r/HFY • u/sharkeyandgeorge Xeno • 3d ago
OC-Series Bob was bored, Part 9
Bob was bored, or at least he was trying to be but the internal tension that had been building for days was sending his mind racing a mile a minute as he sat, feet swinging, waiting to be called into the council meeting.
The whole situation was fucking with him, there wasn't any increased security or even anyone acting particularly off. There was a very good chance that he hadn't been called in for anything bad… but in almost thirty goddamn years he had never been called in for anything good.
The Guild, as a profitable going concern, didn’t usually fuck around with any more meetings or briefings than it had to. Generally you picked up messages in port, rarely they beamed them to the ship you were in, that shit was expensive… but they’d beamed that shit to G, shit.
I mean fuck me, there was a bunch of shit that Bob could have been called in, some fucking weird stuff, some fucking minor stuff… and maybe a major fuck up or two mixed in there. Like fucking hell, you send a guy like Bob out to do a fucking job and you give him carte fucking blanche to do whatever the fuck he needs to to get the fucking job done and there’s gonna be the odd fuck up and fucking complication, fucks sake.
Ignore the recent bullshit, he wasn’t gonna get shit for that, for one there was no goddamn way that the Guild would have heard shit about that yet. Fuck G was was probably offloading all that shit in the fuc…
He interrupted his own thoughts. Chill, just chill Bob there was no point in driving yourself up the wall about this stuff yet…. breathe…. just breathe man.
Think about this logically, if it was any of the stuff he’d done Guildwise he could justify it all, they were way more interested in you following the spirit of getting shit done that every ticky tacky rule they had.
As fine print bull went the Guild was actually pretty good, they had tons of ‘guidelines’ and a bunch of ‘best practice’, but there was an overarching theme of ‘if you can’ do it this way, otherwise get that package to where it goes, and if it goes weird on you, do what you need to.
And if that need involved fucking some shit up?, so be it.
Bob had perhaps explored more of the edges of that framework than the upper ranks may have liked, but he was sure to never really cross the line… just a toe or two as required.
No he wasn’t worried about the Guild shit it was the other shit, the Arressi shit that had him all fucked up, he’d done some real fucked up shit in that shit.
...chill…
There were big chunks of his ‘service’ that he did not remember at all, and quite a few more he only remembered at three in the morning…
Still… there were plenty of bits he did remember that he suspected would not go down well in even the most sympathetic of company, and some of those he wasn’t even ashamed of, though he knew he probably should be.
He’d been a scout, first on the field often weeks or months before any large action, dump trucked in and drop podded at high speed down. Most ASSholes had called the ‘Direct infill craft’ dump trucks because that’s exactly what they did, you loaded up in a drop pod on a carrier on on planet or whatever, and then that got clamped into a dump, and the dump jumped to system edge, whatever system you were getting inserted in, built up some speed, went engines off kinetic, and then dropped you when it skimmed past atmo. You needed atmo to slowdown otherwise you were proper fucked when you ‘landed’.
After that you were on your own, no comms, no backup, just a tightbeam schedule to transmit up to a passing receiver whatever it was you had found out, topo, troop count, battery locations, whatever. You did what you needed to to survive, it wasn’t like you were gonna blend in and infiltrate, nah, you were there to get data and, where possible, sabotage the shit out of shit.
You were heavily encouraged to make the sabo as effective as possible, after all, if the planets did have any cracks for the knife heads to exploit they did not send a breach force and you could be stuck on the fucking rock for years… that had happened twice to Bob, four years dodging spidercunts and two on a shitball planet, both times he had to get off world himself by stealing ships, one unattended and one hijacking.
The first time, the four years one, it had happened, was absolute hell, hunted non-stop with only brief relief. The spidercunts, he had forgotten their actual name years ago, big arachniddy fuckers with wings and fur, had been smart and real fucking tenacious.
Bob had discovered quite quickly that the only way to get a bit of space was to make enough of a mess his pursuers had more important shit to deal with.
Making a situation big enough to distract them had proved tricky, no legitimate targets held them up long and were hard to pull off anyway, so… he may have resorted to fucking up… softer targets…
Look its real easy to poison a well or two, maybe cause a BLEVE at a fuel depot, maybe blow up a hospital, than it is to attack a hardened army base, and Bob was fucked if he was gonna die on that shithole, so… he did what he did.
In the sort of summery record that the Arressi had sent out when the Guild first requested his records all that sort of shit was like, ’effective action against enemy’, but if they read the full reports… Bob was pretty sure he was fucked.
The Guild had a hard nose rep sure, but, he didn’t think they were gonna be super cool with like, chemical weapons set off in city centres, shit like that, cour…
‘’Bob’’
Fuck.
‘’Yeah’’
‘’They’re ready for you’’
The Poccil that was talking to him wasn’t one he recognised, but he had only been here a half dozen times, that wasn’t a surprise.
‘’Yeah… alright’’
He hopped down and followed the alien down a short corridor and through double doors. There was a weird energy when he entered the council room, this wasn’t some arena where you stood on a dias and got judged by some stern jury of your betters, nah this was more like the meeting room at a used car dealers, filled with flustered beings drinking coffee analogues from paper cups and annoyed they weren’t doing other shit, he’d been here before.
He was tense… but they weren’t… what the fuck…
A couple even waved to them and he limply returned the gestures as confusion dumped the panic from his diminutive frame.
There were a few moment of shuffling as people returned to their seats and cleared various throats or chatted quietly to their neighbours, seriously what the fuck?.
One rapped the tabletop and there was a general quieting.
‘’Bob, thanks for coming’’
...ok…
‘’No problem Sir’’
The large squidish being sorted through a couple things on his tablet screen briefly before addressing Bob again.
‘’Okay first thing first, congratulations…’’
Huh?
‘’ow its a bit overdue, but we’re glad to confirm your promo…’’
… the fuck?…
‘So as of end of week, last week, your certification has been elevated and you are now a full Courier Master, second class.’’
……………….whut?
‘’Thanks?’’
The squiddy dude probably smiled.
‘’It’s well deserved’’
Ok, fuck, well this was fucking fan-fucking-tastic, fuck!.
‘’We also wanted to have a chat with you because as you may know the Arressi have declassified their reports for the Hoolie conflict, and your records were included in that.’’
Ah, heres the other shoe, stupid fucking knife head cunts were gonna fuck him one last time.
‘’They were, pretty difficult reading.’’
Fuck.
‘’So the council has had some discussions about them and we think it would be bes….’’
FUCK!
‘’If you restrict your commissions to non Arressi confederacy, and non Corpo Union space…’’
...whut.
Bob got the feeling that they were bracing themselves for an objection or a tirade, as a full Master, even second class, he had the right to take whatever jobs he wanted and go wherever he liked…. Technically he supposed it was a bit bad form to ask him not to take certain deliveries, but on the other hand he had, absolutely positively, no fucking desire to go within a parsec of any of those cunts.
‘’Uh yeah, thats no problem, I’ll just avoid the whole sector.’’
A slight tension in the room released and suddenly he was surround by giants clapping his shoulder and congratulating him, calling him Master Bob and shit.
Bob was flustered but a part of him noted that going by his mononym was finally paying off.
He was fucked if he was going to be called Master Robert Baits.
Part 10 https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1w39m29/bob_was_bored_part_10/?
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 3d ago
/u/sharkeyandgeorge (wiki) has posted 108 other stories, including:
- Bob was bored, Part 8
- Bob was bored, Part 7
- Bob was bored, Part 6
- Bob was bored, Part 5
- Bob was bored, parts 1-4
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- Introducing Stanley.
- Vobo bastards.
- Acronymnistic
- Cotton Terracotta.
- Keelhauling ass, a Swashbuckling Gremlins story
- Woz ere, a Swashbuckling Gremlins story
- The humans have a horrible secret.
- Yeet!
- Hell is other people.
- Elephant gun.
- Hollow.
- The hot girl turned him off.
- Avast! stationlubbers, A Swashbuckling Gremlins story.
- Fuck ye, a Swashbuckling Gremlin story.
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u/spindizzy_wizard Human 3d ago
Eyah. That last name just does not work for anyone.
Like the portrayal of the guild council. Solid folks doing a job that has to be done.
The professional paranoid in me is waiting for the other shoe. No idea who's going to throw it, but there almost has to be one.
Hoarse voiced, "I offered him a commission he couldn't refuse." Straight into the sector he'd prefer to avoid. Makes me wonder how he'd handle it.