Cosmosis

@rosso: Saw someone make that mistake, once.

Only it was a porcupine.

That hadn't gone as planned.

Granted, almost nothing ever went as planned. He really needed to work on that.

Daltar sank into the pilot's seat of the Aphelion as it accelerated away from the Cosmic Crosswinds. Small-arms fire splashed against the ship's shields, but there was no way any hand-held weapon would be punching through them, and his firing of his own's ship's orbital engines while he was still in the hangar all but guaranteed their own ships wouldn't be pursuing him any time soon. Of course, his contact wasn't the only one who had been keeping ships in that hangar, so he'd probably just upset a lot of uninvolved parties, but dodging blots of plasma tended to occupy one's mind to the exclusion of all else.

As his navigational computer calculated a jump to somewhere a reasonably safe distance away, the Delossian smuggler pulled off his seared vest and shirt with a painful grunt, before unlatching the scored duranium plating that he'd been wearing underneath. If the exchange hadn't gone as planned, it has also at least not gone off entirely unexpected. As the scorched armor clanked onto the floor of the cockpit, he let out a long breath and and put the vessel into lightspeed. It would be a bit before he reached his destination, but he was out of immediate danger, and that meant he had time to examine what he'd come away from this misadventure with.

Back in the cargo hold, he unsealed the crate he had been commissioned to deliver to his contact on the Crosswinds and began impatiently tearing out the insulating foam that coated its contacts. Whatever was in here, it was at least valuable enough for his contact to have tried to double-cross and kill him without payment for. Fortunately for him, what the man had lacked in honesty he had also lacked in intelligence, because he made his move before the merchandise had even been produced. Well, Daltar had done his part of the job, and the murder attempt coupled with the lack of payment made him think he was completely justified in claiming whatever cargo he'd been hauling for himself.

He squinted in puzzlement when he finally found what all the padding had been protecting: a smallish device, about the size of a belt buckle. He turned the bit of tech over in his hands a few times, before a broad grin began to creep across his scarred and weathered face. If this was what he thought it was, it was worth far more than he had stood to get paid. He experimentally clipped it to the buckle of his own belt and activated it, glancing at the nearest reflective surface and laughing out loud as no reflection greeted him. A personal cloaking shield. These things were illegal on most planets and almost impossible to find on the rest, for good reason.

Yeah, he was going to misuse this.

@paragonxxx: Yep, that's what happens when a planet decides to go the "peaceful" route: its aim goes to crud.

@paragonxxx: I've never been much of one for counting, anyways. I'm more of a poetry guy. ;)

@paragonxxx: Sure, sure...it's not bad at all. I'm sure it gets you from here to there just fine...

>;)

That's because you need a good ship. ;)

It was. I think it was Gambler who nailed it when he said that if it had been anything other than a Star Wars movie, it would have obliterated the box office. It was a victim of the ridiculously inflated expectations that the franchise had been saddled with.

Gotta plug the coordinates for this place into my navcom...

@rey_king:

Daltar just shook his head. Apparently his passenger enjoyed his conversations as frenetic as his fights. "Yes, I do, but unless you want to eat it cold, we'll be there before it heats up. We're just going to the moon; will take about five minutes, depending on how quickly we get landing clearance."

He did hold his breath slightly while awaiting clearance, but it came through with no complications. Looks like he was right; the "security" they'd escaped was probably just local criminal strongarms, trying to pass themselves off as legit. "Good luck to you," he called out to Kegen, as the strange man exited the ship. "I hear rumors that they're expecting a big shipment of gladiators soon, so if you don't find a fight right away, you will. Try to avoid picking any fights with security here; these guys are actually pretty serious."

With that, the smuggler headed back to the stars, wondering if it was worth tracking down someone interested in his newly-acquired bit of Earth currency.