DMHR1

Chapter 1

Dead Man's Hand: Second Star to the Right

Outskirts, Bolsun
Nox
Clan Wolf Occupational Zone
9th September 3054

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Joker pulled her cloak tightly around herself as she sort to hide amid the bustling crowd. It was nearing shift change at the nearby Metals of the Earth factory, so the streets were crowded with workers bustling to-and-fro, so one more face in the crowd was hopefully easy to miss... which was just as well, as she wasn't convinced that her forged ID would stand up to close inspection. Hell, she wasn't sure that they were worth the paper they were printed on, almost to the point where she could have been forgiven for thinking that her contact had deliberately set her up to fail.

Well, it wasn't like she had much choice: she knew that she was apparently on the Wolves shit-list, even if she wasn't sure exactly why, and her bottle-blond disguise would only get her so far. Chances were that they had her old MRBC record from Tamar, which meant that they had her finger prints. Although she had decided against getting her DNA profiled and added to the system: something about being an orphan and not knowing who her parents were always kept her away from that.

Under what was laughingly called normal circumstances, she wouldn't have taken a job that took her into Wolf territory, but after their little excursion to Malibu earlier in the year, the Falcons were liable to be looking to even the score, so laying low and letting them get distracted by the next thing to bruise their frail egos was in order. And unfortunately, there were only so many jobs that a unit like their could take... and one look at the contracts being issued by the DCMS out of Wolcott had them looking elsewhere. And that meant Nox, which meant the Wolves.

"Lord, I don't know what I have done to offend you so," she muttered under her breath, "but whatever it was, I am really, really sorry for it."

At least the mission was undeniably on the side of the angels: a local businessman, Ruben Pettersson, had been off-world when the Wolves came calling, and his wife, Ava, a reservist Aerospace pilot with the Militia, had been killed, leaving their two young children, Tobias and Kristina, to be looked after by a family friend... according to the last report ComStar had let out before their showdown with the Clans on Tukayyid, and that had been two years previously. Pettersson had spent every waking moment since trying to scrape together enough money to hire someone, anyone, willing to try and rescue his children. None of the bigger, more famous units would take the job, not for what he could offer, and he was smart enough to see through the con artists looking to take the money and run.

Then, someone told him about Dead Man's Hand, a specialist unit that could do the impossible, and at a price he could afford.

It hadn't taken him long to talk them into taking the job: hell, they were all partial to a good sob-story, especially after Tamar. And so they'd taken the job, and found a JumpShip willing to slip them across the boarder...so long as they allowed some very polite young men and women to tag along for the ride down to Nox. Joker didn't have much experience with ComStar, not directly, but even she could tell a covert action team when she saw one in the open. But they'd been the perfect guests, kept pretty much to themselves and had even provided a fresh merchant class transponder code that let them slip by unchallenged.

Then, once they were ground-side, they had vanished off into the night, off to do something no doubt unpleasant to the Wolves.

Joker didn't care: they had their job, and she had hers, and right now, that meant locating an old business associate of Petterssons, who might know where to find the missing children. Presuming, of course, that she wasn't picked up in a security sweep in the meantime

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