⚒️ The Heartless She

SPONSORED

Take control with Horse Browser, the browser built for professionals who demand focus and efficiency. Save up to 2 hours every day by organising your work seamlessly and reducing daily stress.

Get 50% off your first payment with code FOOFARAW when you subscribe!

Check it out!

“The algorithms suggest a sixty-five percent likelihood of the contract vessel ‘The Berganza’ being responsible for some disruption to our operations. We are commissioning you to serve an injunction on them.”

Ovsei sipped his chai and nodded agreeably. He decided early in his career he would be nothing but polite when offered a contract by Cavendish Interventionists of any branch. This rule served him well for more than twenty years; the Interventionists paid exceptionally well for work Ovsei would do for a subsistence wage, and were glad to have him to blame when things inevitably got more kinetic than was good for the company’s squeaky clean image. 

“What timetable do you have in mind?”

“Expedited.” Sitting next to the Interventionist was a girl who made Ovsei feel decrepit. He had more lines on the back of his thumb than she did on her face. She was in a dress Ovsei recognised from movies his grandparents had liked. It was a traditional Bavarian costume, though her skin and hair had a distinctly East African spice.

Ovsei looked at Lev. His better half. Lev gave his little half shrug, a gesture Ovsei had come to know as on the warm side of indifference. 

“Payment of our usual fee up front, hundred percent bonus on completion.”

He expected them to haggle.

“Why didn’t they haggle?”

“Not worth worrying about,” Ovsei reassured Lev. “If it is so important to them that they will pay our starting offer, it is important enough that we would have had an abrupt engine failure shortly after declining their offer.”

Lev snorted. Abrupt engine failure being something of a recurring motif in their work.

“Better tell the girls then, hadn’t we?”

The girls were delighted. Most crews relied on a weathervane to keep them from trouble. It was, in fact, the entire purpose of having a weathervane in a contracting crew. Unfortunately for the Heartless She their weathervane Didi was something of an adrenaline addict. Of the three girls Ovsei and Lev had accidentally adopted, Didi was, however, the most restrained.

“Expedited? And a completion bonus!”

“Did you get the data download, old man?” Keke had decided that both Ovsei and Lev were at the beginning of their dotage and as such likely to forget crucial steps in the contracting practice. 

“You forget one time, and they never let you live it down,” Lev grumbled to Ovsei.

“What does it say about the ship?” Rosalia was practical until the torpedo tubes were loaded. Then she became a hooting mess. “Weapons? Shield plating? Engines?”

“Nothing in the file,” Didi grumbled, scrolling through the index. “It looks like it’s some old expeditionary scow, sold off at auction after a crucial part failed, and then stitched back together.”

Keke tapped her spoon on the weld seal that ran across the galley, the scarring of a rail gun which had torn Heartless She apart when she crossed the stars with a different name.

“No judgement,” Didi agreed.

“Have they seen us?” Ovsei always preferred to work from the shadows. The Heartless She might be a resoldered scow, but she was coated in stealth cladding, and occluded by high-performance electronics. Where possible, they used the distortive effects of gravity wells to improve their camouflage.

“It doesn’t look like it.” Keke peered into the scanners, watching for signs of acceleration, manoeuvring, or chaff deployment.

“Do it.” Ovsei gave the word. Didi did not countermand him, though she could.

Rosalia whistled to herself cheerfully as she completed her firing solutions. The algorithms calculated tumble, spin, and velocity. They fed traceries into her optical implants, constantly updating as she laced the void with dense carbon needles. The ship they were tracking was torn to pieces, reactive mass boiling chunks of its carcass.

“They didn’t try to avoid the bullets,” Lev said what they were all thinking. “Fuck.”