Lillian sat in the chair in the dark, little room. She was deeply nervous, but you couldn't tell by looking at her. Her face was composed and her jaw set. She tried not to think about what would come next, knowing it would be highly dangerous. The two goons that stood beside the door way across the table from her were silent and impassive. They'd obviously been picked for intimidation value, with hulking muscles and brutish features suggesting violence.
Lillian wasn't frightened of them. She was quite confident in her own ability to take them down in hand to hand if it came to it. She was quite the fighter despite her diminutive stature. The door creaked open, and a unassuming man came in. He was bland of feature and almost entirely average, with a shining white politicians smile. He sat down carefully, and arranged his briefcase. He opened the briefcase slowly and carefully, ignoring Lillian for the moment. He pulled out some papers and photographs, and spread them out carefully, then said, "So, my little friend..." Lillian despised being called little, she may only be five feet even, but she was hardly insignificant, "It appears you managed to do our dirty work without resorting to the gun. You have killed Mr. Petridis for me quite efficiently." He pushed one picture of a space-dead man forward, then an incident report from the Captain, one Reglar Ingotbottom.
"Says here that Mr. Petridis fell out the airlock after something malfunctioned. Quite clever of you." The man smiled, and Lillian's stomach turned. She nodded, quiet and impassive, outwardly. The man continued, "Yes, well, I imagine this concludes our business. You are released from our service, and we remind you never to speak of us. Even the Security Division Head isn't safe from our reach, young missy."
Lillian nodded, allowing some emotion to creep to her face. The man cocked his head at her curious grin, and asked, "What amuses you?"
Lillian smiled sweetly, and took the Universal Recorder out of her pocket. It was wired to a headset, so it would transmit the words it heard to a set of special receivers elsewhere. The man looked at it calmly, and sighed. He pulled a gun out of his briefcase calmly and carefully, "Really? You think that we hadn't prepared for such an event? You are a fool, and a dead fool, Ms. Helsbrecht."
Behind him, the door creaked open once more, and one of the guards crumpled to the ground with a thump. The other guard turned to go around the door, but it snapped back open, crushing his nose and sending him sprawling into the corner of the table. The table tipped and tottered for a moment, disrupting the careful array of papers, but it settled on it's feet. The man turned, his gun leading, but a set of hands in black armored gloves snatched his wrist and twisted with a sickening crack. The man dropped the gun silently, his face turning beet red, to look into the eyes of the intruder.
"Hello, Chairman Gulliver. I am, as you might be aware, Head of Internal Affairs and Investigations. My name is Grigori, and you have made a serious mistake this day." The smiling, Slavic man released the Chairman's hands, and gestured at Lillian, "Please, go outside. My associates will process you and you will be released. I need to have a long, exceptionally unpleasant conversation with this man." Lillian nodded, and started to walk out the door.
She turned down the hall, catching strains of conversation from the room behind her, "...Director of the Interstellar Commission will hear about this!"
"No, he will not." Another sickening crack, and a short scream. "Now, who else is part of your little... Syndicate?"
Two men in Deathsquad armor flanked Lillian after she turned another corner, and they led her to a small, mousy clerk of a man. He smiled, and said, "Mr. Petridis has made a full recovery from his near death experience, thanks to the brilliant medical treatment of Ms. Aemelia. Both of them, Director Blyant, and Mr. Ingotbottom are awaiting you on the Witness Relocation shuttle. Here are you new identities." He handed Lillian a small box, which, when she opened it, revealed five sets of identification, and an obscene amount of money. "Please, enjoy your new lives on Antioch VI."
Lillian entered the little shuttle, space only for about eight people. Two more of the immobile, silent, intimidating Deathsquad sat near the door, and she sat down next to a tall, brown haired man with a shaggy beard. Across from her were two doctors, and a man in an unmarked jumpsuit. "Well, so it's settled then?" Reglar, the man in the unmarked suit, said, "We're free to go, eh?"
Axl bumped his shoulder into Lillian's, and chuckled, "It wasn't a very long meeting..."
Lillian smiled, really smiled, and said, "Not for me... I suspect it might last a long, long time for the poor Chairman and his compatriots." She turned to Hector, the male doctor, who had a bit of a strange look on his face. She glared for a moment, then said, "Hector, what you did was stupid, unnecessary, and not befitting a man of your intellect..." Her gaze softened, and she reached out to pat his knee, "And I want to thank you deeply for it."
Hector smiled slightly, and Lillian spoke one more time, "So, my friends... Our new life awaits..."
The shuttle launched with a slight jerk and a roar of engines...
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Topic: Space Station 13: Urist McStation (Read 2124524 times)