Chapter 5 Part 2: On Negotiating

The Galactic Average corporation, being the prolific testaments to Capitalism they were, had long ago defined itself into several branches in order to best expedite the squandering of public funds on fancy projects that never actually produced anything of any use to anyone. There was Galactic Average Medical, who produced three hundred metric tons of gauze on any given Tuesday, Galactic Average Industrial, responsible for making sure that televisions expired exactly two weeks after their warranties did, and Galactic Average Provisions, responsible for propagating corn across the untold reaches of space and time.

There was also the Galactic Average Bank, but that particular organization had been forcibly separated from the rest of the Galactic Average during the rush to construct the Interplanetary Interstate. Ever since the split the organization developed certain. . . eccentricities.

At the moment, former captain and notorious space jerk Chris Ennings stood in the central courtyard of the Galactic Average System Headquarters, three tall buildings uniform in their absolute drabness, the combined force of which controlled the majority of the commerce in the Hauser system. He clutched in one sweaty palm an elixir torn from the hateful breast of Doctor Clockwerx, an android who represented the absolute zenith of science gone batshit.

From the documents he read, Ennings knew that the Doctor's serum was capable of repairing every feasible damage the human person could withstand without being reduced to the consistency of a fine chutney. He knew that whatever organization got their hands on it could put Galactic Average Medical out of business so fast Adam Smith would shit bricks of fire. In his weaker moments, he'd even fantasize leveraging that for a posh position as some sort of undersecretary, or manager, or whatever the sort of thing that middle-aged men spent their days doing, but that wasn't going to be the case.

He took one step towards the building, knowing that this invention was going to get patented and buried so deep that, uh, some other famous person would be totally, um, surprised. Or something.

"Do you need backup, Captain?" Philo asked, disentangling himself from the tall drink of water leaning nonchalantly against the car.

"No. . . Really. Please, don't let me, uh. . ." Ennings tried to banish the terrifying spectacle of heavy-robot-petting from his brain. ". . . Inconvenience you."

"Assisting our egress is never an inconvenience." Philo said. "Furthermore, without my assistance, how can you hope to find the president of the medical wing?" Ennings shrugged.

"I was planning on figuring that out once I got in." Ennings smiled a wry, charming smile. Philo sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Do you even know which building is the right one?" He asked, exasperated. Ennings stared blankly at the android for a moment, and then pointed at the large caduceus decorating the front of the nearest tower. "Right, well, best of luck then." Philo replied, not missing a beat.


The inside of the tower was oddly subdued, even for a hive of pencil-pushing office drones slowly counting down the days until their inevitable death. Ennings, who had set his brain to 'Take-no-shit badass,' strode manfully forward, and impositioned himself most disconveniently for the harried, mousy secretary, quietly nursing instructions into the phone.

"Hello." Ennings said, smiling a smile that conveyed just how large his teeth were. "I'm here to speak to your president. I have a business proposition that I think he will find most. . ." Ennings paused dramatically while suggestively tapping the elixer upon the poor woman's desk. ". . . Compelling."

The woman stared at him with the same mixture of awe and fear with which cattle regard an oncoming murdertrain. She pressed a secret button and handed him a small key on a fine gold chain.

"First elevator to your left, sir." She quickly withdrew her hand and continued to stare at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Ennings paused, shocked that his plan actually worked.

"Well. . ." He rapped the vial once more. "Thanks." He swiftly turned and walked for the elevators. He passed a pair of security guards, assault weapons slung over their shoulders, and he suddenly became cognizant of exactly how muddy and disheveled he was. The guards gave him a once-over on his way to the elevator, which was rather disconcerting. Ennings considered himself much more deserving of suspicion, and he couldn't help but feel the least bit slighted.

The elevator he had been directed to slid open, unleashing a crowd of people into the lobby, all of which tried very hard to pay Ennings no mind, all the while giving him a wide berth. Entering the elevator, the well-dressed man in charge of sitting on a stool and pushing the button accidentally bumped into his shoulder with a force that is hardly ever indicative of an accidental anything.

Ennings tried very hard to push the nagging sensation of disease out of his brain as he slid the delicate gold key home. The doors closed as the carriage rocketed upwards, and Ennings focused mostly on the thought of escaping this afflicted ball of mud.

"Eventually" He said out loud to noone in particular "They're going to figure out who I am. Better to escape with my life, I can do more good alive than I'd accomplish dying for a grand gesture." He concluded, failing to convince even himself. He laughed the sad, forced laugh of someone choking on their morals.
The elevator came to a stop. The doors slid open, revealing a long hallway crafted of large slabs of smoky marble. He knew that it wasn't real marble, rather, it was a semi-permeable membrane that would allow burly men with scary energy weapons to perforate Ennings in all manner of ways, without affording him the opportunity to return fire. The realization that he was surrounded on all sides by the advanced version of tinted glass did little to expel the nagging worry in the back of his skull.

The hallway terminated in a heavy red door, bare except for a black bar at eye-level, presumably for some sort of retinal scan. Hesitating for a moment, Ennings gently knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked, more forcibly. Nothing continued to happen. Reverting to brute force, he kicked the door as hard as it could, and it flew open. Ennings winced as the sound of something expensive shattering echoed across the spartan office.

"I knew you were coming." The tactiturn man at the desk spoke carefully. "So I left the door open." He said, measuring his words like precious gold powder.

"Well, I know that now." Ennings retorted, not knowing what else to say.

"Well I'm glad you know that now." The man replied, mockingly. "I would find your cognative abilities highly suspect if. . ." One could observe the gates being thrown back on the lion's cage of seething fury raging in this man's cockles. He flexed his hands like he wished they were full of vertebrets and pasted another veneer of politeness on his jowls. "Please." He said, gesturing to a single black seat set before his empty desk. "Join me."

Ennings strode quickly across the sable carpet laid out across the smoky marble floor that he guessed might actually be marble this time. He paused to gaze out across the expanse of Sikking City, a giant mud-crusted testament to a collapsing economic infrastructure, and decided he liked the view better from the plush seat in front of him.

Mostly because it framed the other Galactic Average buildings in such a way that it looked like the ham-faced man before him was a little red ball in an unfathomably huge game of Pong. Ennings giggled a little, and a ripple of confusion danced across the man's flab.

"What do you want?" The President (whose name was Gilbert, which you know for no other reason than a sudden shocking shortage of pronouns) asked slowly.
"Why, I'm here to make a business proposition." Ennings said cheerfully. "I have something you want. . ." He said, leaning back. "And I went to no small lengths to retreive it, either." He twirled the little vial dexterously between his fingers, and sinisterly between the fingers on his left hand. "I expect compensation."
"Of course." The man replied, reaching for something under the desk. "Name your price." This caught Ennings attention.

"Well, we can start with whatever you've got in your wallet." He said.
"Wouldn't you rather I just make a deposit into your Valet? I can promise the utmost discrepency upon my part, the sums will be small and wired through puppet accounts, we can parse it over a few days, the Bank won't suspect a thing." Gilbert stared into Ennings's eyes with a strange mix of hate and desperation that would confuse even the most seasoned empath. Ennings subconsciously crossed a leg across his knee and set his hands in his lap defensively.

"My Valet was recently destroyed." He said plainly.

"Of course." Gilbert did little to conceal his biting sarcasm. "How professional."

"Don't presume that my sub-par planetfall is any indication of my abilities as a businessman, Mr. Gilbert." Ennings said, wagging his finger. "There ain't more than a handfull of pilots who'd even think of running a light transport through the goddamned blockade of a planetary defense you've got here. Hell, ain't more than a scant handful anywhere that would even think of trying to land anything at all what's had most of it's thrust capacity shot to shit." He bit his bottom lip has memories of explosions ran through his brain. "Those mass drivers are nasty." He stated.

"Look, I don't care." Gilbert said, throwing ettiquite to the wind. "I know you must think you're some almighty badass for what you've done, but I want you to know that I don't give one god damn shit for what you think you can do." He tossed a fine leather billfold upon the table, it slid straight into Ennings' lap. "Take the money. Empty my fucking account if you want, I keep my passcode written on my access card, I don't fucking need it. Now do what you were god damned paid for," He rose and leaned across the table intimidatingly. "And give me my goddamned cargo!" He growled. Ennings, sufficiently cowed, handed the man the vial.

He didn't take it.

Instead, he looked at it with the same mix of indignant outrage and confusion that rich people get when their many butlers prepare them salmon caviar instead of sturgeon. He grabbed Ennings by the collar and began shouting.

"What is that?" He scrunched his face up, like it was some sort of magic eye puzzle that would reveal itself that way. Ennings paused. Disparate half-realized suspicions began clunking around in his brain, like an irregular granite Rubik's cube.

". . . This is the stuff."

"What stuff?"

"The stuff I stole from Clockwerx. You know, his miracle medicine." Ennings smiled as disarmingly as he could. Gilbert's face rippled meatily, dissolving into a mixture of fear and queasy disgust that most people experience during a gas station sandwich-induced BM. He walked towards the large wrap-around windows of his office, and stared out at the crumbling city beneath him.

"I want my family back." He said quietly. Enning's stomach dropped twenty floors, then went flying back into his throat.

Shit.

Gilbert slowly turned, stared Ennings right in the eye. He opened his mouth to speak, but the fear scrawled across Ennings' features caught his attention. He hesitated.

"You're not one of the kidnappers, I take it?" He asked, anger quickly subsiding. Ennings stood, tucked the wallet into his pocket, and backed slowly out of the room.
"Ah, no." He said, standining in the threshold of the imposing red door. "Terribly sorry." And with that, he turned and ran as quickly as he could to the elevator.
"Hey, my wallet!" Gilbert shouted, just as the doors closed.

Ennings hammered the ground floor button as quickly as possible, until the elevator began to descend at near free-fall speeds towards his waiting egress. He pulled the wallet out of his pocket and inspected the contents. Several thousand pentacreds (just enough for a ship capable of getting them out of the system), a long string of sentimental photos, and a collection of bank cards, the most notable of which was a matte black, with nary a clue as to it's use. As loath as Ennings was to pass up such a tantilizing little incite to adventure, he had more pressing matters to attend to.

He pocketed the money as the elevator doors opened into the lobby, still crowded with similarly dressed office drones migrating in groups. Not missing a beat, Ennings pulled the fire alarm in the elevator, trigginer a klaxon that didn't so much encourage an orderly exit from the building, as freeze everyone in their tracks for a moment. Realizing what was happening, the drones went absolutely rip-shit, and began charging for the nearest exit. Never letting a good panic go to waste, Ennings charged out of the elevator, slammed through the same group of security guards from before, taking the opportunity to slip Gilbert's wallet into an unsuspecting pocket, and didn't stop running until he was behind the wheel of the hatchback that Philo's robo-whoring had secured them.

"Good to see you made it back safe and sound, Captain." Philo said cheerfully, ready and waiting in the passenger's seat. "Gizmo called, he wants to meet us at the Spaceport, he said it was urgent. Did you sell the vial?"

"No, but I got us money." Ennings kicked the ignition into high gear and pulled out into the hectic traffic. Behind him, he saw a pair of Millitary dropships unloading a number of heavily armed and armored warriors into the plaza, pouring like a human river into the Medical building. Enning's heart skipped a beat, but he consoled himself in the knowledge that no-one saw him.

Except the plethora of cameras that probably adorned every street corner and hidden crevice in that building. Shit. Ennings silently cursed the wonderful security blanket that modern day technology provided the average layperson. If nothing else, he told himelf, it makes my job damn tough.

"In the interest of avoiding any self-incriminating action," Philo said, noticing the near-riot taking place in the Galactic Average System Headquarters, "I shall refrain from asking any questions."

"Good." Enning breathed. "Hey, what happened to your boyfriend?" Philo slung a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the disheveled comatose heap in the cramped back seat.
"Goddamn, dude." Ennings said. "Did you at least buy him a drink first?" Philo shrugged and smiled, letting the wind from his open window ruffle his synthetic blonde hair.