Deviation Actions
Literature Text
The old shuttle had seen better days. Much of the paint had worn thin and in some places silvery metal showed through. Dents and dings pitted just about every surface of the ship interrupted every so often by a scorch mark. It was a good ship and it had served several owners very well, considering that it was still intact far longer than the majority of ships its age. Its mere existence told a story of survival.
The current pilot of the ship did not own the ship – he had stolen it.
It was his way.
Ra’shid Veet, as was often the case, was on the run. He had a long rap sheet. Generally his crimes had been nonviolent, but from time to time he had been pursued … aggressively … and some had found themselves at the wrong end of his blaster. Sometimes dead. He truly hated those times. But this time it was not CORE-SEC chasing him. It was some private nasties bounty-hunting for MalTech.
Veet looked down at the chip sitting beside him. He had no idea what was on it. He hoped he had stolen the right one, because this job was looking more and more like it was not going to be worth the fee and he had to get through three more sectors before he reached the safety of The Nugget.
* * *
Veet never planned on becoming a criminal. It just worked out that way. He’d never been in trouble as a kid and had always been a 60th percentile student. After graduation from the university, The CORE has slotted him in an inventory control job at Mason Industries. For a short time, Veet enjoyed the independence offered by a regular job and a regular paycheck, but within a year the mind-numbing boredom began to make him feel like he would explode.
Then he got the message. At first he figured it was just some of the regular spam that tended to flood his inbox regardless of how aggressively he tried to filter it. For some reason he decided to read it. And it was to him – personally – offering some serious coin for simply “losing” an occasional widget.
He ignored the message.
He ignored the second.
Not the third.
And so he started redirecting some inventory and then obliterating it from the books. Not a lot at first. And no one noticed … not at first. He was never caught doing anything, but there were more and more questions and more and more scrutiny. And finally it came time to move on. And by that time cash was not an issue.
Veet lived alone and lived on the move, so cash was never an issue now. Doing jobs now was all about the rush.
And so life’s paths had led Veet to many places as he handled one “job” after another, making delivery and then fading, as best he could, into the blackness. After years on the job and years on the move it was becoming harder and harder to vary his M.O. – and so he found himself operating farther and farther out from Core-Nexus where it had begun. Soon he found himself at the very border of The Core in the area they called The Edge.
* * *
Now, Veet was out beyond The Edge, a couple of jumps into Frontier space. He was currently being “one with the roid” with his small shuttle powered down to minimal life support and tucked tight into a crevasse on a large asteroid. At low-power, the radar was not working, but if it was, he knew he’d see the blip that had been pursuing him across five sectors, gaining ground with each one. They were faster than him, but far larger and less maneuverable. He was not sure if they had seen his radar blip at all before he’d roided. He was pretty sure he was safe here unless they got extremely lucky. The trick was figuring out how patient they were. They had already shown some pretty significant persistence, so the MalTech bounty must be a good one. The danger was that the bounty might even be big enough for them to hire friends.
To collect his fee, Veet had to make his delivery to The Nugget within six hours. To stay alive he had to turn up his life support power within four. He took a quick, burning sip from the flask in his hand, re-adjusted his flight harness to make things more comfortable, and closed his eyes to wait them out.
