2954-07-08 – Tales from the Inbox: At Reach’s End 

Zeph Tsiklauri looked around the spaceport concourse warily as he stepped out of the lift. There wasn’t much to see, and he counted that fortunate. Braunweiss was little more than an outpost at the far outer edge of the Coreward Frontier, exactly the sort of place he wasn’t likely to run into trouble, but he had discovered over the prior six months that he had an uncanny knack for trouble. 

Or maybe it was that trouble had a knack for finding him. Zeph wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that no matter how out of the way a spaceport was, he seemed to end up running into someone who knew who he was, and that usually meant someone who wanted a piece of him. 

That was the problem with having a reputation, especially one built on the perforated bodies of other notoriously dangerous spacers.  

Zeph hadn’t precisely set out to be known as the bounty hunting  scourge of the underworld’s hired guns, but growing up on Botched Ravi had made him tough and stubborn. When he’d had a barroom altercation with a roaring-drunk belligerent as a young spacer just starting out, he had held his ground. Naturally, that tattooed hooligan had reached for a gun, but being stone-cold sober, Zeph pinned him to a bulkhead with flechettes before his assailant could get even one shot off. 

He’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the incident, and the local authorities even paid out the fixer’s modest bounty even though Zeph hadn’t even known the man’s name. 

The Syndicate had of course marked Zeph for a more personal sort of collection, but two attempted assassinations had gone little better than the drunk’s fumbling attempt. Zeph couldn’t really claim this was due to his own skill or precautions; the first reprisal killer had missed a clean shot at Zeph’s back at twenty meters, and he’d been tipped off about the identity of the second and had turned hunter himself, preparing an ambush in a disused spaceport corridor where weapons fire wasn’t going to hurt any bystanders. 

After that, Zeph had cleared out, crossed half the Reach, and tried his luck signing onto a crew out of Valkyrie. This hadn’t lasted long; that crew found his presence rather deleterious to their efforts to avoid the ire of the powerful syndicates of the Silver Strand. After a random and rather farcical encounter with a low-level goon trying to earn himself a quick promotion, Zeph and his shipmates had parted ways.  

From there, he’d bought a scrapyard Albatross explorer and spent a few months getting it fixed up. Zeph’s Old Mule was hardly the prettiest spacecraft in the Reach, but it was everything a solo operator could want in an all-purpose runabout – roomy, comfortable, nimble, and well armed, with plenty of stores for long voyages. 

Old Mule had served him in good stead on his meandering way back across the Reach toward home, taking odd jobs where he could find them to keep his bank account from going dry. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost count of the various incidents resulting in the death of someone who tried to kill him or take his things – it was at least fifteen, but probably above twenty-five, depending on how you counted it, and how many of the various “upwardly mobile” underworld hooligans who’d crept away from a gunfight wounded had later died of their injuries. 

Zeph tried not to worry about any of them, when his own skin needed plenty of worrying about. Several of the surprise pistol duels foisted upon him had been caught on security monitors, and some of those recordings had made their way onto the datasphere, which only compounded the problem. For the Reach’s underworld, causing death had become a point of institutional pride. He was a mildly famous example of someone who’d slighted them repeatedly, and he was still very much alive. 

He’d heard there was need for independent pilots at Braunweiss. Since the system was nearly cut off from most of the Reach by Incarnation incursion into the Frontier, it had taken nearly a month of Himura jumps to work his way around the conflict zone. On the way into the system, he’d set up an interview with a local grandee who seemed to be hiring, and now, all he had to do to secure a cushy asteroid-watching contract was not die on his way to the meeting. 

Zeph did his best to look nonchalant and busy as he walked briskly along the concourse. A few heads turned to look at him, of course – he was after all a big, bluff Ravi-born newcomer – but most returned their attention to their own doings just as quickly. 

One or two seedier-looking characters watched him more openly. Zeph met their eyes evenly, but didn’t break stride. If anyone wanted to have a go at him now, and was stupid enough to do it in the wide open of the concourse, so be it. Anyone that foolish was not a real threat. 

What Zeph hadn’t accounted for, was a very different kind of trouble. A familiar, crystalline laugh echoed off the bulkheads. He turned to look for its source, a picture forming in his head already – a cascade of curly red hair framing a pale face, green eyes peering out lazily between long eyelashes, full red lips twisted just slightly upward into a sly smile. He would know that laugh anywhere, but he’d last heard it on the other side of the Reach. 

Not seeing the person it belonged to, Zeph quickened his pace as much as he could without breaking into a run. Anata Kearney, here, meant he needed to get his business done, and get back to his ship. 

His meeting was in a private office on the level above the concourse, and he soon reached the lift that would take him there. As he got into its car, however, a slight figure in a black coat with a jagged white mohawk darted out of a doorway and slipped in just before the doors closed. 

Zeph’s hand crept toward his gun. 

“I’ve missed you, Zeph.” The figure looked up, and two vibrantly green eyes met Zeph’s gaze. Anata’s mane of red hair was gone – she had taken such pride in that, once – but there was no mistaking her. 

“Twice now. Or is it three times?” Zeph scowled. “Come to have another go, Ana?” 

Mr. Tsiklauri is probably known by reputation to some members of this audience. His rather star-crossed career is remarkable mainly for not yet being cut tragically short. 

He could of course be protected from his criminal enemies if he ceased to travel as an independent spacer and settled down on one of the Core Worlds, where Syndicate influence is very small, but this seems to have not occurred to him. Like many spacers, he seems at peace with the risks of the trade, however amplified they may be in his case.