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Zadane has a cluster of younger men sitting around him, who you surmise to be members of his crew. You haven’t taken more than a few steps toward him when his gaze snaps over to you, the iris of his bionic eye spinning rapidly.
“Well, look who it is!”
His crew reach for their weapons upon hearing the old coot’s tone of voice. You play it cool, though, and stop a few paces away from the nearest pirate. “Zadane.”
“You’ve got some nerve,” he continues, a pint of ale clutched in his metal fingers. “You went silent on me after Golgotha… I was out in the cold.”
“That had been a tough battle.” Participating had been a mistake on your part as well as Zadane’s. “But I wasn’t the only one, and here I am now.”
There’s a tense silence. Suddenly, a crooked, platinum-studded grin breaks out across Zadane’s face, and he snaps the fingers on his organic hand. “That’s right, you are. More than I can say for the rest of them. No one comes to see old Zadane anymore, no.”
That isn't quite true, you think, as his lackeys relax slightly. Golgotha might have been Zadane’s own failure, but it hadn’t completely destroyed his reputation. As a matter of fact, that abortive engagement with a Fleet flotilla had actually secured him some notable prestige among the more radical pirate factions. He’d roped you into it, though you hadn’t been able to do much during the battle and were forced to jump out of the system before your ship got totally destroyed. That had been a decade ago, at least.
There’s an open chair at the table, which you take. Zadane leans back, reaching into his voluminous overcoat for a pipe. “Golgotha,” he begins to reminisce. “Farstan, that old bastard. Can’t believe I didn’t expect him to deploy a force on the far side of the moon like that… yeah, that was quite a battle. Wasn’t it?”
>“They had us outnumbered two to one. What were you thinking, Zadane?”
>“You were too cocky, but it was a good battle.”
>“We took the fight to Fleet for once, that’s all that mattered.”
>“I was proud to be there.”
>Write-in.
