This was a solo operation.

Koehler went over the seals on his hard suit one last time, echoing the words he'd heard from dozens of dive masters over the years in his head as he did so. "Check the seals, fuckwit, unless you really think St. Peter'll let your dumb ass through the gates." He might've been paraphrasing; there were plenty of variations on the phrase.

Finding them to his satisfaction, he reached over to the switch on the side of the airlock. It was a typical maintenance tunnel. He wore no uniform, and carried no traceable weapons. This was a standard - if any of them could be called standard - UPLN black op. Complete deniability. After all, who would be surprised to find a rebel leader with shard of rail slug in what little remains of his skull? Half of them were just common criminals trying to put on airs, anyway.

Koehler had been tracking the target since he'd picked up contraband off an asteroid base orbiting Barnard's Star. He made sure to mark the location down for a later sweep-and-clear. The man's ship may have been fast for its size, but it wasn't fast enough to escape a single-seater stealth cutter.

The target, a self-appointed Commander Logan Buckfield, was in transit back to his ship from the Al Azrael space hub orbiting Alpha Centauri IV. Koehler'd scoped the thing out. It was state of the art, straight from some factory on Mars. Between the thermal shielding, radar absorbing coatings and autolasers, he knew his chances of planting a charge on it were nil. Still, the fucker'd had to make a pit stop somewhere.

With one hand still gripping the switch, Koehler winked and brought up his HUD. The UPLN had crawlers in almost every computer system in the galaxy. He took advantage of those to tap the station's cams. It didn't take long to find Buckfield exactly where Koehler wanted him.

The shuttle was slowly picking its way through the docks. The things were fully automated, and not particularly fast. It was supposed to be a safety concern, but then, the safety of fugitive murderers isn't typically taken into consideration. Koehler pulled the switch, and with a rush of air, was blasted out into the path of the shuttle.

He shrugged his rail rifle into his arms, and took aim. The computer in his suit detected this, and fired RCS to hold him steady, all while interfacing with his implants to give him the best firing solution. Buckfield had only enough time to look in surprise before the first slug slammed into the shuttle, shaking a cloud of space dust loose to fill the area around it. The glass cracked, but held up to that first shot. It was designed to take regular micrometeorite impacts, after all. But it didn't hold up to the second or the third.

Buckfield desperately tried to dive for cover, but that only served to make the second slug rip across his torso, spraying blood and hamburgered organs across the sitting area. The third severed him fully in half. Not that it mattered; depressurization would have killed him anyways. I guess I did the poor bastard a favor, Koehler thought. Depressurization was a nasty way to go.

Koehler sighed and returned the rifle to its magnetic locks on his back. Buckfield's corpse was already starting to freeze over. Activating his suit's RCS thrusters, in manual this time, he quickly made his way back to the cutter. UPLN crawlers were already sterilizing the station's systems of any video evidence that the attack took place. It was almost an afterthought when they deleted the manifest stating the cutter had docked.

Koehler keyed in a secure ansible connection to command on Eris. "Softball landed," he said.

The response was quick, but not quite seamless. "Home run?"

Koehler smirked. "Out of the park." A few minutes later, the cutter's micro-reactors safely brought critical, Koehler slipped out of the docks before their emergency services even knew there had been an attack.