The Saturn Transgression: Part One.

The Saturn Transgression

I

Rayfe Tassk took one last drag from his cigar, and then flicked the smoldering butt over the alarmingly corroded safety rail of landing platform B77. He watched it drop for a few feet before it disappeared in the boiling Venusian cloud cover below. A mild twinge of vertigo assailed him and he stepped away from the edge, walking casually back to the battered metallic ellipsoid that was his home and livelyhood, the light freighter Celestial Bounty.

Tassk cut a swashbuckling figure; a swarthy, rangy man with dark hair carefully trimmed to downplay a receding hairline and a thick, resplendent moustache dominating the space between his hawkish nose and often grinning mouth. His tight black trousers and flaring white shirt were immaculately tailored, and his tall spacer’s boots were polished to a mirror sheen. Many who would criticize such foppish attire might be dissuaded by sight of the chromed, pearl handled gauss pistol that hung low in an elaborately tooled black leather gun belt.
Standing at the foot of the lowered cargo ramp, Tassk rubbed the stubble on his square jaw and impatiently eyeballed the small structure at the far end of the platform where the surface-lift would emerge. He was impatient to leave. Venus had been sufficiently terraformed in the past century or two to allow for mask-free breathing, but the air was still foul, even at this altitude.
Finally he yelled toward the interior of the Bounty. “Hey, Suds! What time is it?”
“Time for you to purchase a chronometer!” came the gravelly reply. The speaker came down the ramp to join Tassk. Skeks Sudzdozin, A.K.A “Suds”, was a lean humanoid of a space-faring species originating in the Sagittarius Arm. He was of middle height and covered in a worn, dirty green flight suit. His skin was hairless and a deep blue. His large bulbous head was near featureless, save for a heavy brow ridge over enormous crimson eyes and a stern slash of a mouth. His teeth were large, white and unsettlingly regular.
Suds was the registered captain of the Bounty, and in a former life was the respected owner of a legitimate shipping company, before the consolidation of the Congress of Federated Systems into the Stellar Empire caused him to go bankrupt, forcing him to earn a seedier living consorting with scoundrels like Rayfe Tassk.
Suds groped in a pocket on his suit and produced a data pad in his long-fingered hand, and thrust its display in Tassk’s face.
“Fifteen forty-four.” he stated. “Sixteen of your terran minutes until the client is supposed to arrive.”
“Yeah, yeah…I just want to get out of here. I don’t want any run- ins with the VCC. They’ve gotten pretty trigger-happy since the Phobos Tong heisted that load right off the pad at Terra Nova.”
“Serves them right for suppressing Organic Crystallography.” grunted Suds.
Tassk rolled his eyes. “Geez, enough with the conspiracy theories! You sound like that springnut that was suing your planet for abducting his great-to the third power granddad.”
“He sued the Reticulans! Who are a quadrant away and not even in the same phylum as my race! You are specist as hell, Tassk! And mark my words, once Organic Crystallography becomes practical, the Venus Crystal Company will go the way of the Venusian Man-Lizards they exterminated!”
“Relax pal! don’t get your splanch in an uproar. Look! Here comes the lift.”
The surface-lift car creaked up to the platform and locked noisily in place. The Company barely maintained landing platform B77 these days as it was in remote and unprofitable region, precisely why Tassk selected it for this rendezvous.
“Stay frosty, Suds!” Tassk said with a grin.
The doors of the lift opened and disgorged a hulking figure in a battered vacc-suit leading a repulsor sled loaded with what looked to be a large black casket.
Tassk looped his thumbs in his gun belt and sauntered forward.
“Greetings, gentlebeing! Rayfe Tassk, at your service.”
The figure slowly swiveled its torso until the reflective surface of its visor was aimed at Tassk. It loomed over seven feet tall, its whole form was obscured by the vacc-suit witch seemed cobbled together from varied and sundry parts. It made no reply to Tassk’s greeting save a slight nod/bow.
“Allrighty then.” said Tassk. “Go ahead and board, we’ll stow your cargo and be off… oh yes, there’s the matter of the fifteen hundred credit advance.”
The figure nodded again, and held out a credit voucher. Rayfe seized it and slid it into his hip pocket.
“Excellent! Thank you!” Tassk stepped aside and indicated the boarding ramp with a dramatic sweep of his arm. The giant trundled up the gangplank, the automated repulsor sled following closely behind.
Suds scowled at the hulking passenger’s back. “I don’t like it. That suit is clearly meant to hide that being’s appearance!”
Tassk shrugged and thrust a new cigar between his teeth. “If he were the gregarious sort, he might have gone with a mainstream freight company as opposed to us.”
Suds fixed Tassk with his crimson orbs. “By mainstream, you mean legal, correct?”
“Look pal, I…”
Before Tassk could fire off his witty retort, a searing blast shrieked out of the boiling sky and scorched the surface between the two spacemen. The black mosquito-like shape of a Venus Crystal Company interceptor hurtled toward them, flame guns blazing.
Suds leapt dexterously and scampered up the boarding ramp, heading to the cockpit to fire up the Bounty’s powerful ion engines. In one blinding, fluid motion, Tassk drew his gauss pistol and sent a stream of explosive flechettes hissing toward the bulbous windscreen of the interceptor. Through skill or luck the flechettes found a weak point and there was a fiery explosion inside the interceptor’s cockpit, and the craft cart wheeled into the thick clouds below. Tassk grinned and started to congratulate himself, but then he noticed the other six interceptors bearing down on them.
He raced up the ramp and toward the cockpit, pausing to grin sheepishly at the mysterious passenger. “Better strap in, this might get a tad hairy.”
There was a heavy thud and the Bounty lurched. Tassk was nearly thrown headlong into the bulkhead, but kept his feet. He felt the heaviness of acceleration and knew the Bounty was taking off. He thrust his head into the cockpit.
“We’re taking hits, Suds! Better beef up those shields!”
“I’m glad I have you here to remind me of such matters, Tassk! Get on the turret and keep those interceptors off our haunches until I can clear the gravity well!”
“Righty-oh, buddy!”
Tassk raced through the ship to the hatch of the gun turret that tracked laterally across the outer edge of the Bounty’s elliptical hull. He strapped into the chair and struggled to adjust to the null gravity in the turret that would keep him from being injured as it raced to and fro. Swinging the turret around, he sought the pursuing ships in the targeting scope. Outside the transparent bubble the clouds of Venus where fading and the star pocked blackness of outer space was asserting itself. Red lances of light streaked around the Bounty, or splashed against her deflector screens. The VCC interceptors had switched from flamers to plasma canons as they left the Venusian atmosphere.
Tassk confined his attention to the computer generated images in the scope. The six interceptors appeared. “There you are, you grasping bastards!” He locked the crosshairs on the lead VCC ship and squeezed the firing actuator. The Bounty’s Quad Anti-matter Canons spat crackling bolts of annihilation at her pursuers. The lead interceptor blossomed in a fiery ball. The remaining ships veered of at right angles to the Bounty and sped away.
Grinning, Tassk reclined in the turret and addressed Suds over the intercom. “That’s that, old buddy! Those rock mongers can’t deal with the likes of us!”
Suds’ voice crackled angrily over the speaker. “Look again, you idiot! Point oh-five past the elliptical!”
Tassk swung the turret around to view the location Suds described. Hurtling towards the Bounty was the cyclopean crescent of a VCC battleship. Along it’s leading edge multiple points of burning red swelled as its cannons charged to fire.
“Make the jump, now, Suds!” bellowed Tassk.
“Working on it! These co-ordinates your client provided are damned obtuse.”
Gelid gouts of red plasma spewed fro the battleship, in seconds they would engulf Celestial Bounty. Tassk stared wide eyed as fiery destruction bore down on him.
  “Suds! Make the jump…NOW!