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17th November, 4501

Many Services to be Found

by Captain Peter Avignon

Captain's Log – Supplemental
Freeport, Caspia System – Date: 16-17 November 4501
 
We slipped into Freeport under a false transponder and a healthy dose of cynicism. The place is exactly what you’d expect: a scab on the skin of civilized space, where pirates dock to sell loot, spend credits, and pretend they’re free instead of just desperate. The landing pads are pitted and patched; the air smells like exhaust, cheap synth-liquor, and poor life choices.
 
Castor went sniffing around the shadow-forums almost immediately. He came back with a lead: someone’s moving the same combat drugs we found missing from the La Mussara lab. Good news—maybe. Bad news—the seller’s cagey and won’t talk to just anyone.
 
We needed an in. I suggested we name-drop someone with weight in these circles. Castor picked Steve Jones, “Ravager of a Thousand Worlds.” Sounded impressive. Turns out Steve is a gun-runner and mercenary type—has nothing to do with combat drugs. We picked the wrong legend.
 
We recovered on the fly, telling the contact that “Steve” wants to equip his marines with performance enhancers and needs a bulk supplier. It’s thin, but it got us a meeting.
 
While Castor prepped for the meet, Lucid and Beñat went digging in Freeport’s digital gutters. They found a public terminal so ancient it felt like archeology—flickering green text, magnetic tape servers jury-rigged to modern relays with six different converters. The whole system was sluggish and half-clogged with low-grade smut. Beñat stood guard, radiating “don’t touch me” energy, while Lucid wrestled with the interface.
 
Hours later, they returned with a profile on our “legend”:

  • **Steve “Ravager of a Thousand Worlds” Jones** (born Trevor Stephan Jones, age 32).

    • Operates a single ship armed with overpowered nuclear torpedoes of unknown origin. Specializes in orbital extortion—wipe out small colonies that don’t pay—and employs exotic munitions to disable ships before looting them and spacing the crews. Charming fellow.
     
    More usefully, they pulled a file on our target dealer:
  • **Adram Elis, 42.**

    • Known for a relatively clean rep in a dirty business—no backstabbing clients, no cut product. Also a skilled cybernetic surgeon, the go-to chop-shop doc in Freeport.
    Suppliers: myriad and untraceable.
    Notable trait: *extremely* paranoid.
     
    Before logging off, we left a little gift in the system—replaced some of the smut with political agitprop from Beñat’s archives: *“Is your captain spacing you? There are more of you than of him. You should unionize (and space him first).”* A little light reading for Freeport’s disillusioned.
     
    The plan shifted last minute. Beñat would meet Adram instead of Castor—posing as Steve’s new, more professional procurement officer. The pitch: even a chaos-loving warlord needs reliable drugs if he doesn’t want his marines dead before they board. Lucid would feed Beñat lines through a subdermal comm.
     
    **The Meet:**
    Adram eyed Beñat warily.
    *“You are Castor Thomas?”*
    Beñat, after a barely perceptible pause: *“Yes. I am Castor Thomas.”*
    Lucid whispered guidance through the earpiece. Beñat played it cool—just wanted samples to verify quality before a bulk buy.
    Adram relaxed slightly. *“You want maximum killing power?”*
    Beñat took one of each variant—two unstable batches (likely to kill the user after a few doses) and four stable ones. Paid in untraceable chits. Said he’d be in touch in a week.
     
    Captain's Log – Supplemental
    Freeport, Caspia System – Date: 17 November 4501
    Hacking, Honeypots, and Hard Drives
     
    17 November
    The day after the meet, Lucid went back to the ancient public terminal—still humming away on its jury-rigged converters and what looked like a repurposed gaming console. She pulled Adram’s address: a string of raw planetary coordinates. Because of course in a place like this, navigation is done by latitude and longitude, not street names.
     
    She shot the location to Beñat’s wrist-comp, then noticed her own device running hot. Not overheating-hot, but suspiciously busy. We shrugged it off—figured it was just processing lag from the antiquated connection. It wouldn’t be until a week later, when her datapad bricked itself, that we’d realize it had been silently mining crypto the whole time. Classic Freeport hospitality.
     
    While Beñat and I reviewed the drug samples and their ominous lot numbers—45-01 and 44-86—Lucid put Plan Honeypot into motion. She tracked Adram to a grimy portside bar, slid onto the stool next to him, and turned on the charm. He was paranoid, but not immune. Two drinks later, she’d slipped a sedative into his third. He was out before he hit the pillow in his rented flop.
     
    With Adram snoring peacefully, Lucid made her way to his personal terminal. No encryption to speak of—just a basic passcode she cracked in under a minute. She pulled up the batch logs.
     
    Findings:
     
    Batch 45-01: Logged as “looted by Space Kings.” Tagged with coordinates and a date stamp from three months ago.
     
    Batch 44-86: Same origin, same raiders.
     
    Facility List: Dozens of locations—pharma labs, biotech outposts, black clinics—scattered across the Frontier. Too many to hit blind.
     
    Lucid didn’t hesitate. She downloaded his entire supplier database, transaction logs, and facility dossiers onto a slim data wafer. Then she slipped out, leaving Adram to wake up with nothing but a headache and a missing afternoon.
     
    Back on the Good Times II, we made a plan. On Beñat's advice, we pick a King's facility to raid in order to get a captive that we can get information out of to help us narrow down the facilities to likely candidates for the Lysander scientists.
     
    It’s not elegant, but elegance rarely survives contact with pirates. We have targets. We have data.
     
    Now we just need a prisoner to make sense of it all.
     
    — Captain Peter Avignon
    SS Good Times II
    “Sometimes the best intel comes from a drugged dealer and a stolen drive.”
     
    [Addendum: Note to crew: if a public terminal asks you to “please wait while installing updates,” run.]

    Continue reading...

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    by 3 Armored Kittens · Prodromos v.1.1 - World Anvil 0.9.15.050 © 2017-2025 [] | Anvil Time: 14:08, Jun 27 2026