No Leverage - Part 2

A shuttle passed high overhead, too far off to be theirs, its engine note scraping faintly through the hot air before thinning into distance. Ragnar watched it go until the sound faded, his jaw working once before it stilled. It sat wrong, taking jobs like this…where there wasn’t enough intel. He had spent a career in a past life all about…intelligence. Not going in blind, or making sure that no one else went that way. But that was in the past and here, he didn’t have the luxury of those morals.

Out here, refusal was just another kind of answer. One some men took personally.

The client had not threatened him. He had not needed to. He had sent the invitation through three hands and one locked channel, with Ragnar’s name spelled correctly and enough detail folded into the message to make it clear he knew where to find him again. Work was offered. Pay was generous. Attendance expected.

Men like that did not ask twice. And the meeting with him had sealed it. A nice office, a smiling face and the echoes of screams of the last person who had let him down. A good sales pitch if nothing else.

Ragnar shifted his grip on the rifle sling and looked back toward the shallow road cut through the rocks. The exchange party was late by three minutes. Not enough to matter. Enough to notice. Beside him, the Orion smiled without warmth, leaning a little closer as if he had mistaken proximity for pressure. “Getting twitchy, Meral?” he asked, his dark eyes shining as he studied Ragnar.

Ragnar did not look at him, but he let the silence sit there long enough to make the answer feel deliberate. “No.”

The man huffed a laugh through his nose, the sound dry and ugly as he rolled his shoulders. “You always this talkative?”

“Only with people I like,” Ragnar said smoothly, his face giving nothing away as his attention stayed on the road.

That got a sharper smile from one of the others, but no real humour came with it. It fell flat into the dust between them. Ragnar let it. He was not here to make friends. He was not even here to make a point. He was here because he needed the funds, because he needed somewhere safe to sleep, because the blockers were running low and the last job had paid in promises until the captain disappeared with the cargo and half the crew’s shares.

Because being one man with useful skills did not mean much when everyone else had ships, crews and names people feared.

A faint tremor moved through the ground before the sound reached them. Engines, low and approaching.

The others straightened by fractions. Not much, just enough...Hands moved closer to weapons, shoulders set ready. The empty-eyed man stopped chewing. Ragnar breathed in through his nose and let the air sit behind his teeth. Dust, heat, old fuel, hunger for violence…and something else too. Sharp, bitter, settling in his nostrils as much as his mind. Fear, he realised, a flash of it from someone before it eased. Too quick for him to know where it had originated.

He turned his head toward the road as the transport came into view, dark against the glare, its hull battered and its markings scrubbed almost clean. It rolled in slow, careful, stopping at the far edge of the field with enough distance between them that nobody could pretend this was trust.

The hatch opened with a cough of hydraulics and heat haze, spilling three figures down the ramp into the dust. Ragnar watched them before he watched anything else, because cargo did not usually kill you first. People did. The first out was Nausicaan, broad and heavy, with one tusk capped in dark metal and a disruptor resting openly in both hands like subtlety had never been introduced to him and wouldn’t have liked him much if it had. The second was smaller, hood pulled up against the dust, face half-covered by a respirator that clicked faintly with each breath. The third came last.

He was Human, or near enough for it not to matter from this distance, dressed in a clean coat with gloves that had not touched cargo and boots that had no business staying that polished in a place like this. He carried no visible weapon and did not look at the crates first. That was what caught Ragnar’s attention. Not the armed men, not the transport, not even the distance they had kept between both parties. The man looked at the people instead, slowly and carefully, like he had paid for the right to take his time.

Beside Ragnar, the lanky one stopped breathing.

It was small. Not enough for anyone else to notice, maybe. But Ragnar felt it before he fully saw it, that sharp bitter spike that had been gathering under the dust and heat and hunger for violence. Fear, sudden and absolute, not nerves or greed, but recognition. His eyes shifted without his head moving, and the twitchy man had gone still. All that restless movement, the listening, the eyes going places they should not, the hands too close to pockets and seams, all of it gone in a second. His face had emptied in a different way from the cold killers. It was the freeze, when panic pushed you past that point. Ragnar felt it prickling along his skin and shifted, shaking it off.

The clean-gloved man smiled a predator’s smile, and Ragnar understood what the job was. The cargo had never been in the crates. His eyes went to the man and he took a slow step back, because he didn’t want to be in the line of fire if the lanky man tried to do a runner.

“Oh, no,” the twitchy man whispered, the sound barely making it past his teeth before he turned, eyes moving from one hired body to the next. “No. Listen to me. You don’t understand what this is.”

[To be Continued]