Free Atrophy by Jess Anastasi

Last time we dealt with him, he gave us a shipment of counterfeit memory storage devices, and we had to pay the clients back out of our next haul. This is so you can track him down and shoot him, right?”
    “Shut up, Roarke.” He paused the transmission and took it back to the start, since he hadn’t heard the first part of the message while Callan blabbed in the background.
    “I have a shipment bound for you. The cargo is very valuable to the Reidar. They paid me a lot of money to acquire it and will pay the freighters who deliver it almost as much, so long as it gets there in one piece.”
    “Arnon Rance? Why in the fiery pits of hell is he on our viewport?” Jensen, the ship’s mechanic, stopped by his chair, looking up at the display. “Didn’t you say if you ever laid eyes on him again you’d light a gas grenade up his—?”
    “Move it or lose it, Roarke.” Lianna appeared, chasing Callan out of her chair.
    Rian paused the recording again with a long sigh. “ Jezus , people, can’t I get five seconds of quiet?”
    There was a chorus of “sorry, Captain” before they all shut up and he resumed the communication. “Like I said last time we talked, I’m grounded in the desert on Arleta. I’ll be here for the next two rotations. If you want this cargo and the chance to get some intel on the Reidar, get your famous ass here before then, Sherron, or I’ll be gone.”
    The viewport shimmered and then cleared, showing the Erebus spaceport laid out below them.
    “All right, crew, are we clear to launch?” Rian filed away the message and brought up navigational data to get them from Erebus to Arleta. They’d be pushing it to get there by two rotations, but this cargo, whatever it might be, had to be important. Maybe the most important thing he’d come across since he’d left the IPC military and struck out to track down and destroy every Reidar he could find. Important enough to deal with that back-stabbing roach-sucking pissant of a trader, Rance. The guy never left his small quadrant of space, happy to be a big-time trader in a small pond. Rance knew Rian was hunting the Reidar after coming up against them himself, the bastard just didn’t know why.
    Rance went out of his way to avoid them, which was probably just one of the many reasons he wanted to hand off this shipment. Still, the hairy slime-ball had obviously realized whatever cargo he’d acquired was valuable enough that Rian would overlook his burning desire to fill the man with plasma and slingshot him into the nearest star.
    No one had answered his question about launching, and he looked up to see everyone staring at the hatchway where Zahli stood, the scumrat just behind her. And if he wasn’t mistaken the guy had on one of his shirts. Frecking Christ .
    Zahli crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. “Are you telling me we’re going to Arleta because of a message from Arnon Rance ?”
    He stood up and slammed a fist down on the crystal screen, his beads clinking loudly. “Yes! Now is everyone clear on that? Rance has something valuable the Reidar want. I’m not going to explain anything else. And I thought I said I don’t want to see that scumrat, which most definitely includes standing on my bridge.”
    Zahli sent him a wounded look then murmured to their stowaway and led him back down the stairs. Sen muttered something about checking the hyper-engine’s secondary controls, while Callan shrugged and stomped off the bridge, no doubt going to find something to eat.
    Lianna brought the ship online and put in a launch request to Erebus’s spaceport control tower. “And I thought stabbing people first thing in the morning usually put you in a good mood.”
    “I want us in void-space and hyper-drive engines at maximum as soon as we’ve cleared orbit. It’s going to be close, but missing this rendezvous with Rance is not an option.” He sat back down and resumed his course plotting.
    “Yes, sir, most reverent