Chương 35: Chapter 32

WEISSFELD: Mechanic Coyote has finished her confirmation of Ms. Kats' work and reports that her expertise matches her credentials. News of Strider's investment in Ninth Life LLC has also caught the attention of the business segment of the local sector's social media, so well informed parties should be more interested in a stake in Ninth Life soon. CAPT TRIGGER: good. you've sent the revised draft of our preferential customer agreement and nda to eli and I for review? XO GUNJAR: Reading it now.

WEISSFELD: Respectfully Captain, we have room to push for further concessions with the addition of an MPR to the agreement. CAPT TRIGGER: mpr? elaborate please. WEISSFELD: Minimum Purchase Requirement. A clause within the contract stating that we will purchase a minimum amount of product from Ninth Life within a set timeframe, guaranteeing them work.

It would more than make up for the addition of further cost reductions, and with your want to re-arm your fighter with missile munitions, we'll be purchasing from Ninth Life consistently outside of planned projects anyway. CAPT TRIGGER: ok. revise and resend. don't make it too aggressive. we will be trusting 9th life with sensitive info/tech and a good relationship is paramount. XO GUNJAR: You mean your ******** will be angry at you on behalf of kats. XO GUNJAR: Is there a filter in here?

Why the is**** on it??? CAPT TRIGGER: no slurs in official communications please. I will review the new contract once I am done here. then we will speak to eddy about the breakthrough in the burrowmand investigation he reported. - Message #strider-official-coms: [add attachment] [emotes] Hoho, it's times like these that Lars is glad he's not part of the crew's circle of shot callers. The lines and lines of business babble are enough to put a man to sleep on his feet.

Though, what a fortunate turn that Mila's girlhood friend happens to be just what they were looking for: a path to seeing them to new and more wild equipment. His dear Aggressor has served so well for many years, but her strained rivets, sticky landing struts, and the stutter of her left gun's motor, already seen to thrice by Jodie, whisper her want for rest to him. So many battles she has served, so many foes chewed by her teeth, that at last her fangs begin to dull.

There was a plan, at first, to standardise their fighter wing with three more Wyverns, ones built with more, how you say? Consideration to beings still bound by the limits of blood circulation. That had been the plan, until Mila protested." But Trigger! That other one you showed me was sooooo cool! What was it? The XF-something?" The captain's face, bearing those hard lines and those stabbing eyes, had their jaggedness buffed safe by the touch of sun-colored lips.

How Lars wanted to dance on the tips of his toes from the juicy spectacle, and then he did, once he laid eyes on the plans for the CFA-44 Nosferatu. A lesson too few are willing to understand is that violence is the foundation of authority, and that to have authority over oneself requires the capacity to back it with a clenched fist when words do not suffice. A grim, unfortunate reality, one that the CFA-44 actualizes with its sheer firepower.

The imposing, delta-wing fighter rivals the Captain's biting Wyvern in its performance in the skies, and the pop-out missile pods - two on the top, one on the bottom - let the fighter devastate all that it can see. Dear Jodie and Nidhogg are already altering the schematics of the CFA for him. Although some might find it a little silly, replacing the bottom pod with a gimballed 30mm rotary gun simply feels right. It's as if his new fighter will carry a bit of his loyal, tired Aggressor with her. …

Though, there is a little part of him, deep under the boyish admiration for a good weapon, that wonders if such a craft should be in his hands. Mercenary work, the business of death, is ultimately an evil upon the galaxy, but it is all Lars is good at. Perhaps if Strider ascends high enough, if they show the universe their might, peace will both walk one step ahead of them, and linger behind in the cast shadows. … Nah! Not happening. Would peace through fear even be real peace?

Unbidden, the image of Trigger's flat mug on a poster flashes through his head, with "DON'T" printed in huge font at the bottom.

"What's so amusing?" Stifling a laugh behind a hand, Lars dismisses the little window hovering over his comm with a flick of his wrist, and gives his attention back to his partner in crime for the day. Beside him, it's obvious Stella still isn't quite used to Hjagard's biting cold quite yet. Her layers of clothes are drawn tight to her body, and her tail is puffed out into a fluffy train behind her. She regards him with an eyebrow raised to touch her knit cap.

"Ah, nothing, nothing," Lars waves her off and returns his attention back outward, to the crowded, elbow-to-elbow wharf they were perusing. Hjagard might bill itself as an industrial center, but their agricultural sector is nearly as robust as their foundries. Hardy, nutritious crops grown in the snowfields and town-sized greenhouses pair with a planet-sized fishing industry large enough to feed the population with more than enough left for export.

As the Aquila's unofficial cook, the rottweiler thought it helpful to go and procure their latest round of rations. Stella, wanting to see more of the planet and desiring to build a nutrition plan for them with her dwindling time on the crew, decided to join him. One train ride later, and they found themselves several hundred kilometers away from Braskal to the coast of the continent of Statland, at the West Sea Wharf.

Both of Hjagard's main continents, Statland and Gorland, each have one of these massive trade hubs. Seaborne ships dock at the wharf to load and unload containers handled by clearly underpaid crane operators, what with their haste. At the same time, starships above without the goods volume needed to get a spot on the looming space elevator swoop low and fast, trying to move their cargo as quickly as can be managed lest they cause a traffic backup.

The first wholesaler is a walrus the size of a cargo container, a man whose handshake nearly rivals Lars's own grip. The price he quotes for a small crew ration pack of cured cod is, in Lars's professional opinion, an insult dressed in a smile, so he counters with a smile of his own and they dance the old dance until both walk away grumbling. It goes like that for the better part of an hour.

A vendor here selling barrels of pickled root vegetables, a co-op stall there pushing wheels of sharp, waxy cheese, each haggle ending with a handshake and a delivery slip routed to the Aquila's hold. Stella trails a half-step behind through all of it, watching, occasionally leaning in to murmur something about protein content or shelf life that wins a few extra creds knocked off here and there. The skunk has a head for thrift, and Lars files that away.

"You drive a harder bargain than I expected," he tells her, tucking a fresh slip into the pouch at his hip.

"Are you sure you cannot stay with us, doctora? Besides the whole stitching wounds and treating the sick thing, I will miss having you here for trips like this." A flicker crosses her face, there and gone, before she musters a thin smile that says a thousand things without uttering a word.

The crowd presses thick around them, fishermen and dockhands and buyers all shouting over one another in a dozen accents, and the air hangs heavy with brine and engine exhaust and the sweetness of fish guts left too long in the cold. A good place. A loud, honest, working place. They stop at a stall hung with strings of dried, silver-scaled somethings, and Stella pulls up her wristcomm.

"Hey, Lars." Her voice carries the same easy lilt it has all morning.

"What do you think about this one? It's a Hjagard native, supposed to have a natural smoked flavor. The numbers on it are great, lots of iron, good magnesium too. Could work for the rotation." She turns the screen toward him. The screen does not show a fish. DON'T LOOK. WE'RE BEING FOLLOWED. Lars's eyes flick up before he can stop them, then snap back down to the comm.

'What? Who would...?' The thought tangles before it finishes. A capture team? Here, this deep toward the Core, on a planet rated hi-sec? It makes no sense. And yet the skunk beside him would not joke, not about this. He clears his throat and gives the screen a thoughtful nod, as though weighing a fillet.

"Ah, you know, now that you mention it, I think I saw an ad for a crew selling exactly this. Caught fresh, only a few creds a pound. They should be docked somewhere around here." He scratches his chin and lets his gaze wander, keeping it slow and lazy.

"Let us go find them, hm?"

"Sounds good to me," Stella says, and tucks the comm away. They walk. Lars sets an unhurried pace, weaving them deeper along the wharf toward where the crowds thin and the stalls give way to parked skiffs and idle cranes. He keeps a loose smile on his muzzle, lets his shoulders stay easy, and works very hard at looking like a man with nowhere in particular to be. It is not his strong suit. His ears want to swivel, and he curses not docking his tail years ago, as it's still and stiff behind him.

Stella is a portrait of calm. She comments on a passing trawler, asks an old fishmonger about his catch, even laughs at a playful flirt from him, all of it smooth, bright, and utterly unbothered. Not a single tell. If Lars didn't have her warning burning a hole in his memory, he'd swear nothing was wrong at all.

'She is good at this,' he thinks, holding the door of a chandler's cargo-pod-turned-shop for her as they duck inside to browse coils of rope they have no intention of buying.

'Too good. Does it come natural to her, or...?' They visit two more stalls, then a moored cargo hauler whose captain Lars chats up about nothing for a full two minutes. Through it all, four dogged shapes hold their distance behind, drifting at the edge of his vision. An older gentleman in a gray coat. A pair sharing a cigarette they never seem to finish. A fourth with his hands buried in his pockets and his collar popped. All of them sport masks and scarfs that ward away the chill as well as hide their faces.

Lars steers them toward the wharf's mouth, where the press of bodies bleeds out onto a wide, half-empty apron of pavement near the road. They take the bait, and a sleet-gray hovervan comes screaming around the corner. It crosses the open lot far too fast, then wrenches sideways in a hard slewing arc that throws grit and slush, planting itself directly across their path. The rear doors bang open before it has fully settled.

Two men leap out, dressed head to toe in matte black, laserbolters already shouldered and trained. Behind them, the four tails close the noose, hands coming up with pistols leveled.

"In the van," the nearest barks, jerking his weapon toward the open doors. His muzzle is thin under his mask, but it's impossible to place his subspecies.

"Both of you. Now. Don't force us to hurt you." Lars and Stella share a look. Her face holds with the same easy mask she wore for the fishmonger and the trawler captain, but her eyes betray her. Those violet eyes are bright with a fear she cannot scrub from them no matter how steady she keeps the rest. His claws bite into his palm.

'No.' Lars' teeth grit.

'No member of Strider is getting handed over. Not today. Not to these.' He draws a slow breath through his nose, and reaches inward for the coiled, sleeping thing deep in his gut, so rarely roused. It answers with a bite. Pain blooms behind his eyes, sharp and immediate, and races down the length of his spine like a live wire. Beneath his winter coat the skin draws taut all over, and he is glad for the heavy layers, for it keeps everything hidden.

His pulse races, and each beat of his heart makes everything from the tips of his ears to his toes throb. While the world inside is feverishly hot, the world outside thickens like cooling syrup." Gggggeeeettttt iiiiinnnn nnnnoooooowww ooooorrrr wwwweee'lllllll-!" The lead gunman is still talking. His voice reaches Lars stretched and dragging, the words smeared low into a tarry slur, and his finger is just beginning its lazy crawl toward the trigger. Lars crosses the gap in a single beat of his heart.

He watches it happen the way one watches a recording slowed to a crawl. The man's eyes widening, the whites swelling around the iris. The rifle barrel lifting a useless inch. The trigger finger tightening, tightening, far, far too late. Lars's fist comes up and around like an antique cannon ball, and crushes the side of the masked cornerian's face in. CRACK! There is a tingle on Lars' knuckles as they dig into the kidnapper's face, but there is no time to ponder it.

The man's muzzle snaps like dry bark, and his head wrenches around past where any head should go, his neck giving with a sound Lars feels more than hears. And for one heartbeat, Lars is not on the wharf. The shape on the canvas is not moving. A dark halo spreads beneath the ruined head. His glove has split down the seam and the red soaking through it is not his. People are screaming.

Rough, familiar hands are hauling him back by the shoulders, away, away, and over it all climbs the wail of a siren that he already knows is coming too slow to matter." Ortiz, what have you done?!" Then it is gone. The second man from the van is still raising his weapon when Lars seizes him, batting the laserbolter aside and clamping one enormous hand over the whole of his face. He spins, putting his body between the guns and Stella, and hauls the thrashing man up as a shield just as the four behind them open fire.

Bolts of green and red hammer into the body in his grip, shredding armor and flesh alike. The man jerks, his shrieks muffled against Lars's palm, and the savage wounds aren't helped by Lars charging once more. Two of them don't clear his path in time. He bowls them flat, and the first never rises again, his neck folding under the brutal stamp of Lars's boot. The second scrambles up onto his hands, and finds his feet just in time for a bolt from behind Lars to catch him in the eye.

A glance over his shoulder tells him that Stella has the dead man's rifle shouldered, smoke curling from the emitter, her aim already swinging to the next.

'Good shot.' The last two are backpedaling now, cursing and firing wild. A bolt catches Lars high in the shoulder, searing a line through coat and fur and meat. It's nothing compared to hot knives jammed into his spine, and it earns no more consideration than that. He flings the half-dead thing still hanging in his grip. It tumbles into one of the gunmen and takes them both down in a heap. The other Lars reaches in three strides, and his fist comes down like a bolt of lighting.

Hastily raised arms are thrown up to try and stop the blow, but they snap like twigs under Lars' strike, and the man has no time to scream before his skull is shattered like an egg. Only the ski mask around the gunman's head prevents an explosion of gore. The one tangled under the body claws free, lifts his pistol and sights on Lars, forgetting in his terror that Lars isn't alone. The rifle in Stella's hands barks once, and he folds. The six corpies aren't the end, though.

The van's anti-grav coils spool up with a rising whine, and Lars's head snaps toward it. The driver has the throttle buried. The hovervan lurches, sleet-gray flank shuddering as it fights to gain speed, but Lars is in front of it before it finds any, both hands locking onto the leading edge of the chassis. It shoves into him as the driver lays into the horn. His boots gouge twin furrows into the asphalt and hold.

The driver guns it harder, the coils screaming, the whole frame bucking, and the two of them go nowhere. Lars sets his feet, bares his teeth, and with a roar, he wrenches the entire van off the ground and over his head. The driver's wide, horrified eyes stare down at him. The young rabbit with a white-knuckle grip on the steering yoke can't be a day older than twenty, and bereft of a mask, his youthful face is free to contort into mortal terror. Terror directed at him.

The rottweiler grimaces, and instead of smashing the van roof-first into the ground, it comes down right-side up. A great BANG echoes off the landscape as the undercarriage detonates into the pavement. Every coil along the belly shatters at once in a spray of casing and blue sparks, and the wreck slams flat and dead, rocking once on its ruined frame before going still. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

All in all, the exchange takes maybe ten seconds, plenty of time for distant voices to shout and scream about the gunfire, and in no time at all, police sirens begin to rush to them. The fire in him gutters and begins to die. Lars stands over the wrecked van with his chest heaving, and as the worst of it drains away, it leaves the bill behind: a deep, marrow-level exhaustion creeping in at the edges. And heat. So much heat.

He drags his coat open, and the sweat soaking him from collar to hip meets the sub-freezing air, rising off his undershirt in ghostly curls of steam. Through the spider-webbed windshield, the rabbit stares back at him, dazed and very much aware of the hands still resting on the ruined chassis of the getaway van. Lars holds the boy's eyes and says nothing at all. Showing the most brains of his gang, the boy raises his shaking hands and stays put.

"Lars!" Stella's rifle clatters to the pavement. She's at his side an instant later, hands already pushing at his good shoulder.

"You're hit, sit down, sit, let me see it." He lets her steer him down onto the curb, more to humor her than anything, and she's on the wound before he's fully settled, peeling back the scorched edges of his coat with quick, clinical fingers. From somewhere inside her own layers she produces a slim hypo, the green stripe of a Mendacyn-X dose catching the gray light. Lars cocks an eyebrow at it.

"Do you always keep those on you, doctora?"

"Don't." She doesn't look up.

"Don't deflect. This is serious." Her jaw tightens as she works a clinging shred of fabric loose.

"That's twice now. Twice someone's been hurt putting themselves between me and whoever wants me." The hypo drives into the meat beside the wound, and he grunts.

"There it is," he mutters as the liquid in the syringe drains. Immediately, the bleeding hole in his shoulder begins to dry and tingle.

"MX always itches worse than the hole it fixes."

"No." Stella caps the used needle and fixes him with a flat violet stare.

"Deflecting." Lars spreads his hands, all easy innocence.

"We do not even know those clowns were here for you, doctora. Could be someone holds a grudge against me, you know. The list is not short." He glances down at the seared furrow in his shoulder, already closing behind his eyes.

"And this? This is nothing. A scratch. I have given myself worse shaving." Stella stares down at him, and exhales sharply through her nose.

"I know you felt it." Lars stops. His brow furrows.

"... The gunshot? I did, but-!"

"No! Not that. When you hit the first one." Stella holds his gaze, steady, unblinking.

"When your fist connected. You felt something, didn't you."

"I felt his face come apart, sure, but I do not see what-""The masks." Her voice stays quiet.

"There's xanion woven into the lining, Lars. I was preparing to take one of them over and couldn't get a grip. When you struck him, you'd have felt it. A cold spot. A hole where the noise should be." Her tail curls slowly against the cold ground.

"You felt it. They were after me." Lars opens his mouth, then closes it.

'What is she talking abo-' Oh. Oh. The silence stretches between them, brittle as the ice underfoot. The steam still lifts off his coat in lazy ribbons. Somewhere behind, the wail of the sirens grow.

"How long," Lars says at last, very quietly, "have you known."

"I've always suspected." Stella turns the spent hypo over in her fingers, not looking at him now.

"When you defended me after I tried to hijack the Aquila, I had suspicions. You hide it well, but feel too much like… a closed door, if that makes any sense." A breath.

"Then I watched a bolt hit you and stop at the muscle." The faintest, tired ghost of a smile.

"And then you picked up a van. Three times is a pattern." Neither of them says anything for a moment. The wind comes in off the sea, sharp and salted, and the sirens climb closer. Lars lets out a long breath through his nose.

"We should call Trigger." Of all the things Trigger has ever let himself get roped into, this might be the one he regrets the most.

"It'll be fine. Just a couple of guys getting to know each other over a few rounds of golf," Mila's brother Nils had said. Yet, three holes have seen just as many words spoken. Around, the great spring-weather dome above them is alight with sunlamps, built into the braces between the titanic, triangular panes of blue glass that make up the dome proper. What marvelous stuff cornerians can manage. Behind him, three sets of eyes watch as he prepares to tee-off at hole four.

The hole is not too far, only a hundred meters or so to the green. The heft of the rental club in his hands is already memorized, as is the mass and aeros of the ball. Add in the lack of wind and Hjagard's near 1G of gravity, and a hole-in-one is a trivial matter. But, if the books on social niceties he's been reading are correct, it would be rude to show up his hosts. Twisting his wrist one and seven-sixteenths of a centimeter, Trigger pulls back, and swings. WACK!

The golf ball flies, sliced just a little to the left, and rebounds off of a pine-like tree to land in the fairway, right near the edge of the rough. That'll do. Bjorn clears his throat into the quiet.

"Good shot," he offers, nodding toward where the ball came to rest at the edge of the rough.

"Thank you." Trigger steps back from the tee and gestures Nils forward to take his turn. He weighs whether to leave it there, then decides a little extra small talk costs nothing.

"Proficiency with ballistics tends to come with the work." The club changes hands. Nils lines up his stance, and for a moment there is only the soft electric hum of the sunlamps overhead. Then Erik, who has not stopped glowering since the first hole, speaks from behind Trigger's shoulder.

"And is that work a fit place for a woman? One with no training to speak of?" Bjorn's muzzle pulls tight, but he says nothing. Trigger turns to face him. Erik is on the taller side for a cornerian, only an inch shorter than Bjorn, so Trigger has to look down only slightly to meet his red-violet eyes.

"I understand the concern," Trigger begins, keeping his voice level.

"But Mila is far from helpless. She is an ace by the count of most who'd know. Twenty-eight fighters downed and confirmed, with partial credit on several frigates and corvettes disabled. And she is not untrained. I run every member of my crew through their paces on a regular schedule. Especially Mila." That lands somewhere, but not where he'd hoped. Bjorn shifts his weight and looks at the manicured grass between his shoes.

"It's not the training," the eldest brother says slowly.

"It's the rest of it. My baby sister, out there..." He works his jaw, searching for a word and disliking all the ones he finds.

"A killer. Wanting to be one. I keep turning it over and I can't make it sit right in my gut. That's not the Mila who left."

"I am less worried about her aim," Erik cuts in, and his voice has gone flat and ugly, "and a good deal more worried about the ape using his rank to get into her pants." Nils's club connects against his ball with a clean crack, and before the ball has finished its arc he's already rounding on his brother.

"We've been over this! Mila told you to your face it isn't like that. She told all of us. So drop it, Erik."

"You always do this, Nils." Erik throws an arm wide.

"You baby her, every single time, at exactly the moment somebody needs to be straight with her. Our little sister is out there getting shot at because the monkey balls-deep in her tells her where to point her guns, and you want to talk about her feelings. Take this seriously for once in your life!"

"I am not an ape." Trigger's voice comes quiet and even, and it cuts cleaner through the air than Erik's shouting.

"Nor a cornerian. My kind are called humans. I come from an isolated world, far from here." Erik laughs, though there is nothing jovial about it.

"Isolated. Like Venom?" Both Nils and Bjorn draw a sharp breath at the word.

"Erik." Bjorn's voice drops.

"Lower your damn voice."

"No, I want him to hear this." Erik takes a step closer, jabbing a finger toward Trigger's chest.

"I'm not stupid. I looked you up, you and your little squadron, and you know what half the posts say? Every other article is guessing at your ties to Andross and Venom, so you better forgive me if I don't roll out the welcome mat for the monkey who makes murder his business." Trigger can only frown, thumbing the wristband band of his comm with the opposite hand.

"I think you'll find most of those sources to be rather sensationalist."

"But are they wrong."

"The ones regarding my supposed ties to Venom are." Erik draws a long breath, and when he speaks again the shout is gone. He steps in close enough that Trigger can see the individual hairs standing on his muzzle.

"Sure pal. Sure. I know what you are. You're bad news, either way. For Mila, for us, for this whole family. And everyone would sleep easier if you just turned around, walked back to whatever rotted tree you swung out of, and never showed that pushed-in, naked face here again. It might be hard for you to understand, but we don't like seeing her get used like this." Something cold burns in Trigger's chest. The first instance can be forgiven as an unintended flare of Erik's temper, but a second?

"If there is one thing in this life I understand, Erik," He leans forward, just enough to loom.

"It's what it means to be used by people with power over you. I would sooner put a gun to my own head and end it than do the same to Mila. Or to anyone who flies under me. So I will say this once, and you will hear it. Imply that I am doing so again, and there will be consequences." Erik's lips peel back from his teeth. His hand shoots out and bunches the front of Trigger's collar, knuckles pressing hard against his sternum.

"That a threat? You want to go, right here, right now? I don't care how much of a hot-shit hired thug you think you are. I will knock every tooth out of that flat little head." Trigger looks down at the fist in his shirt, then back up to meet Erik's eyes.

"No," he says.

"No, you won't." Then Nils is between them, one hand flat on each chest, shoving them apart with a grunt of effort.

"Enough! Both of you, that's enough!" He rounds on Erik, keeping himself planted as a wall.

"Drop it and shut your mouth. I mean it." His voice cracks down the middle, fury and exhaustion duking it out to express themselves more.

"It is not up to you. It is not up to me, or Bjorn, or Mom, or any of us. We don't get to decide how Mila lives her life."

"Fuck yourself, Nils! It's not just about Mila!" Erik levels a finger to his brother's face.

"What do you think would happen to everyone else? To Mom, if she died? Dad's gone, baby Mirana was gone before she could even live, and if Mila goes next, do you know what will happen? The woman who gave birth to you will fall down and die of a broken heart! Is that what you want?! Do you want the grief of laying them both to rest?!" Nils stumbles back, stricken.

"Enough!" Erik nearly trips when Bjorn takes his shoulders and whirls him around, forcing him to come face-to-face with his elder brother's scowl.

"You're out of line, Erik!" Bjorn's voice is only a single notch below a bellow.

"We don't talk about Mirana, and you're not giving Mom nor Mila the credit they deserve! We're supposed to talk things out here and have a good time here, but all you want to do is make an ass of yourself!" Erik wrenches himself from Bjorn's grasp, his fangs flashing.

"You think I want to be angry, to be the bad guy? Newsflash, asshole! I don't!" He roars back, his ears pinned back and tail ruffled.

"I'm calling things as I see them, and the only thing I see coming from Mila playing spacer is her in a casket with Mom not far behind because no-one wants to talk sense into her!" Whirling around, Erik starts to stomp away.

"I don't want to be right about any of this!" Trigger, Bjorn, and Nils watch him march all the way to the dome entrance, where he takes his coat from the reception booth and vanishes back into the blustery snow outside. Bjorn sucks in a breath and drags a hand down his face, looking older than his thirty-three years.

"I'm sorry about that, Trigger," he finally says, turning to the human.

"This is all a perfect storm for Erik. He's not trying to be an asshole, he's just…" The mink turns his hand over and over, looking for the word.

"... Sensitive, and it tends to come out wrong." Chewing on his lip, Trigger hazards the question gnawing at him.

"What prompted all this from him, if that's okay for me to ask?" Nils and Bjorn share a look, brows furrowed and lips pulled into tight lines.

"Ah, well, it started twenty years back, I guess," Bjorn begins, crossing his arms and looking up at the false sky above.

"There was an accident at the Braskal Jordis Manufacturing plant, where dad worked. A gantry moving a ladle of molten steel from blast furnace seven suffered a break-down, and the bucket filled with tons of molten metal was left hanging in the middle of the track. The floor was supposed to be cleared while they worked on it, but the plant was behind schedule already, and the foreman just had everyone work around it." Bjorn's face twists, his sharp teeth out and his eyes narrowed.

"The stoppage wasn't reported correctly, and another ladle was sent down the track, smashing into the stopped one. The stopped ladle broke free, fell, and sent three-hundred tons of steel spilling out. Eighteen people were killed, and dad was one of them." The mink takes a shuddering breath.

"I was thirteen at the time, with Erik nine, Nils at five, and Mila just two years old. Erik might have had it the worst, because he didn't really have a concept of death at the time, but was old enough to learn by force when he was told dad was never coming home. To make things worse, mom was pregnant and due in just a month. The shock of dad's death…" Bjorn turns his eyes away, and he doesn't need to finish. A chill that Trigger doesn't care for settles in his gut.

"Mom wasn't okay for a long time after that," Nils takes over, setting a hand on his brother's arm.

"Jordis took responsibility for the accident and paid out to all the families who lost someone, so we didn't go hungry while mom mourned. Things did get better after a while, but..."

"Erik had to stay behind and miss a week-long school trip to Corneria because he had a stomach bug," Bjorn takes over once more. He looks over to the golf cart with their rented clubs, then back to the green, then sighs and gestures for Trigger and Nils to follow. Once they're riding back towards reception, he continues.

"He still wanted to go, but mom was funny about letting us off the leash now, and the last thing he wanted to do was upset her, so he stayed behind. It saved his life, because on day four of the trip, the entire class was killed in the Corneria City Bombing. The entire town came out for the service, and Erik… He got swept up in the rhetoric that followed." For a time, the only sound is the wind in their ears and the whine of the golf-cart's battery.

"It doesn't excuse his behaviour," Bjorn sighs.

"But I hope there's no hard feelings." They've just rolled the cart back into its bay and Trigger is handing his rental clubs across the reception counter when his wristcomm chirps, three sharp tones he doesn't hear often.

"Captain. Priority one transmission from Pilot Ortiz," Nidhogg announces through the comm speaker. The half-formed pleasantry he was about to offer Bjorn dies on his tongue. He has the comm up and the channel open before the AI finishes the sentence.

"Lars. What happened?"

"Hey, Boss." Lars's voice comes through level, but there's an edge under it that Trigger has only heard a handful of times.

"We had ourselves a little excitement at the wharf. A team tried to grab Stella. And before you ask, it was her they wanted, no question. They came kitted to handle a psychic." The cold that had begun to thaw on the fairway comes flooding back in.

"Are you both alright?"

"We are fine. Truly." He pauses, and something rustles over the mic.

"I caught a graze, nothing the doctora couldn't patch on the spot. Seven of them came for us. Six did not walk away from it." His tone flattens.

"The seventh is a kid roped into being a getaway driver. Police have him now and they are already grilling him." Damn. Part of him was hoping they could make away with the survivor for interrogation. Bjorn and Nils have gone still beside the coat booth, watching. Trigger turns a half-step away from them and lowers his voice, though it loses none of its weight.

"Listen carefully. Both of you see a medic, even if you think you don't need it. Cooperate with the police, stay polite, do as they ask." He pauses, letting his first sentence hit bottom before he continues.

"But you answer nothing about the incident itself, not until Catrina is on the ground with you. If they press, you tell them your legal counsel is en route and you'll speak once she arrives. Understood?"

"Crystal clear, Boss. We sit tight and keep our muzzles shut."

"Good. I'm calling her now. Remember, not a word until she gets there."

"Understood. Ortiz out." The channel clicks dead. Trigger is already keying the next call, Catrina and Eli both, the connection tones layering as the line reaches for them. He glances back at the two brothers, and the easy weekend has gone out of him entirely. Whatever man had been swinging a golf club ten minutes ago, this is not him.

"My apologies. Bjorn, Nils." He's already shrugging into his coat and turning towards the door.

"I need to handle this." Six hours later puts the whole of Strider Squadron on The Aquila's bridge, gathered in a loose circle on the upper tier by the captain's chair. The story has been told, the questions asked and answered, and now the meeting settles into the part Trigger actually called it for. Catrina has the floor, one paw resting on her hip, and the other loosely holding her datapad.

"The short version is that we'll see no further trouble from the locals." She lets that sit for a moment before elaborating.

"Kaliman and Ortiz aren't being charged with anything. Seven armed assailants, two unarmed targets, in broad daylight in a public area? There is no way to spin it as anything but self-defense, and I made certain the investigators understood that prying any deeper into our affairs would be a poor use of everyone's afternoon." A thin smile.

"They agreed." A low murmur of relief threads through the crew. Then the snow leopard's gaze cuts sideways, and lands on Lars.

"Of course," she continues, and her tone takes on a silken edge, "my work would have gone a great deal smoother if not for the state of the scene. Six bodies, several of them rather... emphatically dealt with. And one hovervan flattened by something the forensics team couldn't quite account for." She tilts her head.

"Would you happen to have an explanation for me, Mister Ortiz? I do so hate writing around gaps." Every eye in the room finds Lars. He's quiet for a long moment, the easy humor that usually rides his features nowhere to be found. Then he exhales, a slow shudder of a breath, and his shoulders drop.

"... Yeah. I have something to come clean about." He drags a paw down his muzzle.

"I am a psychic. A psychosomatic, to use the proper word. Unregistered. Have been my whole life." The reactions ripple out in different directions at once. Eddy's jaw actually drops, the gecko's throat working silently. Jodie's ears shoot up, and beside her, Nidhogg's RK-4 tilts its head. Mila gasps somewhere to Trigger's left.

Only two faces in the room hold steady: Stella, who watches Lars with quiet, sympathetic wince, and Catrina, whose expression suggests she'd already done the arithmetic and was merely waiting for him to show his work.

"It is how I handled them," Lars goes on, eyes on the deck plating.

"I walked us out to that spot on purpose. Open ground, thin crowd, good place to make whoever was tailing us commit. We had no weapons between us, so when they sprang it, I..." He turns one broad paw over and stares at it.

"I used what I had and took them down."

"And when," a new voice cuts in, hard as a struck anvil, "were you intending to share this?" Eli has come off the bulkhead he'd been leaning against, his single organic eye blazing, and the cybernetic one whirring as it narrows and shifts to a hellish red. The eagle's voice climbs, every clipped word landing like a punch.

"It is bad enough that we're sheltering one fugitive, and now you stand there and tell me we've been harboring two the entire fucking time?!"

"I'm not a fugitive." Lars winces at the volume but holds his ground.

"I never ran from anything. I'm just unregistered. There's a difference."

"A distinction," Catrina offers, almost gently, "that won't matter much. Failure to register psychic ability is itself a crime across a good many systems, Mister Ortiz. In some of them, a rather serious one." Lars has no answer for that, and just as Eli opens his mouth to tear into the dog again, Trigger steps in.

"Enough." Trigger's voice isn't loud, but it cuts the rising tension clean off at the root. Every eye on the bridge turns to him.

"Lars kept this from us, and that has to be addressed, but I'm certain he had his reasons." He holds Eli's eye until the older man's hackles ease by a fraction.

"Lars has flown and bled with us, and when the moment came, he told us the truth instead of spinning us another story." His gaze moves to Lars.

"You and I will speak about this at length, but not now. Right now there are larger fires to put out." He turns to Catrina, and the matter is closed as cleanly as it was opened.

"I want carry permits," Trigger begins, his hand resting on the Havoc-7 on his hip, which has become quite the companion.

"Every member of this crew, every port we touch, wherever the law allows it. Make it happen." Catrina inclines her head, already tapping a note into her datapad.

"And where the law doesn't allow it?"

"Then we remain armed anyway." He sweeps his gaze across the assembled crew so there's no mistaking it as policy.

"If any port denies us the right to defend ourselves, you go armed regardless. Conceal it, keep it quiet, and if you're caught, then I will make sure authorities see things my way." No one argues. Eddy looks faintly thrilled, while Catrina sighs slowly.

"Second matter." Trigger's jaw sets.

"Shore leave is over. We make for Crook's Triad at the first opportunity."

"What?" Mila's head snaps up, ears flattening.

"Trigger, we just got here! It's been, like, five days! Can't we stay a little longer? Please?" It pains him to deny her. He sees the disappointment crowd into her face and feels the pull of it, and he holds firm anyway.

"If the people hunting Stella have tracked us here so quickly, and are willing to mount a snatch operation on a hi-sec world like Hjagard, in public, then waiting only gives them another swing at us." He softens, just slightly, just for her.

"I'm sorry, Mila. I am. But I don't think your childhood home should become a battlefield." That takes the fight out of her, even if her ears remain pinned back. He turns to Eddy.

"You said your contacts came through."

"Oh, did they ever, boss!" Eddy snaps to life like someone flipped his switch, words tumbling out in his usual rapid-fire patter as he counts off on his clawed fingers.

"So I've been workin' my guys, right, the good ones, the ones who actually know things and not just think they know things, and after a whole lotta back-and-forth and a few favors I'm now in the hole for, get this: we got Burrowmand narrowed all the way down. Not a sector, not a system, a planet. Red One. That's the real name, by the way. Dead center of the Triad, like somebody parked it there special." He spreads his hands wide.

"Bingo bango."

"Good work." Trigger nods, inwardly glad to finally have a heading.

"Then we leave at dawn." He pauses.

"Contingent on one thing. We find somewhere safe to tuck Stella away while we sort out who's behind this."

"Actually, Captain," Stella cuts in with a murmur.

"I'd rather come with you." The words are quiet, but they turn every head on the bridge. Stella stands a little straighter under the sudden attention, her tail curling close.

"Please. I don't want to be hidden away in some safehouse, waiting to find out whether the people who come through the door are yours or theirs." Her violet eyes find Trigger's and hold.

"I'd rather see it through. With the crew." Trigger studies her. The set of her shoulders, her raised chin, it all seems quite firm.

"You're certain? I won't pretend the road ahead is a safe one."

"I'm certain." She doesn't waver.

"You took me in when I'd given you no reason to. Then Jodie put herself between me and a bolt. Then Lars did the same thing today, twice over." She draws a breath.

"Three times now this crew has stuck its neck out for me, and I'm tired of being a thing that gets protected and moved around. If you'll have me, I want to see this through. And maybe pay back some of what I owe along the way." The bridge is quiet. Trigger regards her for a long, weighing moment, long enough that she begins to fidget under it. Finally, he speaks.

"It'll be good to have you, Stella. As I said, we leave at dawn. Make your final arrangements."