Corbin's Irritation

It was really getting irritating.

Corbin ran this thought through his head as he nursed a cup of bad synthetic coffee. The past year or two had escalated from mildly amusing to sheer hell. He had been chased, arrested, shot at, yelled at, left in the middle of pirate space, and even stabbed. The last one had hurt the most, both figuratively and literally. He had avoided fights most his life, kept his head down, kept his shoulders forward and his mind on the job. Shipping freight, transporting ships, even the occasional security detail. Anything for the paycheck, but nothing to get him in bad with anyone. But that didn't matter anymore, and it was all because of him. More importantly, because of how he looked.

Why the hell did that damned Edison Trent have to look so much like him?

Even now, Trent was on the newsfeed. Corbin stared at the picture of the man who had turned his life into a chaotic mess. He had to admit, the resemblance was uncanny. They even seemed to have the same taste in clothes. If someone had told him that they were twins who had been separated at birth, he would have believed it. Then, he would have punched whoever had told him.

Still, that similarity in appearance had been nothing but a curse. He had been arrested multiple times, only to be exonerated after DNA checks. He had been cornered by bounty hunters, refused for jobs, threatened by drunks. Once, a Kusari woman in a Liberty Police uniform had yelled at him for 5 solid minutes before he convinced her to look at his ID. She ended up apologizing profusely and buying him a drink, but he wasn't sure she entirely believed him even then.

He stared into his cup. This synth coffee really was terrible. It was like Trent, in a way. It bore just enough resemblance to real coffee to give anyone unfamiliar with the original a bad opinion of it. If only he could just dump Trent down a drain, watch him get pumped into space on an intercept course with a star...

There is a simple joy in shooting small ships with big torpedoes.

Again, Corbin hadn't been looking for trouble, but at least this time, it had nothing to do with his looks. No, it would seem that the Xenos that had started shooting at him had no concern for his face, other than whether or not it had a missile sticking out of it, and they were obviously pro-missile. This was, however, more of a relief to Corbin than a bother. He had just gotten a new ship, and a little stress-reduction-by-means-of-violence was rather welcome.

Especially when you were flying an armored bucket with nine cannons. He had bought drinks for every Blood Guard member in the bar when they let him purchase the Bullpup Mk III.

He had gotten into a rather heated, though friendly, discussion with a few other pilots over the virtues of mobility over offensive capability, and in many ways, they were right. He had no doubts that a ship with a faster turn speed and a thinner profile would trump other ships in many situations.

Then, he thought of hitting Edison Trent with nine cannons, and then landing a ship the size of a small gunboat on his still-twitching corpse.

It probably wasn't the most sound reason for purchasing a ship, but it sure did feel right. And honestly, the extra thruster port was welcome for when he wanted to get away very quickly, a situation he had seen come up more often. Programming the two co-pilot bots had been a bit of a chore, but he was starting to like having them around on the long trips. They always listened, they didn't talk back, and they didn't think he looked like Trent. This was marks in their favor in all departments.

They last of the squadron of fighters that attacked him detonated in a flower of shrapnel as the overly-large ordinence collided with him. As Corbin tractored in the escape pod and set in a course detour to the nearest prison, he briefly visualized Edison's face on each of the pilots in his cargo hold, and smiled a little.

Things might be looking up.