Imposter's Gambit: A Space Opera Adventure (Delta Desperadoes Book 1), page 1
IMPOSTER’S GAMBIT
©2024 TONY PEAK
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CONTENTS
Also in Series
Variance Archives, Delta Pavonis, Volume XVIII, audio recording # 27
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Thank you for reading Imposter’s Gambit
Acknowledgments
ALSO IN SERIES
Delta Desperadoes
Imposter’s Gambit
Freelancer’s Bluff
Renegade’s Wager
Check out the entire series here! (Tap or scan)
Dedicated to those who got back up, dusted themselves off, and tried again.
VARIANCE ARCHIVES, DELTA PAVONIS, VOLUME XVIII, AUDIO RECORDING # 27
Bandit: I tell ya, those sons of bitches didn’t care about who they killed out there. Man, woman, child, even one of them dogs imported over from the Golden Band. Anything was free game - if the credits was right.
Priest: And you participated in these mercenary endeavors?
Bandit: Everybody’s gotta eat.
Priest: Perhaps you should have gone hungry instead?
Bandit: Have ya ever starved, padre? It does somethin’ to a man. Drives him crazy, it does. He’ll do damn near anything to stop that pain in his gut—even believe in the same dang nonsense that you do.
Priest: My beliefs have saved me on this frontier.
Bandit: Ain’t no god out here, padre. No Variance, or whatever it is you people think will protect ya. Out here? It’s just you and the land MEC said was yours, and what you’ll do to not let it kill you for one more day.
Priest: And tomorrow?
Bandit: Nobody out here thinks about tomorrow.
1
“If ya find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’.”
- old Duster proverb
William fastened the dead marshal’s badge to his chest. The holographic device clung to the dirty, outer layer of the spacesuit he’d taken from the shuttle’s locker. The badge loaded up the man’s name and rank:
Steelgrave – MEC Chief Deputy Marshal
So he hadn’t just killed any regular, off-the shelf lawman, but a deputy marshal.
But that’s who he had to be, until he got off-world and retrieved his credits from that transport. Until he fooled the right people the right number of times, once again.
William Burton would have to disappear. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Open the hell up, we ain’t got all day out here,” a voice said outside the shuttle.
Steelgrave glanced behind him. The shuttle pilot, Moze, sat slumped in the cockpit, the right side of her head blown away. Grey matter still slid down the viewport. The real marshal lay in a crimson pool a few meters away, near the supply lockers. An armored breather mask obscured the man’s face. Probably old MEC military issue.
The shuttle was a small craft. No place to hide; no cover to be had in a firefight. It ferried passengers back and forth from Dozois Depot—the station in orbit—down to the surface of Pavonis II. Or Pavo Dos, as the locals called it.
He’d not wanted the pilot to die. Moze would have flown him back to the Depot, for a few credits or another lay—or if he’d saved his last bullet and threatened to use it on her. Not that he would have. Instead, his last round had pierced the real Steelgrave’s heart, right after the marshal had killed Moze as she’d tried to eject them both. She’d not wanted them fighting on her ship. The marshal had gotten off a decent shot and winged him on the left side. A graze, maybe a little deeper than that, but the suit’s inner safety liner kept William from bleeding out.
A fist banged on the shuttle hatch.
“Hey, you hear me in there? I said open up this shitcan, we got business!”
Steelgrave coughed. The shuttle’s air stank of blood, bowels, and the cordite remnants of gunfire. He’d not smelled those things for two weeks—the time it had taken to reach Delta Pavonis in a cramped scout ship. Escaping Epsilon Indi had been tricky, but he’d eliminated his target, collected the credits—and acquired another contract on his own head in the process. Killing MEC colonial administrators for disgruntled locals had kept him on the run for months. Maybe he was stupid, to still be running.
If he was going to play the part, he had to look it. The lawman’s black, wide-brimmed hat lay on the deck and he put it on. He removed the marshal’s mask. The man looked middle-aged, with the flushed nose and cheeks of an alcoholic.
William donned the mask, grimaced at the stink of the dead man’s sweat, and pushed it up into his hairline.
Next, he examined the man’s sidearm. A nickel-plated, .45 Dokor revolver, with an airtight cylinder cover. Nice, for a backwater desert like Pavonis. It was better than the cheap, .380 semi-automatic pistol he’d lifted from Moze’s locker, right before the marshal fired.
Before he could snatch the revolver, the shuttle hatch opened.
A hot breeze slapped Steelgrave in the face. It smelled of sand and earth with all of the life baked out of it.
The terror of not having his helmet on froze him in place for a split second. Those who eschewed protection didn’t live long on most Duster worlds. But he didn’t risk any movement to lower his new mask. His practiced eye gauged the distance between himself and the three figures outside. One wore a cloak that blew in the wind. The other two were slim silhouettes, indicating close-fitting armor or jumpsuits. One sported the conical, wide-brimmed hat worn by Daimyō settlers and wore a sword. The gleam of canisters along their chest bandoleers caught the yellow-white, noon sunlight.
All three kept their hands near a holstered weapon. Handguns, probably 12mm.
Steelgrave breathed in a gust of dirty air and stifled the fear that he might be inhaling pathogens, radioactive particles, virus-laden spores, or other airborne dangers. He’d never visited the planet before, and colonial worlds in the Dust Systems tested one’s survivability right out of the airlock. He should’ve braved the stench and worn the mask.
The figure in the center kicked at the dusty ground. “Steelgrave?”
Their voice sounded sexless and mechanical; a mask with a voice changer.
Steelgrave’s eyes narrowed against the grit swirling into the shuttle from outside.
“Of course.”
His declarative lie felt easy. Easier than gunning down those Sadistos back at Epsilon Indi, the ones who’d wanted blood bank supplies for their crazy rituals. Easier than taking his clothes off for Moze. Going down on her had gotten him a ride down to Pavo Dos.
The figure, wearing red-tinted goggles and a breather mask, gestured at the corpses behind Steelgrave. “They never come all nice and quiet, do they?”
“Nope,” Steelgrave said.
The figure in the Daimyō hat shifted on their feet. The other person, a man also wearing red goggles, cleared his throat.
“So…did you bring it?” the first figure asked. “And why is your mask up? I thought we agreed on that.”
“Killing is hot work,” Steelgrave said.
Maybe the marshal had never removed his mask around these people? The guy must have been as corrupt as a bag of shit in a Sadisto reactor room.
The first figure said nothing. The one in the Daimyō hat grunted.
“Yeah, so, we’ve been waiting on your ass all goddamn morning,” the man in the goggles said. “Malvado’s gang, they don’t sleep as late as the trigger-happy dipshit that’s supposed to patrol this place. Come on, hand it over before they get here.”
Steelgrave had to keep lying. He had no bullets left in the pistol, and he’d not have time to dodge or duck before the trio drew on him. One of them would get a lucky shot. Maybe the final shot, like followers of Pistola Rojas believed awaited everyone. Plus he had no idea what they wanted, what deal they’d made with the marshal, or why they were so anxious that they’d forced the shuttle hatch open.
But he knew when people were in the mood to do something stupid enough to kill. The trick was to be the one still standing afterward.
Steelgrave grunted as if he didn’t give a damn one way or another. “Sure, I brought it. Do I look like your delivery boy? Come and get it before some dipshit shows up. I’m not in the mood to explain this to the local magistrate.”
The first figure hesitated, looked Steelgrave over as if still considering murder, then laughed. The contemptuous mirth sounded tinny through their mask.
“The magistrate?” the figure asked. “That’s a joke. Things have changed since the last time you were on Dos. Any fucking way. You heard the man, it’s in there. Go get it.”
The other two shared a glance, then all three drew their pistols.
Steelgrave drew his empty, useless .380. Might as well die with it in his hand.
The report of two shots reverberated painfully in the shuttle’s enclosed space. Yet Steelgrave didn’t cover his ears or flinch; one move like that and he might be dead, too.
It took a second for him to realize the bullets hadn’t been for him.
Steelgrave kept his gun in a low, one-handed grip, ready to shoot any of the three. It wasn’t the best for accuracy, but it served for quick shots fired from the hip. Yet the figure in red goggles was already on his knees, clasping at the two new holes in his chest. He grimaced up at Steelgrave, tried to mumble something, then keeled over.
The other two holstered their guns and entered the shuttle. The one in the Daimyō hat rifled through a package fastened under the passenger bench near the marshal’s corpse, while the other tugged down their mask and smirked at Steelgrave.
It was a woman. Her skin was too clean for a Duster settler, much less a bandit.
“He was an informer for those shitheads at the old fort. Malvado my ass; he was working for that prick. But you did good. Here, your pay. See you around…marshal.”
She tossed a small pouch at him. Steelgrave caught it without breaking eye contact. After looking him up and down in curious admiration, she left with the Daimyō hat gunner, who was carrying the package. He restrained a protest as they took the marshal’s nickel-plated pistol, as well as the 12mm sidearm the dead bandit had been wearing. The pair vanished in the dust-filled yellowness that constituted a landscape outside. The mechanical buzz of a hoversled cut through the wind, and they were gone.
Steelgrave loosed a tense sigh. “Motherfucker.”
After a quick peek outside to ensure he was alone, he checked the pouch’s contents. There was a single credit chit and a hand-scrawled note that read:
Meet me in the Grinders, the quiet way. Sundown, in three rotations.
If the real marshal was supposed to have received more, Steelgrave wasn’t aware. Considering how the woman had smirked at him, he guessed the man he was impersonating had just gotten screwed. It must have been a smuggling operation, given the package under the bench. The meeting in the Grinders—wherever that was—could be a setup, but if the bandits had wanted to kill him, they would have done it.
Or maybe the real Steelgrave had a reputation, and they didn’t want to test their mettle against it. Whatever the reason, he had to leave the shuttle and make himself scarce. Find the nearest spaceport and get the hell off of Pavo Dos. If he hurried, the scout ship he’d arrived on—Fei Barentain—would still be in orbit near Dozois Depot. The credits he’d accrued from bounty hunting for the past several years, his armor, and his guns, was on that ship. It was all he had.
Years of murder and firefights for causes he cared nothing about. Rebels paid him to take out MEC officials so their lives might be easier. But it never worked. People still died, and MEC cracked down on such unrest with brute force.
He got paid either way, and moved on to the next troubled planet.
That was the reason Steelgrave had fired on him and Moze. The marshal had been leaving Dozois Depot, too, but had gotten suspicious after checking his mobile and staring at William’s face. William had been about to load his credit stash—sixty thousand of the rectangular chips, plus his gear—onto the shuttle, when Steelgrave had interrupted. It had to happen eventually, since he was on the MEC bounty list himself. The marshal threatened to alert the station security, and William had ceased moving his stash to deal with the man.
It had happened so fast.
Though he’d panicked, William intended to mislead Steelgrave, get him off his tail, then coax Moze to fly him back to Barentain and get his belongings.
But Steelgrave had been full of piss and questions, demanding that William accompany him down to the planet. An argument had broken out as the shuttle landed. Moze had gotten spooked and tried to eject them; pilots who harbored fugitives lost their permits. It had cost her her life. The marshal must have thought she was helping William and acted accordingly. He’d snatched her pistol from a locker; he’d spotted it earlier while she’d dressed after their coupling. One second and two corpses later, the gunfighters had knocked on the shuttle door.
He glanced at Moze’s body. The patch on her flightsuit read ‘Moze Mecha Mama.’ She shouldn’t have died, but frontier lawmen always shot first, and rarely asked questions afterward. The .45 round had also pierced the viewport, meaning there was no way to fly the shuttle back into space without repairs, even if he possessed any piloting skills. Which he didn’t.
Moze. They’d met on the Depot, and he’d needed a ride planetside, hoping to drum up another set of contracts on another strife-filled shithole. Spacers were easy to woo with sex, since all that time logged in cockpit pods added up to a lot of frustration. How people could live like that, never leaving their ships, was alien to him.
“Sorry, Moze,” he murmured, wishing he could feel at least a pang of guilt. Yet there was nothing in his heart or mind but the need to find a ride back to Fei Barentain.
William checked everything on the shuttle. Moze had a pack of Starrio smokes, which might come in handy for trade. The drug was popular among starship pilots and settlers who had a kink for that sort of thing. The marshal had nothing else of use but a tungsten-tipped boot knife, which Steelgrave tucked into his own footwear. A couple of water-filled canteens and a packet of soy wafers were the only edibles onboard. He grabbed the real Steelgrave’s mobile, unsure how he’d gain access to it, or if there were any syncers on Pavo Dos that could hack it for him. But the mobile might be linked to a credit account, or have info he could use to get back to Dozois Depot.
It would also have the MEC bounty listed for William’s own hide. That didn’t need to fall into anyone’s hands. Not if he planned to escape with a clean break this time.
Finally, he checked the dead bandit’s belt. There was one O2 cartridge left, so unless he had to walk more than twenty kilometers, he’d be fine. The mask stank of cigarette breath and sweat, but Steelgrave had to bear it, or breathe the garbage that Pavo Dos’s air cyclers hadn’t managed to clean up. MEC and their Duster colonies. Why anyone wanted to live on them, he had no clue.
Why he’d chosen to flee from one to the next…he didn’t want to think about.
Mask lowered and sealed, Steelgrave—not William—exited the shuttle.
2
“When a bad person dies, they either go to hell, or to Pavo Dos.”
- spacer adage
Steelgrave waited for the mask’s goggles to adjust to the landscape’s harsh, washed-out luminance before exiting the shuttle. At least the real marshal had worn good gear. Too bad the dead man had poor taste in selecting a world for smuggling.
