The cockpit shook and the displays dimmed slightly as the Markos slipped his Ulysses class fighter out of the swirling blue vortex of subspace. He’d had a run in with pirates a few weeks ago while working for STX, and hadn’t been able to get it fixed. Money was tight, and opportunities for serious profit were rare back in Procyon. EP, he had been promised, would be a much more lucrative location, if a somewhat riskier one. Re ran his eyes peripherally over the instruments to make sure that there had been no serious complications during the trip, then looked up to survey his surrounds.

The planet he’d arrived at was distinctly unimpressive, given that he’d spent almost two days cooling his heels on Blackwood station while waiting to be told where to go. It was small, cold, and mostly water, or at least ice at the poles. Livable, but certainly not the nicest world in the galaxy to spent a few days on. He grunted. At least it kept the Zogs away. He’d come out of subspace on the dark side, but saw few of the groupings of lights that normally indicated settlements. He brought up the map he’d been sent and studied briefly against the scanning data to orient himself, then locked the fighter into glide mode and headed in for the coordinates he’d been given.

He levelled out of his glide about fifty kilometres from the small chain of islands that he was aiming for and brought the fighter into terrain following mode, and projected the forward shield out as far as it would go, into the conical configuration used for atmospheric flight. It wasn’t particularly good at stopping hostile fire like this, but it minimized drag, and conserved fuel, something else Markos hadn’t been able to afford a lot of recently.

The flight in was short and uneventful, though it had started to drizzle by the time he hit the coast. His rendezvous was in the small settlement that had been established here for reasons unknown to Markos. He’d had neither the time, nor the inclination to do any kind of research into the area, but the presence of a small harbour full of what looked like fishing vessels gave him a decent idea. A light flashed on his board, and the Comm system beeped, indicating an incoming hail. He slapped at the relevant button. “This is Markos Caine, I’m expected.”

“Indeed you are, Mr. Caine.” It was the same voice that had contacted him on Blackwood, and earlier, in Procyon. Maybe he’d finally be able to put a name to it tonight. “There are some open spaces to the north of the town – it’s about all that passes for a spaceport around here, since the locals don’t like having people set down too close to the city. I’ve got a man waiting for you with transportation.” A small white dot showed up on the computer generated map on his HUD – someone had activated a beacon. Helpful.

“Confirmed. Caine Out.”

He slapped the comm. off and oriented himself towards the beacon. It was transmitting from several kilometres out of town, but there were no landing lights or other readily apparent signals that this was any kind of official spaceport at all, so he made the landing primarily by instruments, guiding his vessel carefully down about twenty meters from the beacon. He keyed for shutdown and entered his security code, then popped the hatch and climbed the ladder out into the drizzly night.

As promised, there was a vehicle waiting for him, an older, wheeled variety of a model Markos didn’t recognize. The driver was waiting in the vehicle, and seemed chatty enough. He didn’t know why Markos had been called here, but did explain the nature of the settlement. It was, as he had suspected, a fishing village, built to exploit the local shoals of what the driver called Rakha fish, apparently one of the planets major exports. More relevant enquiries – about his employer, the unusual timing of the meeting, that sort of thing, were met openly, but generally without much information. Markos got the distinct impression that the man didn’t know an awful lot about who exactly it was that he worked for. He might not even know his boss was a Survivor. About the only thing of use that Markos did get from the driver was that he wasn’t the first one that this man had picked up – in fact he was the fifth in three days, all pilots, and all from the same spot north of the town. That was unusual. If the survivors were recruiting pilots, it didn’t make sense to do it like this. They could have called them all together at once and saved themselves the time and effort of multiple meetings. It puzzled him, but the drivers reassuring comments that he’d “Taken all five back out there as well” put his mind at ease.

They stopped outside a wide, low building. There were no street lights, but the building appeared to be made of the same light coloured material as the rest of the buildings on the street. There was some sort of sign above the door, but in the dim lighting, Markos couldn’t read it. They went in and passed through a small lobby, into a long hallway, with many rooms coming off it. Only one had light spilling from underneath its door, and it was this that they made for. The driver knocked quietly, then opened the door.

Inside a tall, white haired man sat behind a neatly arranged desk. He looked up, and rose to greet them. “Mr. Caine, I presume?” Markos nodded.

“Excellent. Thankyou Davies. Mr. Caine will be staying with me tonight – you may leave.”

“Wait a second… Staying?” This hadn’t been a part of the message “I don’t even know if I want this job yet, and you want me to stay?”

The others head turned slowly towards him. “You had somewhere else in mind? Sleeping in your fighter perhaps?”

“Why would I do that? I’ve got a bed on Blackwood.”

“Ah, I understand the confusion. The weather patterns in this area are somewhat unusual – I’m sure you noticed the cloudbanks coming in – those will be storm clouds within hours, and lightning is hardly the most conducive environment for flying in.”

“Storms, huh?” Markos was suspicious, but tried to keep it from his face. He needed this job, and there had been clouds on the way in.

“Alright, fine, I’ll stick around.”

“Excellent. Until the morning then, Davies.”

The driver nodded and headed out.

“Now.” Said the white haired man, seating himself back behind the desk, “I imagine you’d like to get down to business, but first a few questions. You are Markos Caine, correct? The same Markos Caine who dropped out of the GTVA pilots academy in his second year?”

“Yeah. Second year, second semester if you wanna get specific about it. That mean something to you?”

“Perhaps it does, Mr Caine. And therefore, that would make you the same Markos Caine who served nine months in a GTVA prison for an assault on a Vasudan in a bar on Vega station fourteen years ago?”

Markos heart began to beat faster. “That was a long time ago. Look, if all this is going to be is an interrogation about my past, I’m heading back to my ship, storm or no storm.”

“No need for that Mr Markos – I have only one more question.” He placed both hands on the desk, and leaned forwards. “If all this is true… then would you be surprised to know that your DNA is a precise match for one Edward McCabe, Squadron Commander of the 50^th Firehawks in the Neo Terran Front?”

Markos stood up and took a step back, knocking his over his chair and unconsciously reaching for the sidearm that he’d foolishly left in the cockpit of his fighter. He slapped at the door release, but it was unresponsive, locked solid. “McCabe’s dead!” he yelled, spinning around to ace the old man. “He died, with the rest of his squadron, fighting the GTVA in Capella! He’s dead!”

“No, Commander, I don’t believe that he is. I believe that McCabe did not die with his squadron, but that he escaped. I believe that he landed on one of the Capellan worlds, killed Markos Caine, took his identity and then left that system with the refugees. And I believe that he has been living with that mans identity for over a decade now.”

McCabe took a step forward, and placed his own hands on the desk, leaning almost into the other mans face. “I did not kill Markos Caine! He was my friend! He helped me when nobody else would and I had to sit there and watch while the Shivans tore apart his transport while mine escaped to safety! I would have done anything for Markos Caine! Anything!”

He pulled his face away, but kept staring at the white haired man behind the desk.

“So now what? You’re gonna turn me into the GTVA? Get yourself a nice shiny gold star from your superiors?”

The man scoffed “Of course not, commander. The GTVA are no more my superiors than they are yours. I asked you here about a job, precisely as I told you in my initial communication, and this in no way changes that. Sit down and we’ll discuss it.”

McCabe remained standing, and took a step towards the locked door.

“You wont get out that way.” A look of mild annoyance crossed the man’s face. “Look, if I’d wanted you handed in to the GTVA, I could have simply contacted them on Blackwood Station. In case you hadn’t noticed, that didn’t happen. Now sit down.”

Warily, McCabe turned around, and picked up his fallen chair.

The white haired man tapped at his terminal, then rotated the screen so McCabe could see it. “Frankly, with your record, I’m not sure why you wanted to keep it a secret. Two commendations from your superiors within the rebellion, almost three dozen logged career kills, and I assume at least three or four from that final GTVA squadron – they never reported back after all.”

“Yeah, well maybe the GTVA purge of NTF officers had something to do with it? Or maybe it’s that I’m not so proud of the fact that I served a madman for over a year. All Bosch wanted was to go talk to the god damned Shivans, and he got a lot of good pilots killed trying to do it.”

“Nevertheless, you spent that year showing exceptional skill behind the stick. The kind of skill that my organization currently finds itself in need of.”

“In need of huh? And what exactly would you need me to do?”

“You’d be a combat pilot of course. A squadron leader again, if you choose, under my direct authority, flying missions for the Survivors as I see fit, on combat pay, and with access to all our facilities, and all our fighters.”

“Some kind of private bodyguard? You afraid someone’s gonna take a shot at you?”

“Not quite… I have something slightly more…challenging in mind. Tell me, commander, have you ever flown against the Shivans?”

“The Shivans?” He looked at him intently. “You’re crazy. You’re absolutely fucking crazy. There’s no way in hell I’m going up against the Shivans.” McCabe stood up “Open that door up, now. I’m not going to listen to this shit.”

This time, the other man stood, rapidly. “Sit down commander.” McCabe stopped, midstride. The mild annoyance from earlier had been replaced with outright anger. “Even if I felt inclined to let you walk out that door, which I don’t, one call from me would bring the entire GTVA down on you. This system would lock down, and there’s no way you and your puny little fighter would make it past the first node. I have no intention of sending you or anybody else against the Shivans, even if I had access to any Shivans to throw you at.”

McCabe glared at him, but sat down. “I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Nor do I like being forced to resort to them, Commander. I am proposing a plan of mutual benefit here, and in my mind, mutual benefit does not involve sending one of the paries to inevitable death. My organization has encountered a potential market with some, shall we say, unusual technologies that we wish to acquire. They don’t have beam weapons, they don’t have fleets of juggernauts – and as far as we know, they don’t even realize we exist. If you join me, you fly a few missions, earn a lot of money, and I’ll guarantee you that every existing copy of this NTF service record is destroyed, DNA profile and all. You can go back to being Markos Caine, and never have to worry again. Or you can face a GTVA court, with six Vasudans in the Jury box and “Neo Terran Front” hanging over your head. It’s your choice commander, but you have to make it now.”

McCabe looked down, then back up again. “Every copy? And no Shivans?”

“I had to pull these records out of debris from a destroyed installation in Deneb, and then I vaped the debris myself. If the GTVA had them, you’d already be in prison. And believe me – I’m no more inclined to stir up the Shivans than you are.”

McCabe sighed, then stood up. “I guess I don’t have much choice. I’m in.”

A smile spread across the older mans face, all traces of his earlier anger gone. “Excellent, excellent! Now… I believe I made an offer of accommodation for the night?”