Ronin Sanchez
Session 1 — The Ragged Edge of Space
Ronin Sanchez arrived late and unbothered, which is its own kind of resume. He came through the gate after the others, declared every weapon on him rather than gamble on a scan finding them first, and walked into the middle of Holger Graeme’s briefing with the easy confidence of a man who has been late to funerals. Four arms, two guns, and a body that technically belongs to the management that dismissed him. He does not advertise that last part. The repo-men already know where to look.
He is the crew’s social engine, and the night out was his doing. Ninety percent chance of a good time, he announced, like a man reading odds off a board, and then he set about making the number true. He took Six in hand and taught him to drink, told him to slow down and sip, and watched the big property-grown killer discover warmth and lobster and, God help everyone in earshot, fun. There was something close to pride in it. Ronin has spent his life guarding other people’s bodies. Guarding this one through its first good night was almost a pleasure.
He is not subtle, and it cost the crew once. When Shackleton Magellan was three seconds from lifting Leocadia Zavia’s coordinates through a hijacked bot, it was Ronin who shouted the bot away, blind to the operation running right past his elbow. He bet the underdog kid in the Nova Nexus pit too, on principle or on hope, and the veteran put the kid down in the third. Ronin cashed out ahead anyway, because the house wanted the new security to win. He took the money. A man in his position does not turn down a rigged win. He just files who rigged it, and why, for later.
Session 2 — The MacMillian Anomaly
Ronin ran the odds on the break room the second the depressurization warnings lit, and the odds said seal it. He got Rock Lavey inside and dogged the hatch with two hands while the other two braced, because that is the whole job: put a wall between the people you’re supposed to keep alive and the vacuum that wants them. He watched through the port as Six did the exact opposite, threw himself across the widening gap into a container already drifting for open space, and Ronin filed it the way he files everything reckless. Low survival probability, high entertainment value. The kid made it. He usually does, and one day he won’t, and Ronin will have called it and nobody will have listened, same as always.
He had spent the day being the wrong man for the room. Stood post in the entertainment sector next to Shackleton Magellan, watched the manager’s assistant Solveig Kaufer take notes on the visiting investor like she was building a case, and kept his mouth shut because saying the useful thing was Shack’s department, not his. Then the container. Then the ooze, the symbols nobody could read, the flash of light and the thing the station’s own sensors called a vortex. Ronin has guarded bodies his whole life, and he knows what it looks like when powerful people decide a thing did not happen. It looked exactly like this. Someone had welded that door shut and cut it open and welded it again, over and over, careful as a surgeon, and then the manager walked out of the debriefing to go pour drinks for a rich man. That told him more than the alien metal ever could.
Then they handed him the stick, which was the one clean thing in the whole mess. Best pilot on the station, and for once somebody in the building had the sense to say it out loud: he would fly them down to Thides III in the 113A, and he would fly them well, and he told them their odds on that count were excellent because they were. And then they told him why, and the good feeling went out like a match. This was not a posting. It was a broom. Sweep the four nobodies off the deck while the money is still aboard, park them somewhere restricted and quiet where whatever they saw stops mattering. His temper came up hot and fast the way it always does, and he held it, because a four-armed man with empty pockets learns early that swinging is a luxury he cannot afford. He kept quiet, which for Ronin is its own kind of violence. He poured the mexican whisky instead, told the crew flat that he did not trust the canteen either and that their odds of ever proving what they saw sat somewhere south of nothing. He would still fly them. That part never changes.
Session 3 — Buckle Up, Motherfuckers
They finally handed him the stick for real, and the first thing he did with it was blow the odds. He went to hot-start the engines inside the hangar the way an angry man does a thing, and the launch protocol he skipped nearly put the ship through a station wall before Jareth got on the radio and saved him from himself. Ronin filed his own mistake the way he files everyone else’s — noted, no excuses — and did not make a second one. When the blob took the engines over Thides III and turned a transport into a falling rock, he flew the rock. Threaded a dying hull through a jungle canopy and put it down hard enough to knock three of them cold and gentle enough that all three woke up, which is the only grade that matters. Low survival probability, and he beat it. For once the reckless number was his to beat and not Six’s.
The rest of the night was the job he actually knows, the one under the swagger. He walked point on a suicide odds and kept his mouth shut through a jungle full of things that hunt your heartbeat, and when the plan finally turned loud he was already moving. Over the fence on the smart rope, and a guard turning toward the noise found two pistols already up and Ronin already firing — a clean kill before the man could pull a breath to shout, because a bodyguard’s whole art is the half-second between a threat noticing you and a threat mattering, and Ronin has lived in that half-second his entire life. This is the thing people forget about the four-armed man pouring drinks and reading odds off a board. When violence is finally the affordable option, nobody in the crew does it faster or colder.
Then he dropped into the pilot’s seat of a stolen ship with alien engines and a compound full of angry men shooting at the hull, keyed the intercom, and told the crew to buckle up in the plainest terms available. He flew it out through dead heavy weapons and small-arms fire that couldn’t bite, threw the thing into evasion when the dissolving blobs came up off the surface after them, and cleared the satellite net on Jareth’s codes into open black. Last time he’d told the crew flat that their odds of ever proving what they saw sat somewhere south of nothing. Tonight he was flying the proof — a gateless jump drive, a hold of alien tech, a bound man in the back — and for the first time since he took this dead-end job, the odds on that crew getting to the truth ticked up off the floor. He’d still bet against them. He just wouldn’t bet as much.
Session 4 — The Case of the Missing Courtesan
He brought her in clean. Reverse thrusters on the approach, deceleration worked properly against a fuel state with no margin in it at all, station ROVs on the hull and the ship set down where it was told to be set down. Then he powered her out and sat in the quiet cleaning his firearms, which is what he does with his hands when there is nothing to shoot, and watched Six decide that a docking ring was optional and go out the airlock into vacuum. He did not comment. There is a version of the job where you argue with that, and he has never worked it.
The rest of it he missed. Twenty-four hours of paid rest and relaxation put in front of a man who has spent a long time not being able to afford either, and he ate his way through it and then some, and spent the working half of the next day too sick to be any use to anybody. So while the crew were pulling hotel footage and reading a scrubbed room and taking fire on the cargo level, Ronin was flat somewhere with a gut full of the best meal he has had in years, missing the whole thing. A bodyguard is only worth what he is standing next to. He was not standing next to anyone.
Session 5 — Hostile Takeover
He came back to a docking bay full of gunfire and a ship that had been sitting under federal lock long enough to go cold, and nobody had to explain the job to him. Six cut the door. Ronin went up the gangplank and started bringing her up, systems in order, the sequence running under four hands while Rock Lavey fought the fuel and water lines and Shackleton Magellan shoved a pallet of food up the ramp on a dolly because a long flight with no food is a different kind of death. Ten armoured soldiers came down the corridor. Robots came out of backpacks. None of that was his problem. His problem was pressure, seals, and throttle.
Two sessions he has been a name in other people’s reports, a man who docked a ship on fumes and then got food poisoning, and the crew went off and did the investigating without him. This time the entire escape ran through the one thing only he can do. He took her off the clamp with the umbilical tearing free, and the decompression that followed ripped three combat robots off the gangplank and threw them out into vacuum, which was not a plan and worked better than one. Then he flew, weapon locks pinging across the board, two transports and eight-plus fighters coming around, and he kept the hull between the crew and everything that wanted them dead long enough for Shack to make the cube do what it does.
Julija Borja did not make it aboard. He did not see it happen, being in a cockpit with his hands full, and the first he knew was Six shouting on the run. The vortex opened off the port side and he put the ship into it, and the last thing the Thides System did was collapse the hole behind them. He is flying a stolen, quarantined ship with an alien drive, a bound prisoner in the crew quarters, and a dead federal officer’s evidence in a duffel, out toward Aethel and a man called Monroe that none of them have ever met. Repo-men were chasing him over unpaid bio-mods. That problem has been comprehensively replaced.
Session 6 — The Albatross Takes Flight
He found fuzzy dice in a glove box on the fourth day and hung them in the cockpit of a stolen ship with no transponder, no name, an engine that opens its own holes in the universe, and a prisoner in the hold. Nobody asked him why. The correct answer, which he did not offer, is that a cockpit you are going to die in should look like somewhere a person sits.
The thing he will carry out of this one is the airlock. He saw Six stand up mid-sentence, walk to the inner door and open it, and come back for the technician, and he read the whole sequence before it finished because reading a room before it goes wrong is the entire job he was grown and paid for. He got his hands on him and pulled, and won, and it was close. Then he took Marlo Petrak off Six entirely, took custody of him, and started him on the toilet and then on hull patches, because a man with work to do is a man nobody has to decide about.
An hour or a day later he told the crew to hold fire on a drone and was overruled by Shackleton Magellan, and Six shot it, and the lights went out and the robots came. He has not raised it since. He noted it. He notes everything. He also noted, over the following four minutes, that every bolt out of his matched pair skated off Pratrock plating and did nothing at all, while the alien pistol in Six’s hand went through the same armour like it was not there.
He ran the retreat, got under the console and pulled the wires out of the alien autopilot by hand because manual control that works is worth more than a navigation feed that flies you places you did not ask to go, and then he flew a stolen transport up a crack in a crater wall with rock close enough on both sides to touch and a man standing on the roof. He did not scrape either of them. On the far side he opened the vortex by hand. Afterwards Rock Lavey gave him the grazer, and he took it, because he had spent an entire firefight learning exactly what his own guns could not do.
Session 7 — The Goodwin Contract
Four days of hand-flying is the kind of work that looks like nothing when it goes right. The cube called irregular bearing changes and Ronin made them, every one, threading the ship through hyperspace on voice and reflex until the Eris System arrived a day and a half early. Then he put the Albatross down on a pad at Aethel Starport smoothly enough that the ground crews were hooking up lines before the gear stopped settling. Nobody applauded. The wheelman notices that too, and lands the ship anyway.
Off the stick, he did the thing none of the others would have thought to do: he took Six and Marlo out for a drink. At the Bamboo Lounge he announced it might be Six’s birthday, which was a guess and a gift in the same sentence, and watched a vat-grown breaching asset eat his first birthday cake in a paper pith helmet and claim the date permanently. He also kept working while he did it. The well-dressed man with the Bamboo Union pin, the rough-looking woman who stormed out of the reserved section, the shape of an argument in somebody else’s organisation. A bodyguard reads a room by habit. This one had cake in it, and a hairline crack in the union, and he logged both.
Session 8 — A Crappy Plan Comes Together
He stayed with the ship for the scouting and joined the job for the work, which is the correct order for a bodyguard. In the subway he was a shoulder and a sightline while Shackleton Magellan cloned a drunk’s badge, and in the tower he was the one who went over the turnstile first and the one who took the service elevator doors on the 16th floor in four hands and opened them like a book. There was a ladder inside. He climbed it under fire with Rock Lavey above him and drew the sonic stunner in the shaft, and when they got the 17th-floor doors open onto four rifles and four red dots he was already stepping back before the doors met.
Then Six came up through the floor two rooms over and the shooting started in earnest, and Ronin did what he had been waiting in the dark to do. Up through the hole, one look, the grazer out of the rig, one shot at the man behind the far desk. The chest went. Not the man, the chest, and what was left of him folded onto the carpet. He had watched blaster bolts skate off Pratrock plating for a whole session and he had wondered what the alien pistol did to a person. Now he knew, and he filed it where he files those things, and took the dead man’s rifle on the way past. Locked to its owner. Of course it was.
Six went out through the window and up the glass. Ronin went after him, because the principal was on the outside of the building and that is where the bodyguard goes, and the handholds Six had cut for himself were cut for a man who does not fall. Ronin fell. The smart rope caught him. He went again and fell again and the rope caught him again, and he came back in through the glass with his suit intact and his dignity in the rope’s keeping. Down the stairs, out the alley door, and at the lip of the sewer he stopped just long enough to find two trash bags and put them over the shoes. Twelve hundred each. A man has to have a floor.
Session 10 — Six Shooters and Four Arms
Ronin flew The Albatross out to the edge of the Eris System and into the gate behind a pair of automated freighters. Six days in the fold gave him a sparring partner who explained, deadpan, that he would not be tapping out. Ronin held up better than Six expected and dropped the big man once, at the price of a bruise. His first turn at cooking the rations was foul. He got better.
He brought the ship down through the weather over Peric IV D and parked her corner to corner across a pad at Acheron’s Rest with the nose just clear of the edge. He asked the Director to dinner while she was still holding her notepad. She walked away. That night at The Outpost Cantina he toasted the traders across the bar, then went over to the armed figure in the back corner with their back to the wall. Nat does security for homesteaders, by Nat’s account, and smiled once before Aliya Pontecorvo sat down. Before the two of them left by the back door, Nat said there might be work for the captain. Ronin took two Road Sodas for the walk home.
He drove the tracked transport south the next morning and put it in a ditch he had not seen. He could not get it out, and Rock Lavey shoved him off the controls. So he was still in the vehicle with all four hands free when the smoke came down and six men ran at the vehicle in a line. Grazer in one hand, a blaster in each of two others, one volley, three men gone. He finished the one on the hood at arm’s length and then the one who had been dragging Rock out of the cab (The Rocky Pass Ambush).
Session 11 — The Cost of a Clone’s Life
Ronin repacked the cargo after the ambush and could not make it all fit: one small box of Castellan Biodynamics vials rode loose on top. He knew the leaves in the dead men’s pouches on sight. Black Ice. He told the crew what it does, and where its users end up.
The Roberts Estate was his kind of room done wrong, and he read it that way: a portrait dressed against the decor, paper books beside electronic ones. He poured the drinks from the decanters and handed them round, then asked Harding Roberts whether the paper volumes were real. That earned a sharp look. He won the ground back by admiring the artwork and talking about the late wife who collected it, and matched Roberts courtesy for courtesy over who sat first. When Six asked Naja Juan her price, Ronin was the one at the table who felt it.
At Acheron’s Rest he arranged fuel, water and air, and bought barbecue and fresh fruit against the ration packs. Then he flew: low and slow over Roberts’s land to a camouflaged pad, out to Peric III and the coordinates the drone sent, into the shadow of a moon to dock at Santo Jin’s Station, and on to a stretch of empty space for a jump with no chart at the far end.
Session 12 — That Would Be a Mistake
Ronin flew The Albatross inward through a locked-down Katha System and set her down on pad twelve at Furosuto Supaia Spaceport through cold and ice without a scratch. On Katha V he stayed with the ship, by the heater, working all four hands in front of it. Six brought him back a child’s t-shirt with holes cut in it and a bottle of jellyfish liquor with two tentacles in the glass.
He pulled the ship off Chae-gul 147 once Six had cut the docking locks, with the station calling on every channel, and flew her out to the jump (The Chae-gul 147 Breakaway).
Session 13 — Albatross Security LLC: The Zenith Job
On the way down the Rangi-Perihelion Elevator Ronin watched the planet come up through the glass: stalk fields being cut in rows, weather ships hanging over Perihelion with their shades out. At 1.2G his four arms weighed more than usual, and he adjusted.
In the applicant line Six tapped him on the shoulder and offered to fight him for his place. Ronin ran the numbers: near certainty that Six would win, a real chance the fight would cost them the contract, and no chance at all that the place mattered. He stepped aside. At processing Lady Edna ran the tailoring machines and fitted him a security suit with four sleeves, the first thing since the management that anyone had cut to his measure.
After the signing he found a stall under a covered walkway, run by an old woman and her son (Grilled Grouse Stall), sat out of the rain and ate a plate of well-seasoned meat with a cigar, watching the street, because watching is what the co-processor does when he lets it run. A van pulled up. Protesters in P.E.T.A. shirts rolled away their signs and carried two large sealed metal crates into a hotel near the Perihelion Super 8. Nobody needs sealed crates for pamphlets. He filed it, finished the meat, and went back to the motel.
On the Meridian Esplanade a pack of teenagers ignored his stun wand, which he took personally, so he named it Frank Zappa. When Channel 7 News broadcast live from the plaza he walked slowly in front of Megan’s camera for the whole segment. When the cameraman swung his drone toward the spot where Six had settled into a firing position, the calculation finished before Ronin decided anything: a camera on Six was a threat to Six. His hand went down on the controller. The cameraman looked up. Ronin looked back. The drone went off, and Megan packed up.
Then the order came to stand down, with a shooter in the window (The Esplanade Sniper). Ronin has heard an order like that before. That time he was right, was overruled, and carried what was left of the young man home on two of his four arms. This time the shooter walked away and nobody died. He gave the crew’s odds for the Zenith a fresh number, lower than yesterday’s.
Session 14 — Iced Tea
Ronin placed the EMP beside Davis Electronics for Shack and got clear before it fired. The odds on a single building were good. Nobody had run the odds on the transformer next to it, and the whole of Motel District 7 went dark. Back on the job, the crew started going through his footage of the fake news crew, because he had dealt with them more than anyone.