By David C.Daoust
Colin Vice was never sure where to begin– Daily, when he punched-in his pass key, and the latest cargo-hold slowly opened before him to reveal his next job, one spot always seemed as good as the next. Careful not to start an avalanche of goods, he pried out the first box and turned it over in his grip to find the bar-code the ‘line’ would need to read and process the box.
The line was a waist-high metal structure of rollers and scanners that snaked all the way out of the ship to the landing. The line was actually a servitor droid, in and of itself. It could read and process the bar-code as he sent the packed merchandise down the conveyer. The Servitor followed close behind, as Colin, ever so slowly, progressed further and further into the long cargo bay of boxes.
Colin awoke earlier than most other inhabitants of the small dusty moon of Twin Crown, pulled on his work clothes, and headed to the star port, where new shipments of merchandise had arrived aboard merchant ships from all over the colonized Solar System. His job was a simple one. He moved said merchandise from the merchant ships, onto the landing, where it was sorted and dispersed to its destination. It was good honest work, for good honest men.
Truth was, Colin Vice had never been considered an honest man a day in his life. He’d been raised in a totally different environment than those that lived on this small hide away moon, full of refugees seeking escape from the war torn and greed infested solar system that was known as ‘the Onion’.
Here on the Belt, far from the hub of resource planets at the system’s core, people could slide by without getting involved in wars for territory, or deal with the everyday violence of the city-stations. Of course they were still taxed to high hell by whichever standing government happened to own the moon at any given time, but there is no escaping tax.
Colin was raised far away from the Belt, deep in the heart of the Onion. His father, Bernard Vice, had built a shipping company that could never be considered legitimate. It was known only as the Organization. And it was indeed the central traffic of the black market. Not as dark and murky as some areas of said market, but most of what was carried in his family’s vast fleet of star ships was never to be registered in any port or authority.
He was raised by rough men, bloody men, the kind of men normal folk prayed to God to never cross paths with. He took to the life quite easily and was running errands for his father around the age of sixteen. Had killed a man by the age of seventeen and had almost been killed himself by the age of eighteen.
The latter was an incident that had changed him forever. Not just physically, as his chest and back were now riddled with scars from where the bullets had plunged into his body, or the artificial heart that had to be implanted for him to live through the experience, but mentally changed his outlook. No longer would he play the game of the high and mighty tough-guy son of one of the largest crime syndicates in the Onion. Calm and calculated ever after, Colin Vice held his anger in check. Cold passionless, those that knew him would say heartless, a comment that never failed to bring a smirk, to the quite literally heartless man’s lips.
So how then did he find himself here? Doing honest work, for honest people, on an honest moon? Not hard to fathom his motives were dishonest. His father had sent him out on a secret job. A job so secret, even Colin did not know the contents of the load he had brought from the heart of the Onion.
Problems arose though, as they tend to do. A blown coil left his ship a useless metal husk in the middle of the desert of this moon. Colin was forced to abandon his ship, with the highly secretive, most likely illegal, cargo still packed away in its hold. The trip through the desert was no game either.
For the past six weeks he’d been working this job, partially to earn coin, partially to gain information from poorly secured star ship navigation terminals.
Of course, getting this job was a heist in itself. For the most part, labor of this kind is handled by droids, even on a backwards moon such as this. Lucky for Colin, the ‘Portland Movers’ only had one such droid, which was easily taken out of the equation with a properly installed virus, a virus that caused the droid to attempt to juggle all the precious merchandise, an incident which caused those hiring the Portland Movers, to lose all faith in the company’s droids, and their ability to move goods safely.
Enter the ‘honest man’, in search of honest work.
Enter Colin Vice.
Colin had just hit the halfway point of the cargo bay, something he had learned from experience. He remembered the first ship he had ever unloaded seemed an endless pit of work; the boxes stacked so high and so deep, one couldn’t tell the true size of the bay, until he hit the back wall. After six weeks, Colin was an old pro and could tell, by the structure of the ship, he was halfway through his mornings work, and more importantly, that he could take a break.
Colin made his way back out of the cargo bay. The Servitor’s line suddenly twisting itself around, to continue to follow him.
“I’m taking a break,” Colin said making a motion with his hand for it to stay. “I’ll be right back.”
The Servitor beeped a few times, had to back nearly all the way out of the bay, just to right itself, having curled itself into a U to follow behind him, ever ready for another box to be sent down its conveyers.
“Stupid droids,” Colin muttered to himself as he made his way down the ramp and back out into the open air.
