? We’ll find weapons. Once they know we’re out, they’ll bring them to us.” It was a cocky statement, but he was right. All it would take is subduing an errant patrol and we would be armed again. “The real problem is, how are we supposed to get out? We ain’t gonna have a getaway ship, no one is going to know where we are.”

“That’s not the issue. Find me a ship and I’ll get us out of there. Doesn’t matter what kind.” A bold statement from Rada, but delivered flat, as though she were replying with the time of day or a weather forecast.

In that moment, I realized I hadn’t given Vel enough credit. Looking around the room then, I could see that he had already considered all of this, because all the pieces were in place. This wasn’t a band of the first four mercs who said yes. This was a hand-picked team. That raised some troubling questions as well, not the least of which was why I was there.

“This is a suicide mission. Let’s talk pay.” I wanted to get straight to it, because none of the other issues would matter if we didn’t settle this up front. “First, separate payments, non-transferable in the event of our deaths. No pools.” I expected at least one objection, but there was only silence. Vel nodded. “Second, we get to sell the location of the base to the feds when we make it back.”

“And if one of us doesn’t?” Nesti asked.

“Burn their share, give it to the poor, I don’t care. I’m not getting shot in the back so you can split a bigger prize.”

Nesti shrugged, unfazed. “Fine by me. I’d prefer we all come back, dead partners are bad for my reputation.” This was true, but mercenaries got by on a lot more than reputation, so it wasn’t especially meaningful. For enough money, the loss of credibility was an exchange almost anyone would make. But I was happy to have the agreement made regardless.

The room was quiet for a few moments after that, as everyone began to mentally process what would be needed. Normally for a job like this, that meant gear and tech, which always forced a confrontation about how much we would get up front to even finance the operation. But there wasn’t much we were going to be able to bring that wouldn’t get removed immediately, so that just left the general strategy.

“What’s the timetable here? It has to be soon.”

Vel nodded his agreement, scratching his arm nervously. “As soon as possible. We have scheduled transports twice a week, you’ll need to be on one of them. Anything out of the ordinary or out of schedule will be suspicious, and they might just blow the ship. It’s happened before.”

“When’s the next one?”

“Two days. It’ll be mostly carrying depleted fuel cells, that’s the usual cargo. There’s occasionally a small crew on those flights, so it won’t be suspicious that there’s more than just a pilot on board.”

These were more details than I expected him to know, which made my job easier. Normally civilian contracts involved me explaining to a mystified aristocrat why I could not, in fact, face off against a cruiser in my single-seat gunboat. Or once, why the assassination of a planetary governor was not quite as simple as ‘pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger.’

“Is the transport armed?” Rada chimed in.

“Technically, but it’s just two small fore and aft anti-personnel batteries. They’re Duvoss freighters, I think they put them on there for landing on savage worlds mostly. They wouldn’t even leave a blast mark on a real ship.”

“Agreed, so strip them off. They’re not going to help us if things go sour, and I don’t want them thinking we’re trying to put up a fight.” She shrugged, the most casual gesture I had seen out of her to that point. “They’re just going to get chopped up with the rest of the ship anyway, might as well keep them here.”

I expected Vos’go to have some questions about the tech he’d have to contend with, but none were offered up. You might think this is a bad sign, and it definitely can be. Sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know, so they have no idea what they’re supposed to ask. But sometimes the cocky bastards are cocky because they really do know what they’re doing.

I watched him on the couch, where he was back to reclining, but now working on a series of small round objects, alternating between hooking them up to his datapad to make some unclear adjustment and working at them with a small tool that looked a bit like a soldering iron. His movements were precise and practiced, and frankly, that was as good as I could hope for.

I know what you’re thinking. I could have just walked away then, told them to find someone else, and taken smaller jobs for a while. Why risk everything on a team I didn’t even know? But if you’ve never been outside of the core worlds, you just don’t understand things. You can’t. You don’t make it long as a mercenary without being able to stare down bad odds. If the odds were good, you wouldn’t have been hired in the first place.

It was a suicide mission, it’s true, but what all mercs know and never admit is that the profession itself is a suicide mission. It comes with the territory, especially on the frontier. Even then, as a younger man, I had six incidents in my career where my survival had been more a matter of luck than skill. And the others in that room, they all knew that, too. You risk your life, you get paid well, and if you get lucky, you might even live long enough to spend it.

I took the job. It wasn’t because I trusted them, of course, or because of sympathy for the old man. The money was good and he was going to fix my ship, that’s all there was to it. I’m not too proud to admit that I just saw an easy way out of my situation. I should have known better.