Working for Outcomes Unlimited requires a certain level of comfort with not really knowing what you’re going to be doing until you get there to do it. Sometimes. You show up for a job, meet your team, get on a ship, and may end up in a cold berth hoping you’ll wake up again. I hate that. But that’s how it works. I figure there are worse ways to die. In fact I know there are worse ways, because we often get to see them up close.

A couple of weeks ago I was notified of a job. I can’t write a lot about it. Classified shit, right? Aww fuck it. If you are reading this I’m probably dead. Anyway, I’m told to show up at a local starport, on a planet I shall not name, to go to a job I never found out what it is. There’s a subsidized merchant starship there - a commercial ship. There are 8 or 10 passengers getting onboard when I got there. I met up with our team. Pretty typical OU types, except for one guy named Friedrich. He seemed like a bit of a dandy. Was carrying a rapier! No - really. A rapier named “Isolde”. I’ve learned already not to underestimate my fellow contractors. Friedrich turned out to be a solid guy.

So, we ended up in cold berths. Not my fave. I love sleeping. I also like awakening. Fingers crossed.

Time passes.

I wake up. That’s good! My colleagues all wake up! That’s also good. The ship’s red alert lights and klaxons are blasting. NOT GOOD. They are called klaxons, right?

Now look, we are professionals. So when we suddenly awaken from cold sleep, find the ship in an emergency situation, and then find the guy who probably pushed the “wake up” button dead, we - do - not - freak -out. Calm and cool. That’s us. That’s me.

Did I mention our weapons are all locked up in the ship’s locker and our other gear is all down on the cargo deck? And that all he have were the cold sleep jumpsuits they put us in? Yeah.

Some of the group starts the way up to the bridge to see what’s up. I ran over to the med lab, location of the closest computer terminal. I like computers. I’m good with them. One of the other guys takes the crew badge from the dead guy in there and I use it to log into the terminal. By that time we’ve gotten a couple of crew communicators, and the guys heading to the bridge had 1)encountered a lunatic dressed as a skeleton who attacked them and they knock him out, and 2)I have learned from the computer that the other passengers are cult members, who killed the crew, took over the bridge, pointed the ship into the sun, turned off the power to the maneuver drive, and are now chanting like lunatics in the cargo bay doing some kind of ritual. I locked the fanatics out of the system. They don’t like this, but they can eat my dookie.

Long story short…we survived. We got the engines working just in time to not become human sacrifices. We saved some crew members who were locked in a cargo container. I can neither confirm or deny that I over-rode the ship’s AI and flushed the lunatics out into space.

JR