A handful of weapons were set out on the table in the dark room.
"We have a problem," a raspy voiced man said to the collected group.
There were several humans present as well as two narns, a drazi, three brakiri and a centauri.
Rally leaned forward and sorted through the weapons. Most of them were melee weapons: stun guns, drazi knives, a flexible fiberoptic baton, some others. These weren't the problem, nor were the occasional PPG.
No, the problem lay in a small pistol sized firearm with a massive single shot round.
A mini-grenade launcher.
"That's a planetary-use weapon," the Centauri said grimly.
"Right, this baby can fire a grenade strong enough to open a foot long hole in the hull if directed right," the raspy voiced man said.
"What fool would deal in those weapons?" one of the Narn asked.
"It gets worse than that," Rally said. "I found one of these things on a job not a little bit ago. In a trash heap."
"Someone is seeding the station with these weapons and eventually something is going to go boom," the second Narn said.
"What purpose would that serve?" the drazi asked. "Something like this will bring security down on the weapons trade like a black hole."
"Legal trade will try up like Minbari at a wetbar," one of the humans noted irritably. "Gray and black markets..."
"Will be prohibitively expensive to operate," the Centauri said. "Not to mention that this puts the lot of us in a station littered with dangerous weapons."
"The vulnerable parts of the station are placed quite apart from the living quarters," a Narn noted. "Really, these days, it's only tradition that keeps slugthrowers off most vessels."
"It's still an explosion in a tight, confined space," Rally said. "There's no real cover to be had. One grenade in a corridor and we'll have mass death...including the person who fires the grenade in most places."
She paused.
"I could take this to security," she said. "I'm legal, and I've got some good in-roads there."
"No good," the raspy-voiced man said. "They'll have to investigate us and my customers aren't going to like me turning over information."
"For whatever motivations," the Centauri said. "Everyone here has at least dipped in the black market, which will prove...embarrassing when security does what it has to do to find the lunatic behind these weapons."
"You know what your suggesting here?" Rally asked. "I doubt any of us here will get along too well. You all know I don't appreciate any weapons getting into just anybody's hands."
"I would note that we've kept a fairly tight rein on firearms in this station," the Narn noted. "We don't have a flood of well armed lurkers shooting the place up yet. I would advise, Miss Vincent, that we are much better than the alternative."
"Unfortunately," Rally said leaning back. "I'm guessing I'm the agent you're looking to use here? It'll look good for me if I get credits from a bunch of black arms types."
"I've heard rumors that some of your human rogue telepaths have been filtering through Brakiri space," the Brakiri merchant said. "I wonder what might happen if they stumble on one of my shipments."
"Or a Narn shipment for that matter," someone else said.
Rally tapped her fingers on the table in front of her.
"The underground is a bunch of pacifists and doctors," Rally said.
"And I know that's the company you prefer to keep," a human said. "But can you really say that the end of Psi-Corps is going to come peacefully?"
See other episodes by Thrythlind
(Posted Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:21)
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