Deliverance; Teaser

Captain Alexei Hon was lying in his bunk aboard the transport ship Deliverance. He had tried to sleep but he was haunted by memories of the war. Beneath his closed eyelids the fires of Shadow raged, never to die. He opened his eyes and gazed over the small cabin. The place was fairly well furnished. He had his own desk, a comfy armchair where he had often leaned back and enjoyed a good cigar. One of the walls was adorned with several old medals, ID-tags and other war memorabilia but also several crucifixes and other Christian symbols.

Alexei got out of his bunk and started to dress. After strapping on his combat boots he started to walk down the short corridor that separated his private room from the cockpit. As he entered the cramped pilot area Farah Hsu spinned around the pilots chair and faced him. ”Morning ´Cap” Alexei stared at the single most defining trait of her looks, a deep white scar running down her cheek, he had given her that scar the day he had saved her life. Farah spinned around again and started to check the control panel. “You had good sleep tonight ´Cap?” Farah was wearing a worn out coat, which supposedly had once been brown but now was more of a grayish-tan color. She had served during the war for the Independents as a code breaker. Alexei suddenly realized that he had stood still for several minutes without uttering a single phrase. ”Not really Farah, anythin up on the cortex?” ”Pretty quiet, got some Alliance traffic in the system but otherwise we seem to be pretty alone out here” she responded. Alexei nodded, and then leaned on one of the consoles. “You should get some sleep, I ain´t likely to get any so I might as well pilot this thing instead”. The two looked at each other for awhile before changing places. Alexei ran his hands down the console, he loved flying, and it took his mind of everything else and let him feel simple again. Farah turned around to walk away but paused for a while. “The ghosts will let go sooner or later ´Cap, it wasn’t your fault” “I know they will, that’s the problem Farah, I don’t want them to”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cable Dunn was sitting at a poker table in the back of a tavern on the moon Adonis. The game was Texas holdem and so far he had lost five hands in a row. ”Just a part of my cunning strategy” he mumbled. In part to keep the other players guessing but mostly as a weak attempt to reassure himself. A large fellow with a serious case of intimidatin manners was dealing the cards. Cable hadn’t caught his name but it had sounded somewhat like Link or Lunk. Crude and brutish anyhow. There were two other players at the table. Chen Tzu, a local “businessman” and Yorick who claimed to be a independent contractor but whose manners screamed corp. Cable was pretty sure they were all cheating, but he didn’t care much, after all so was he.

He looked down at the hand he had been dealt and couldn’t believe his luck when he saw two aces smiling back up at him. He studied the others, Tzu was scratching his nose which Cable had picked up pretty fast meant he had a rotten hand. Yorick didn’t have much of a poker face, and judging by the fact that his face had shone up like Sihnon on U-day, whatever he had was good. What’s his name however seemed impervious to reading, his face was always stone cold, the man was likely to dumb to be able to experience emotions. Oddly enough when time came to bet, everyone threw in their share of platina to the pot. Cable took a long look at Tzu, was he a better player then he had thought? Or was he attempting a bluff? As the game continued the pile of cash in the center of the table just kept rising, when it finally came to turning up the community cards they revealed two aces, Cable quickly calculated the odds of that to happen to roughly 2,598,960 to one, which pretty much put the odds pretty much in Cables favor.

Time then came to reveal the cards; the big lunk was first, having a week hand that didn’t really give him a chance. Yorick, slightly less cheerful now had a pair of eights, not bad but nothing compared to Cable. He felt his poker face start splitting into a grin when suddenly it all turned bad. Tzu turned over his hand with a smirk on his lips, showing a ace. Cable stared at the card for a while. Bastard was cheating, and trying to steal his winnings nonetheless. Cable was frozen in chock for a while. His confounded state was suddenly broken by the ogres harsh voice. “Your next little man, or do you hide something?” Cable snapped back into reality. This was bad, and something had to be done quickly. He was the offworlder at this table, and with two aces this was going to look like a rotten attempt at cheating. ”I, I fold” he bursted out. He couldn’t risk them seeing his hand at this point. The brute leaned over the table towards him, resting his fist on the surface. Yorick leaned slightly away from him and Tzu seemed to be reaching for something inside his vest. ”No Mr. Cable, I want to see your cards” the lunk in front of him growled. Cable sighed and then let his cards fall to the table. “It appears someone has brought his own set of cards to the table” Tzu said with a sinister smirk on his lips. “You have bad manners Cable and I think we mite have to give you some lessons in etiquette”. Cable let his hands slide down his thigh towards the Derringer he had hidden there. Why did every vacation have to end in a gunfight?

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“Hitting atmo in 3...2..1..” Deliverance shook heavily as the ship hit the atmosphere of Adonis and the cockpit was lit up by the flames that caressed her body. “Firing stabilizers” Captain Hon was sitting at the controls and behind him Farah had returned from the galley to watch reentry. She liked to watch the captain fly, he had a soothing calm around him that had been developed during years of military training. And she always thought he sounded kinda funny yelling out his maneuvers, guess old habits die hard. “Send a wave to Cable and tell him we will be on the ground in five, I want to know if that man has managed to scrounge up any work for us” He said. “Sure thing Cap” she replied. Farah walked over to the co-pilots station and started to page Cable.

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Cable was just about to draw his gun when his cortex terminal started beeping. “Uhm.. Mind if I get that?” He said with an unsteady voice. “Actually” Tzu answered while pulling a small gun from his vest, “We do mind”.