Rather fortunately for the mercenaries, the High Port wasn’t the kind of place where a heavily armed thug carrying an unconscious man across his shoulders gained more than a few speculative looks. Jocasta kept her fusion beamer unslung to dissuade any more serious curiosity, though the Black Lady knew what would happen if she fired it inside a pressurized tin can like this. Something that rhymed with sexplosive recompression she thought with a whimsical grin.
 
The hangar bay wasn’t far from the main elevator trunk. An expensive birth for a trader but hardly bank breaking for an outfit the size of the White Sharks. Or the size the White Sharks had been before a number of their members took retirement with extreme prejudice at any rate. She didn’t doubt that Markus was right that military grade weaponry would see off the hoard of bounty hunters who had been loosed on them, but they were likely to have taken so many casualties that the White Sharks as a group might never recover.
 
“Here we are,” Jocasta announced entering the code she had swiped from the computer terminal at the rendezvous. The hanger door opened to reveal the cavernous bay beyond. A Suytnet 22 armored transport squatted in the middle of the hanger like an angry toad, it’s body boxy with protruding sensor packages and weapon hard points. Fuel hoses and data lines had already been unhooked and lay in coiled heaps beside the big ship.
 
“Crew must already be aboard,” Markus observed. Jocasta nodded and they hurried across the deck to the ship. The temperature declined rapidly as they got closer, an artifact of the leakage all such bays had to the deep space beyond. They hurried up the ramp and Markus gratefully dumped the groaning form of their prisoner into one of the jump seats and knotted him in place with the restraint harness. Jocasta moved forward to look into the cockpit.

 “There is no one here,” she called back.

 “Oh I wouldn’t say that,” a voice hissed from the darkness. Something heavy fell on her from above. Jocasta managed to get her arms up to deflect a blow at her head. Pain tore at her but she rotated away from the blow, aiming a snap kick at the ribs of her assailant that drove them into the wall. She swung her fusion beamer up but the attacker kicked it up, then caught her wrist and twisted, the weapon clattered to the deck, mercifully not firing and cutting her in half. She charged at her attacker, deflected a blow at her midsection and then cracked him across the jaw with her elbow. Her arms burned and she could taste blood. Markus was shouting behind her but she couldn’t make anything out over the ringing in her ears.

 “You!” she gasped, recognizing the snake mutant from the bar.

 “You should have taken my advice,” the snake said, drawing back fangs from a bloodied mouth.

 “Maybe next time,” Jocasta allowed and pulled her pistol from its holster. The movement seemed slow and suddenly the weapon seemed very heavy. She frowned and looked down at her arm. Two neat puncture wounds had appeared just above her wrist.

 “Son of a…” Jocasta managed and then collapsed to the ground. The snake thing leaned down and picked her up. Jocasta vision was tunneling rapidly but as the snake came close she bit down hard on its hand causing it to recoil in outrage.

 “Bitch,” she concluded as the darkness rushed up to swallow her.