Repo Jocks

Repossessions

James Rackham sighed, looking around carefully; it was always the little jobs that went wrong in the biggest of ways when you weren't looking.

"Mike, find it yet?" He radioed his partner.

"Not yet, but we're closing in. Stations big, but a busted up mess from some war, or raid, or whatever. We'd have found it already if they had a proper surveillance system, but this things more full of holes than a rat infested nomad ship."

"Yeah, well, that's probably why he's out here in the first place." James replied, chuckling darkly as he walked through the third hangar of the run down colony station Mist Drifter. The place was a real dump. It was out on the raggedy edge of known, colonized Frontier space, suffered a few pirate attacks and mercenary raids, and was the frequent meeting ground of smugglers, traffickers, and the general scum of the human race.

Of course, while this made it easy to infiltrate to hunt for their target, as no one looked twice at a lone star fighter or a pair of random fighter pilots traveling out to their humble abode, it also made it hard to actually locate said target. They'd been moving around this port of thieves and cutthroats for over two days already, and people were getting suspicious.

Not that they were cops or any other real form of legitimate authority figures; but that they were assassins hunting an assignment, or bounty hunters hunting a bounty head, or spies of one of the myriad organizations, both governmental and private. Or a long list of other things, none of them well liked, and all of them dangerous on all sides.

Either way, James had the feeling that lots of knives were being sharpened for their backs, and that it was past time to leave this damned anarchist hellhole.

Looking around across the massive hangar, he sighed in irritation. With dozens of massive platforms jutting out along the walls, or along the massive columns that dotted the middle of the place, all of them designed for everything from shuttles to heavy freighters to dock at, it could still take days more to search the place on foot.

"I think we have a winner!" Mike radioed to him a few minutes later.

"Oh, thank God! Where?"

Two columns left over, midway up, far side. Sending a marker to your scanner now. Already confirmed the model and make, and the things even answering with the same electronic license plate. She's our bird. Jackass didn't even try to hide her." Mike almost sounded offended that it had been so easy after so many days of looking.

"They never do, not when they travel through so many different borders and territories. It's one of the few things that makes our job easier." James had practically broken out into a jog to a nearby transport cart to speed up the trip to correct column. Otherwise it would be nearly a twenty minute walk.

"I know, I know, it's just once in a while, some actual effort to hide from us would be nice."

"Quit complaining. This is easy money, and I want off this floating slime bucket. You got the Calico warmed up yet? As soon as I'm in we're out of here." He hacked the simplistic controls on transport cart and pushed the little thing up to a decent speed towards the targeted columns elevator.

"Yeah, yeah, ships ready to go. I had her engines cooking soon as I identified our target. Soon as your good, we're gone. I got to say, I like it when I get to play computer hacker and you get to do the leg work. Don't even have to leave our ship."

"I'm checking that damned coin as soon as we're back in civilized space! I'm sure you got it rigged somehow, this is the third time in a row I've had to do the shit work."

"I'm offended you would imply such a thing! I'm the soul of honesty and integrity!"

"You turned Dante into a hacker because you were bored!"