We agreed that the mission would take place on the very next day. The window of opportunity was fickle, there was no safe way to tell when and if Belarix would decide to sell or use the bio-data.
The next step I needed to plan was the trip going there.
Belarix's compound was located on Cloreps, the largest of seven moons orbiting Galrus VI, a bleak and lifeless world that was once filled to the brim with valuable metals and minerals.
Cloreps wasn't originally suited for human life but a few decades of terraforming well before I was born had served to correct that slight deficiency. For the three centuries that followed, Cloreps had been as a successful mining hub, making a lot of very rich people considerably richer.
Well, not so much anymore. There were still mineral crumbs to mine deep in the most hazardous parts of Galrus VI, just not enough to keep any significant corporation interested.
Lots of planets out there. No point in wasting resources on one that's almost bare.
Over time, Cloreps changed into something less civilized but not any less populated. Most people still living there were descendants of miners who had no means of leaving to start a new life elsewhere once the mining craze had died out. There was however still a redeeming quality to this mess of a moon; since it stood next to nothing less than five major trade routes, Cloreps had evolved into a sort of business exchange hub.
But not the sort of business most people like to be involved with.
An ideal spot for a dubious entrepreneur like Belarix to call home. From my initial digging into his personal affairs, I gathered we were pretty much in the same business with perhaps a few slight yet pivotal differences. For starters, he served a vastly wider client base and his corporate venture completed a lot more jobs than I did with Sy.
Numbers, really. Until recently, I had been working alone and now, Sy was my only official partner. Belarix had a full retinue of henchmen, lieutenants, thugs and goons at his disposal.
Disposal being an essential keyword here. I came to understand that for anyone working under him, advancement was almost as frequent as early, sudden and permanent retirement.
Needless to say, we somewhat traded the same craft but while I aimed for quality, Belarix was quite content with quantity.
I suppose that if I looked hard enough, I could find a few more common traits between this charming notradox and myself. We both liked to be in complete control of our own little universe. We were both paranoid and neither of us seemed to care much for the comfort of society in general.
And we both had a thing for Satie.
There were also differences to consider. Belarix treated his partners with a merciless system of fear versus reward. Efficient I suppose, to some degree. It encouraged performance but betrayal would never be very far, which was yet another reason for Belarix to be paranoid.
I only had one partner, I didn't pay her. There was no fear, no risk of sudden retirement. I was generally nice to her and I fucked her in the ass as much and as often as she asked. She was programmed to enjoy it so I suppose it wasn't too bad of a deal for her.
Location was also a difference between us. His lair was in the middle of a dirty, scummy spaceport. Mine was isolated in a stable asteroid belt in the middle of nowhere.
Well, not entirely nowhere. If a nosy, long range scanner array is going to notice you every time you leave home or come back, your carefully hidden base becomes useless. There's some sense in hiding in plain sight, the planetary system in which my base was located was void of any interesting planets but there were four systems with inhabited M-class planets within less than a few hours travel so when ships came through here, no one noticed, no one cared.
As a high profile merc generally hired to do quiet, dangerous and mostly isolated jobs, it was mandatory for me to own a ship. It was small, no larger than a shuttle really. Fast and hard to take down, it carried very little in terms of firepower, unless you counted Sy as a weapon but that was a completely different story.
That little ship really was all I needed to carry out my mission and for this particular one, it would be just perfect. Unlike most private mercs who enjoyed making a bold statement of their presence, I didn't go out of my way to make my ship stand out. I didn't want or need to be recognized when I visited a target, I didn't care for that sort of marketing. I preferred letting my results speak for themselves. My ship had no name, a very boring designation number and it looked like any other private shuttle out there.
Getting there would be the easy part. I considered parking my shuttle on one of the nearby worlds to take a commercial transport to Cloreps but an emergency escape would considerably more difficult.
It would be easy to park my ship at one of Cloreps's three spaceports. Just a drop in the ocean. From there, Sy and Satie would find their way to Belarix's compound. Satie would voluntarily be captured while Sy would do just her thing. I would stay in the ship and monitor everything. The gear I had at home was far more adequate than my ship's console for a hostile takeover of Belarix's systems but there was no way I would let these two alone on a mission at this point. Sy was still somewhat green and there was absolutely no way to tell how Satie would react if things went wrong.
I refused to risk losing either one of them, my presence close by would be necessary if anything happened. I was no space hero but walking down an enemy base with my guns blazing if needed; well within my grasp.
My own preparations were now complete. My data feed into my target's control room was stable and I made certain that it was completely private and undetected. As far as I knew, we were good to go but Sy insisted on preparing Satie for her role. I wasn't aware she needed any preparing but since Sy was new to this initiative thing, far from me to try and discourage her.
Speaking of Satie, I was pretty happy with the injection device I made for her. At first, I planned to use a stealthy, subdermal patch but I quickly rejected that idea. Not only did it severely limit the quantity of chemicals I could administrate, there was a million ways it could go wrong if she got in any real trouble.
I therefore aimed for a look that combined both civilized and feral, tame yet sexy, something that reflected how Satie had taken control over her slave life; I placed the injector in an unchained metal choker. It was crafted with the very same alloy I used to build Sy's frame, nearly indestructible. The injector used no mechanical parts. Instead, I opted for a high frequency injection vector that pulverized the chemicals directly into the muscle tissue. It would sting a bit but the fail rate was pretty much nonexistent.
All I needed now was for Satie to try it on.
For the last three hour or so, Sy had Satie locked up in her own little lab. I had to admit, curiosity was getting the better of me.
"Sy darling, how are you doing? When can we leave?"
