Miami Pete 10

Miami Pete 10 (updated):

I had never imagined myself to be a retribution kind of person. Growing up on Deltos, I lost a lot of friends and family to the vaguarities of life there. The corporations often killed us street rats when they caught us... um... "appropriating supplies". But hey, it was their stuff we were taking and they have the right to protect what's theirs just like anyone else. Similarly, occasionally one of us would cross one of the Dons, real pieces of work those guys.  Cross a Don and you ended up hanging from an overpass, missing your bones. I think the removal of the person's bones was symbolic, but there was always the rumor that the Dons used them to make soup. Revenge on a Don?  The very idea was laughable. Still, as bad as the corporations and the Dons were, the Priests were the worst. You didn't have to do anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Priests would snap you up. There was always the whispered argument of who was worse off, the ones we saw again, or the ones we didn't. Friends who were taken by the priests and were seen again were changed. They would recognize you and smile, right before they snatched you too. We never knew what happened to the friends we didn't see again. We were too busy running and hiding to think about striking back.

Now, I was thinking about tracking down Pete's killers.

There weren't any authorities to help. Space, it's big man. Far too big for any government to even begin to police. That didn't stop various governments from trying once upon a time. Needless to say, it didn't work out well for them.  A government only has the amount of money it can manage to squeeze out of it's people. Even the most over-populated world has a finite number of people to tax and therefor the government has a finite amount of money to build ships with. Space, on the other hand, is infinite.

I had to be honest with myself. I had no idea where the monks had gone, and I had no contacts. Pete might have been able to call in favors from various people, he had contacts on nearly every station between here and the other side of the universe. Not always friendly contacts, but contacts none the less. I, on the other hand, wasn't even considered a person on many, if not most of those stations.

How had I not known all this time that I was a cyborg?

With no better ideas of what to do, I took the tray of data chips from Pete's safe back to my quarters and plugged the one marked "kid" into my console. A directory popped up and the first file I noticed was named "readme.first".  So I opened it. It was obviously Pete's writing, complete with Pete's horrible spelling and his less than accurite concept of puncuation. Pete was a  brilliant Captian, but he never had much in the way of patience for textual communication. The file filled in some of the gaps of what he had told me before he died.

Pete started out as a minor crew member on the Haul-o-caster under a Capitan Gothew. Gothew took a job with one of the Dons on Deltos to hit a Corporation that was rumored to have some incredible new technology. All the right people were bought off, it was supposed to be a walk in the park snatch and grab. Except, somehow the corperation got wind of the operation and they were met by cyborg shock troups, and the corp had lots of them, because they were the manufacturer. Pete and a few others managed to survive the initial ambush and ran for it. They quickly found themselves cut off and unable to escape. As they ran, they were picked off one by one. In a fit of desperation, Pete lost his persuers by jumping down a trash chute.

At the bottom of the chute, in addition to some more mundane garbage, Pete found a dead scientist and a failed experiment, me. I was out, but I was hurt pretty bad with a headwound where a bullet had grazed my skull.  With nothing else to do because we were basically locked in a dumpster, Pete bound my wound and managed to get the bleeding stopped.  Finally, the garbage collection service arrived to pick up the dumpster allowing us to escape. Not being able to figure out anything else to do with me, Pete took me back to the Haul-o-caster expecting to either meet up with what was left of the crew, or for it to be gone because they left without him.  To his surprise, the ship was still there, but none of the others had returned.

Hoping I would eventually wake up and be able to give him some answers, Pete shoved me into the ship's autodoc and settled in to wait and see if anyone else showed up.

A few days later, the auto doc signaled that it was done with me. When I came out of the auto doc, I was still pretty out of it and un-communicative. Pete was too busy trying to get the ship patched up enough to get out of there because a contact had sent Pete word that the corporation was zeroing in on the Haul-o-caster, and Pete didn't want to be there when they finally showed up.  So Pete ignored me and frantically tried to get the drives on line. At one point, Pete stopped working long enough to go find a bigger hammer, and while he was gone I just walked up and, without really thinking about it, figured out what was wrong and fixed it. I was still in lala land, and had no idea what I had done but when Pete returned and figured out what happened, he started pointing me towards damaged systems. Soon, we were lifting off, never to see Deltos again.

A few days later, I snapped out of the fuzz and started being... well... me again.

An additional note from Pete at the end of the doc explained that he had figured out that I didn't know about the cyber device, he didn't know how or what to tell me, so he just left it unsaid.  Gee thanks Pete.

The note also said to make sure to update the Ship's Pact.

"Ship's Pact? I didn't know that Hauley was covered by a Ship's Pact."

I knew what a Ship's Pact was.  Every kid on Deltos knew what a Ship's Pact was and dreamed of getting their name on one some day.

The idea of a Ship's Pact grew out of the problem that there is no real Authorities out in space.  So for instance, Jo-Bob owns a long haul freightor - and aren't they all since space, it's big man - and somewhere out there in the great beyond, a little piece of space debree penetrates the bulkhead right in Jo-Bob's cabin as he sleeps.  Whoosh, the air is gone, and so is Jo-Bob.  So what happens to the ship?  Perhaps Jo-Bob has a will, but who's going to enforce it?

Enter the idea of a Ship's Pact.  Nobody knows who came up with it, but for true spacers it's held as sacrosanct.  Each time a new crew member joins a ship that has a Ship's Pact, their name is added to the pact.  The order of the names on the pact typically reflects the rank hierarchy on the ship, but not always because the Capitan can alter the order if there is reason enough.  So, when our example Jo-Bob dies, number two on the list, traditionally the ship's XO, moves up and becomes Capitan and de-facto owner of the ship.  Then number three moves to number two and so on.

Using the hints from the note, it took me a few minutes to find the Ship's Pact in Hauley's data core.  When I opened it, unsurprisingly I saw "Miami Pete, Capitan" at the top of the list with a number one.  What surprised me was the next line that said "kid, Chief Engineer" with a number two. I never even knew there WAS a Ship's Pact, let alone that I was on it.  That it said Chief Engineer beside my name was nice though, and made me smile a little in spite of myself. The next two lines, numbers three and four, also held names and were both titled "passenger".  The monks.  I had their names.

I was so excited to have found a clue, that I almost forgot to update the Pact.  There was a column for a deceased date, so I solumnly updated Pete's record with the appropriate date, and his number updated to a zero.  My number updated to a one, and the name changed to read "kid, Capitan".  Oh look everyone, I'm Capitan Kid.  I really need to figure out a name for myself.

I also updated the disembarked date for the two Monks.  I didn't want them to be on the active Pact list.  I didn't think I would ever see them again, but it felt wrong to keep them there.  Their numbers likewise updated to zeros.

I'm coming for ya monks...