Daniel Radcliffe

“FRIENDSHIP!”

Chad blinked; that wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was close enough and he was feeling so out of it right now. He felt like he’d overindulged at one of the family gatherings - man, the food coma was right there and so temptingly within reach. If it wouldn’t have been horribly rude to fall asleep in front of a whole roomful of potential datemates, he’d have already been under the table and curled up.

Oh, the woman was getting smaller. Still beautiful, though, he noted as he stared at her glassy-eyed. So beautiful, all shining and glowy, and he couldn’t look away even as she shrank to barely larger than his thumb. He wondered if she would consent to being his wife; it would solve an awful lot of problems and maybe his dad would stop harping on him to go out and find a real occupation.

Then it hit him.

Searing agony lanced through him, shooting out in white-hot spears from his forehead. He could feel something burrowing into his skull, forcing nerve connections where before he had none. He could feel power rushing through his nervous system, forcing open floodgates in him that he hadn’t even known he had. Chad knew, with a sudden, terrible certainty, that if he had been any more tense, if he hadn’t been completely stoned out of his skull on the drugs in the food, that if he wasn’t such a naturally relaxed guy, that this would have killed him. Magical Space Princes and Magical Space Princesses were cut from the same cloth, but Magical Space Princes were wired differently. Their powers were weak, and their bodies’ natural magical channels were narrow and reluctant to let magic flow.

The power from the stone - he could feel the shape of it now, feel it like a third eye or second nose, feel the air through it like it had always been a part of him - had blasted those channels wide open with the initial power rush. If he’d been even the slightest bit tense, if he’d been able to even muster a little bit of surprise, his magic channels would have tensed and the power surge would have burned his entire nervous system out.

If that’d happened, he’d’ve been lucky to die seizing while his nerves fired muscles randomly; if he’d’ve been unlucky, he’d’ve been left a drooling husk with the stone trapped on his forehead, keeping him alive until a better vessel was found.

Still, that hadn’t happened and even as he realized what had, in fact, happened - he was now Space Princess Chad of the Dominion of Chad, apparently - he could feel the aftershocks bouncing through him, changing him in nearly indefinable ways. He could feel magic much more strongly now - raw, unshaped magic just waiting to be given form - but he didn’t know what to do with that so he put it to the back of his mind. He suspected he could do a lot more magic now than he used to, but that wasn’t what Magical Space Princes did or were for.

He could feel the stone in his forehead. He reached up to tap it, just to verify what he could already feel down to the depths of his brain, and -

It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer, stars exploding across his vision as the tap sent shockwaves of pain from the roots of his hair all the way down to his toenails. He clapped one hand over the stone, protecting it instinctively. It hurt worse than being kicked in the family jewels, and that was saying something! He made a hurried mental note to never ever do that again. Like, ever.

Ow.

He did have to wonder if it was the same for all the space princesses, or if it was just because his physiology was different. Space princes were not, after all, supposed to get Keepstones; they weren’t designed to handle them, their skulls didn’t have the secondary socket thinning at the fore to facilitate bonding when the time came, they had differently shaped magical channels, and, well. Certain other morphological distinctions made them extremely ill-suited to receiving a Keepstone.

And yet here he was.

“What just happened?”

Scichael Mofield sat in a bar, sipping his drink.

Mofield wasn’t really his name, of course - who the hell names their kid Scichael? - but it was what the (extremely well-done) driver’s license in his pocket said and it was the name he’d given to the whispered rumors that someone wanted to hire him.

He sipped his drink and glanced up at the mirror over the sticky bar he was currently seated at. It’d been a bit of a surprise when his snitches had reported who was hiring; the guy hadn’t been seen for nearly eight months and the general assumption had been that he’d been picked up for “moving violations”. Still, it seemed either the rumors were wrong or the guy was very good at escaping; either way, he was back again and looking for Mofield’s services.

And Mofield was inclined to indulge him; his last payment had been…Unorthodox, to say the least, but oh so useful. Mofield glanced up at the mirror again, and let a muscle behind his eyes relax. Suddenly he was looking both at the mirror and through it, the rooms beyond making themselves known to his eyes in flashes of movement and light. The backroom had a mouse scurrying through it, and Scichael made a mental note not to eat any more of the pretzels. The upstairs rooms were all full, most of them with strangers seeking the short comfort that came from another’s embrace, but the room at the end had the mayor’s aide and what looked like the mayor’s wife.

Mofield smirked into his gin and let the vision fade. That was an interesting tidbit, and made coming here tonight worth it in and of itself even if the prospective client never showed. He was, after all, now almost - Scichael glanced at his watch - twenty minutes late. It wasn’t like the guy didn’t know where the place was; they’d met here the last time he’d hired Mofield, after all, and he’d been on time then.

Scichael figured it was some sort of protest about coming back to the place; the guy had looked supremely put out the last time they’d met, when he’d had great difficulty in getting his shoe off the floor thanks to a particularly venerable gum wad. Mofield had honestly called the meeting in the same place for that exact reason; he was just enough of a bastard that the petty humor amused him. Plus, of course, it was one of the few dive bars he rotated meetings between that had an intact mirror over the bar, and his contact was a creepy enough bastard when he couldn’t sneak up behind you. Mofield would probably shoot him if tried, just on reflex.

“You’re late. Thought they taught you batchies better than that,” Scichael drawled, enjoying the look of brief irritation that drifted across his contacts face as he sidled up behind Mofield. Z grimaced as he checked both the seat and the floor beneath it before deigning to sit down. Mofield hid a snicker in a sip of his drink as he enjoyed the vat-man’s discomfort; some people in the business would refuse to work for the tank-born, but Mofield contented himself with merely needling any that tried to employ him. Given his own dubious antecedents, he couldn’t really say he was in a position to throw stones about parents or the lack thereof.

“I had a few things that wanted doing before we met, and time got away from me,” Z responded as he sat, a creepy smile sliding onto his face as he glanced over at Mofield with an unsettling light in his eyes. Mofield raised one eyebrow, sharpening his gaze to look for oncoming police cruisers but Z merely shook his head. Mofield grunted and nodded to the bartender, who immediately refreshed his glass and set a frothing pint in front of Z. Mofield sipped politely at his glass, but Z ignored his completely in favor of staring at Mofield. Creepy batchy.

“So. I heard you were looking for me. Me, in particular,” Mofield tried the drawl again, ignoring the way the steady gaze was making his skin crawl. It was the price of doing business with the guy, and he’d never been one to shy away from a good score just because a client made him want to bathe in hand sanitizer.

“Indeed. I have need of your particular talents.” Z spoke crisply and clearly, which Scichael could appreciate in a client; it was probably a result of his batch processing. The batchy reached into a side pouch and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper that looked like it had been torn from a spiral bound. Mofield leaned over to look at it with a studied disinterest. He didn’t recognize the drawing, but he did recognize the logo and leaned back while whistling softly through his teeth.

“You’re aiming big. I don’t tend to hit developmental labs because corporate espionage isn’t really my thing, but I’ve seen their security set up.” He made it a point to keep up to date on various security initiatives and maintained no less than three clean covers to subscribe to the latest news in security both physical and cyber; the logo belonged to one of the foremost labs in the city, and he’d heard only some of the security features from a friend of a friend.

Z nodded, smile firmly fixed on his face as he leaned towards Mofield. “That’s why I need you. No-one else could even begin to attempt it.”

The admiration in the batch-born’s voice made Scichael simultaneously preen and want to go take a shower, but he concealed both reactions with the ease of long practice. No point in letting someone know when they’ve found a possible chink in your armor; they’d just slide a knife into it later when it was inconvenient. He leaned back and glanced away from Z to covertly check the room behind them in the mirror; no-one had been foolish enough to come to the bar for drinks while they’d been talking but a little extra caution never hurt anyone.

He leaned forward again to address Z. “Did you want this done fast or want this done quiet? If I need to find something similar to replace it with, I’ll need extra time for the forgery.” Swapping one item for another of considerably lesser value was an easy way to cover your tracks, but it tended to work better when he was heisting jewels than anything else; forgeries took time, especially technological ones. Paintings you could get away with some missing details, documents just needed to have the right seals, but tech forgeries needed to behave at least a little like their counterpart before they gave up or they weren’t worth using.

Z merely shook his head and patted the satchel at his side. “No need. I will provide a…replacement of sorts. I just need you to get in, get the original, leave the one I get you, and get out.” He paused for a beat. “In three days.”

“Three days!” Mofield only just stopped himself from yelling. Three days was barely enough time to case the place, let alone formulate a plan for a heist. Granted, he didn’t need to do any digging at City Hall for floor plans anymore thanks to Z’s last payment, but even considering that this was a bit much. Still, Z’s last payment had been good, had pushed him to the very top of his game, and he could admit to himself that his greedy, blackened soul was drooling over what else he could get from the batch-born.

He leaned back on his stool. “And what do I get in return?” He knew he sounded bored, but Z’s grin only widened, damn the batchy. Reaching into his satchel, Z brought out a small rod approximately eight inches long and two in diameter. Inset into the surface were symbols Mofield was somehow certain weren’t part of any human language, set on rings that rotated and shifted under Z’s clever fingers. Mofield feigned disinterest as best he could. “My niece has one of those. Does it make the pretty light show when you shine a flashlight through it too?” he sneered, but Z’s expression didn’t waver.

“This,” he said, enunciating clearly but quietly as he held the rod up to what little light was available in the dingy bar, “is a dimensional hopper. You set the rings to the dimension you want to go and press the button on the end.” Mofield’s eyebrows crawled towards his hairline. “That simple?” The other more…regulated travel facilitators were never that easy. “That simple,” Z confirmed, and banished the rod back to his satchel with a quick flick of clever fingers. “It is also, of course, enormously illegal to make or own one, but I don’t think you care very much about that, do you, Mr. Mofield?” Mofield snorted a mirthless laugh, and Z nodded genially.

“So, Mr. Mofield, what do you say?” Z held out his hand. Mofield hesitated; his instincts were screaming at him that something wasn’t right with the clone in front of him, but……He’d always been greedy, and he loved the thrill of a challenge.

Scichael reached out and took the extended hand. “A pleasure doing business with you, as always.”
———————————————————————————————————–

“You in, partner?”

“You know me, partner. I’m always in.”

———————————————————————————————————–
Sirens wailed as Scichael hauled his nearly-unconscious partner along the inside of the chain-link fence towards the hole he’d made in it earlier, cursing himself for going along with this and that bastard Z for putting him up to it.

Mofield’s long-time partner, Lyndon Burrnow, made a bubbly noise as more blood flowed down his chest. He’d taken a bullet meant for Mofield, and from the sound of it the damn thing had nicked a lung. He needed to get his partner to the hospital now or he wouldn’t have a partner much longer.

“Hang in there Lynd, I gotcha,” he chanted as he finally made it to the hole in the fence. The whole venture had been snake-bit from the start; he’d spent a day driving by in various cars casing the place with his extra vision and the sheer number of sensors, security points, and vaults in the place had made it clear subtlety wasn’t going to be an option. Any kind of covert infiltration would take at least two people on the inside, and a quick check of the application process made it clear that turning anyone already on payroll would take months he didn’t have, and getting someone on the payroll from outside would take even longer.

So he’d chosen a more direct route, paying a hacker out of his own funds to cut power and communication to the site so he and Lynd could come in through an industrial ventilation shaft without being cooked to death or alerting anyone and hitting a lab a floor away from the real target. They’d clean out that lab, he’d slip over and replace the bit Z wanted with the forged piece, and they’d be out through the maintenance tunnels after setting off a fire alarm.

That plan had lasted all the way up to actually getting to the lab they were going to clear out. Almost immediately they’d been set upon by a guard whose glowing, bulging veins were a big clue that he wasn’t the average no-neck goon. Scichael hated hitting places that employed pilots. Still, Lynd - who loved a good fight the way other men loved a good beer - had simply tackled the glowing bastard with a gleeful yell to Mofield to get on with it.

He’d taken off and left Lynd rolling on the floor with glowing-veins, switching the piece Z’d asked for and hurrying back. When he got back Lynd was sporting one hell of a shiner and the glowing bastard - who glowed quite a bit less now - was out cold on the floor. They’d gone in to their original target to start clearing it of anything that looked both valuable and portable, and found three more guards that were very clearly the result of some kind of experiments, plus another smug-looking pilot holding their less than metaphorical leashes.

Mofield had snatched some kind of blue, glowing device off a nearby table and they’d both legged it, but the alarm had been well and truly raised. Armies of guards had come boiling out of the woodwork - fortunately of the more typical gun-wielding variety - and had cut them off at every turn. Lynd had finally ended up tackling one to the ground taking his gun to cover Mofield as Scichael worked frantically to unlock a side door they’d managed to find. Lynd had been shot just as they got the door open, and Mofield was left to keep him mostly upright and going for their exit strategy.

Fortunately, the hole in the fence was still there - the hacker had been worth every penny Scichael’d spent on him and had thoughtfully disabled the perimeter alarms as well as communications - and he managed to manhandle his partner through. Less pleasing was the canned bastard leaning against their getaway car, the drive system of which had clearly been ruined beyond repair.

Mofield scowled at the smiling face of Z. “The hell are you doing here? I need to get Lynd to the hospital, he’s been shot,” a panicked glance told him that yes, Lynd was still with him though he was fading fast. Z didn’t move. “Did you get what I asked for?” Shouting was becoming audible in the distance and Mofield grimaced. “Yes, now get out of my way! I need to get another car, Lynd’s shot, do you hear me?”

“Let me see it,” Z said calmly, taking a step forward. The shouting behind them was getting louder and Scichael scrabbled madly for the satchel at his side before throwing the whole thing at Z. Z caught it, and looked inside for a long moment before smiling even wider. “Excellent! And as promised,” he tossed the rod that landed near Mofield’s feet. “The dimensional hopper. If you set it right, your friend might even live; there are a lot of technologically advanced alternate dimensions where you two aren’t fugitives from the law that could have him back on his feet in a matter of days.” So saying he began walking off, heedless of Mofield’s sudden scrabbled for the hopper.

“What’s the setting? YOU BASTARD! WHAT SETTINGS?” The batched bastard ignored Scichael’s screams as he disappeared around the corner. Mofield threw one panicked look over his shoulder at the guards now clearly visible through the fence and headed his way before grabbing Lyndon and pressing the button. With a soft pop, both he and Lyndon disappeared from reality just as the first wave of guards pushed through the hole in the fence and fetched up against the stationary vehicle that no longer sheltered two wanted felons.
———————————————————————————————————–

A man stands at the top of a hill covered in delicate aqua grass that slopes softly to a white-sand beach and a light periwinkle ocean. In front of him is a raised mound of ocher dirt topped by a rock that has a name carved deep into it: LYNDON BURRNOW.

The man looks up at the achingly blue sky for a long moment before speaking to the grave.

“I’ll get him for you, partner. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll kill Z.”

It’d been three days.

Chad looked at the counter before him, deep in thought. It’d been three days since he’d last felt Thomas. There was a hollow feeling behind his eyes now, like something had been scooped out and not replaced. It felt weirdly like the inverse of when he’d gotten his Keepstone, like someone’d pulled one of his eyes out of its socket.

And God did it hurt. He hadn’t told Brad or any of the others, but being a Space Prince was fundamentally different than being a Magical Space Princess (and it wasn’t just the boobs). He looked down at his shaking hands and clenched them into fists; he’d been lucky the first time he’d gotten his Keepstone, the drugs and general lassitude letting the magic that would turn him into Magical Space Prince Chad sear open his magical channels safely if not painlessly, but the second time had left him with fine tremors in his hands, a general clumsiness he just couldn’t shake, and migraines that left him feeling like his brain was going to boil out through the hole in his skull where his Keepstone resided.

Thomas had helped; he had been a stabilizing influence sitting behind Chad’s eyes since before the first time he’d gotten a Keepstone (though Chad himself hadn’t realized it at the time). Thomas had managed to ease some of the pain - brain and nerve damage, a part of Chad that sounded suspiciously like Ricci supplied - by just being there, and more when he actively called on Chad for help.

Chad liked to help, and though he wasn’t sure if Thomas was doing it on purpose or not, the fact that helping eased the pain was a great boon as well. Thomas had let him ground the shake in his hands, control his clumsiness, and keep his head up through even the worst of migraines.

But for three days now, Chad hadn’t been able to feel him. For three days, he’d had the worst migraine of his life. For three days, he’d been knocking things over and stumbling over nothing as tickles of pain ran up and down his spine.

For three days he hadn’t been able to cook anything but the simplest of dishes, hands too unsteady to hold a knife or stir a pot.

The others had noticed. He’d noticed them noticing; Zelania had refrained from being too sarcastic with him, Vega hadn’t punched him at all, Ricci had been dropping increasingly pointed hints about the benefits of advanced science and research and Elliana had redone his entire wardrobe. Brad hadn’t said anything; while Chad loved him more than his own brothers, and they were connected far more deeply than he was with the Sparkle Sisters, he wasn’t sure just how much Brad could feel of what he was feeling.

“You gonna make dinner, or should I get something out of the freezer?”

Brad’s voice interrupted Chad’s thoughts and he straightened, rubbing his shaking hands together like it would help. “I got this; go ahead and tell the others it’s macaroni and cheese for dinner again.”

“You got it, bro.” Brad hesitated before leaving. “You know I got your back, right?”

Chad didn’t look at him. “Yeah bro, I got it. You go ahead.”

“Alright bro.” Brad hopped to the floor and made his way out the door. It was a long moment after the sounds of him leaving faded before Chad started moving, mechanically grabbing a pot and the noodles - cursing quietly when he dropped the box and dried noodles spread themselves across the floor. He stared silently at his hands, at fingers jittery with misfired nerves, and sighed before beginning to clean up the mess.

It’d been three days. Thomas wasn’t coming back.

There is always a Joe’s.

Wherever there’s an open offshoot of the Metaverse, wherever there’s sentient life capable of hopping between metaversal branches, wherever someone needs a milkshake and a decent fry-up, there’s a Joe’s. It’s a constant, a diner done up with old neon in whatever language the locals speak proudly announcing that the diner is open and ready for business.

Of course, in an infinite metaverse of infinite combinations, some places are more hospitable for some folks than others. The door of Joe’s Diner will always take you where you need to go, but a door works both ways. Sometimes the door opens and the Diner is full of an oxygen-nitrogen mix, with red vinyl seats that have seen better days shining under fluorescent lamps.

Sometimes the door opens to a thick methane atmosphere, argon lights brilliant pinpoints above seats that glow with a helpful luminescence so patrons can find their seat. Sometimes the door opens to beautifully crystal-blue waters lit by schools of tiny bio-luminescent lifeforms that flitter about the ceiling and tables. Sometimes it opens to a completely gasless chamber where crystals glittering with strange and ineffable energies litter the walls and ceiling and everything is made of perfectly polished carbon formations.

And each patron is where they need to be. Humans and those who breathe oxygen chow down on carbon-based proteins under the humming fluorescents; gelatinous creatures with no discernible features slurp a stew of sulphur-based chemicals in the brilliant argon lights; strangely jolly-looking creatures with large eyes and even larger noselike protrusions crunch calcium-based delicacies as the lights dance to and fro; complex refracted waveforms of sentient energy integrate higher mathematics equations expressed in physical form as eleven-dimensional matrices of crystal made with the perfect amount of symmetry as the lights twist around them.

Cook and Hollywood - and Joe himself, of course - are as much a part of the diner as the seats or the flickering neon sign. Where there is a customer inside the Diner, Hollywood is there to take their order and Cook is there to make it. It’s not bad, most days; Hollywood’s had a lot of time to get used to things. The first few times he’d found himself as a shambling two-foot-tall monstrosity made of something akin to twigs and sphagnum moss had been……Disconcerting, to say the least.

But if there was one thing working at Joe’s gave him, it was time. Now Hollywood could turn around to find himself a complicated series of cellulite-walled tubes strung together by the carbonaceous goo equivalent to silly string that floated in a liquid oxygen environment and communicated by tapping itself together and not bat a proverbial eye. Cook, too, had learned to take changes to himself and his kitchen in stride.

It wasn’t like it was at all separate anyway; at a quantum level, all possible iterations of Joe’s existed at the same time on the same real estate. It didn’t tend to matter much except when a rush hit. When things got really exceptionally busy, Hollywood sometimes found himself turning with a d'kr'tgh of drrnl'th in his hand, only to watch them die as the oxygen-rich atmosphere he found himself in collapsed their tissues. It didn’t happen often but when it did he’d always have to go back to Cook for more, and he’d usually slide in an appetizer free of charge to make up for the wait.

Cook took the quantum-ness of it all as a personal challenge. He switched between the realities of Joe’s more often than Hollywood did, experimenting with dishes and cuisines that were indigestible, illegal, immoral, incoherent, and ineffable to the life he’d started with. Taste-testing his creations was one of the best ways he’d found to stave off boredom during slumps when the door opened less than once an hour, and served him well when the hinges never stopped creaking and customers of all walks wanted their food as soon as they could get it.

Joe himself knows how it all works. After all.

There is.

Always.

A Joe’s.

It had been 5 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 14 hours, and 42 minutes since Chad had felt the comfortable assurance of Thomas’ presence in his head.

But who was counting, really.

The pain had been hard at first; he’d tried to continue like nothing was wrong, concealing how exhausting it was just to get through an average day, never mind those days where he was called upon to fight. The pain had gotten worse then, as he pushed himself beyond his new limits, making it even more of a chore to go through his day, until he just. Hadn’t been able to get out of bed.

For a week.

Ricci had confronted him about it, when he’d finally gotten himself enough together to feel like fire wasn’t scorching its way up and down his spine with every step he took and come out of his room. So he’d explained, as best he could. He wasn’t quite sure how much she realy understood his connection to Thomas, but she took to the challenge of helping him manage with a zest that suggested she very well might.

There’d been several days of exhausting tests that had left him feeling like his brain was going to slowly dribble out of his eyesockets before she’d come back to him with a guilty look around the eyes. She took her time explaining it to him and Brad, who’d come to offer moral support; turns out, he’d been right. Keepstones weren’t given to Space Princes for a reason, and doing it a second time had just made everything worse - especially without the drugs he’d ingested the first time.

There wasn’t really a cure; he’d known, deep down, but Ricci was very clever and he’d had some form of hope. Still, she was able to devise a cocktail to ease the bad days and had put together a number of aids to make the good ones better. She’d worked with Elliana to create a stylish harness-type garment that hid biofeedback sensors to let him know when his pain levels were about to spike; she’d upgraded most of his cooking utensils with handles that would compensate for the shakes in his hands; and finally, she’d given him a mobility aid.

Chad would never tell her, but he detested the cane. It was the perfect height and weight - Ricci was far too good to have let such important details get by her - but it represented a tangible, visible reminder of the way he’d used to be.

Of all the people he’d lost.

He hadn’t lost everyone; the Sparkle Sisters were still with him - for all the good he was to them. Vega wouldn’t be in the same room with him, Zelania would actually turn her music off whenever he entered a room with her in it and then pointedly not glare at him the entire time he was in there, and Elliana would chatter on and on about how everything would get better, that they’d fix him one day he’d see! It was enough to make the ever-present pain in his skull flare whenever he stayed in a room with her too long, and the relentless optimism wore at him.

Ricci and Brad were the only ones who didn’t walk on eggshells around him, for which he was profoundly grateful. He could still do things on his own, thank you very much, just…Not as fast. Or as well. Ricci knew when to be quiet, too, and how to be quiet without making him feel like the quiet was his fault. They’d sit in silence together for hours in the library, her working diligently at some research or another, and him enjoying the quiet with a silly novel or another.

Still, eventually the agony would gather in his hips and lower spine and he’d be obliged to get up and walk it out to a more even distribution. Brad would always come with him, rolling on the floor if it was a day to be slow or in Chad’s hand if the day was a good one. They’d chat quietly, talking about light topics like the weather and what Chad was going to make for dinner, and for a bit it would seem like nothing had changed.

But inevitably it would be time to stop walking, whether it was to begin meal preparation or simply because Chad couldn’t walk any further, and it would all fall down. Meal preparation was easier now that Ricci had upgraded most of the kitchen implements to accommodate the shake in his hands, but it was still a chore instead of the delight it had been before. Additionally, ever since the one unfortunate incident where he’d almost dropped a filleting knife through his foot all knives and other sharp implements had been removed from the kitchen and replaced with automatic slicers that never quite got the cuts he wanted right. Meals still tended to be simpler, and the drink-mixing had been reduced to simply what he could pour out of a bottle. Nobody complained where he could hear them, but Vega and Zelania would sigh loudly whenever dishes repeated themselves too often on the menu and dinner would be a very strained affair those nights.

Battles were the worst. He didn’t do much more than stand on the sidelines now and cheer the others on. When it became apparent that flashing lights exacerbated his migraines to the point where he couldn’t do anything beyond curl up on the ground and beg his brain not to leak out his ears, Ricci had given him a polarizing visor/headset combo that kept the worst of the attacks at bay, but more often then not he’d spend the entire fight doing nothing but using Brad on anyone that got too close and doing the transformation sequences whenever the others needed him to.

The first time he’d become Magical Space Prince Chad (the armored version) after Thomas had…Left him, he’d almost laughed out loud how easy everything had felt, the rush of endorphins at the cessation of pain making him almost giddy as he’d joined the others in the fight against the horrible Space Witch Escadrille and their hordes of semi-sentient squiplings. The rush had lasted all the way up to the end of the fight when they’d resumed their normal forms and everything came back with a vengeance. He’d collapsed and spent three days confined to his bed with the lights off.

The others tried to avoid transforming as much as possible after that, for which Chad was sincerely grateful. Every time they did it left him prostrated for days, taking grim measures of Ricci’s potion whenever we couldn’t bear it any longer.

And that had been his life for the last 5 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 14 hours, and 44 minutes. Chad sighed as he closed his book; he could feel the fire beginning to streak from his sacrum to his kneecaps, and that was a surefire sign he’d been sitting too long. Nodding to Ricci - who absently nodded back - he headed out to take his customary turn around the garden. Today was a good day, so Brad was in his hand as he walked out into the artificial sunlight. Step, step, cane. Step, step, cane. Step, step -

“What did you want to make for dinner?” Brad’s voice interrupted his contemplation of his own footsteps and Chad paused to look up at the artificial sky. “Oh I don’t know Brad. What have we made so far this week?” He didn’t want to repeat a dish too often, made dinner awkward and all that.

“Well, on Monday you made spaghetti, and Tuesday was wedding soup. Wednesday was subs ‘cause it wasn’t such a great day. Thursday was chicken Parmesan. Friday-” Brad’s voice trailed off, replaced a strange ringing in Chad’s ears. He had to drop Brad to cover his ears it was so loud. A pressure built up in his sinuses, he could feel some of the delicate veins in his nose go as a metallic taste flooded his mouth and he leaned forward to try and keep the blood off his nice shirt. God, the pressure -

And then, with an almost-audible snap, it stopped. It all stopped. And a warm, familiar presence filled the gaping hole behind his eyes. “Thomas,” he breathed, a beatific smile lighting up his face even as Ricci came running into the garden with Brad in hand. He just had time to hear her shout his name before his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed.

When he woke up, he was alone in his room with the lights off and a gentle white noise generator making gurgling noises like a small stream. Chad sat up and flexed his hands. Not a tremor. He stood up and stretched, taking first one tentative step, then another. Nothing.

He laughed, a long joyous laugh and the presence behind his eyes pulsed in time to his happiness. He turned and for the sheer hell of it did a cartwheel, landing perfectly on two feet. Feeling particularly bold, he reached out and flipped the lights all the way on for the first time in months. His eyes watered briefly as they adjusted to the light, but no crippling migraine manifested itself. Chad turned to the mirror and, grinning like a loon, tears streaming down his face, looked himself right in the eyes.

“Welcome back, Thomas. I missed you so much, bro.”

Balthazar lowered his arms and sighed. A wave of his hands had the lights coming back up and the disco ball lowering to the ground on its mooring. It had been his grandest production yet, and the backup dancers were even now shooting him sympathetic glances as they filed out.

His magic had always worked best with a large show; the larger the show, the better it worked and so when his first attempts to scry Wyatt had failed, he’d been trying increasingly elaborate rituals designed to let him see his errant friend - despite his distaste for the spectacle. This latest attempt had taken place at the largest telescope in Sentinel City, where he’d arranged to re-purpose the huge optical-grade mirrors for a few hours; he’d had backup dancers covered in the shiniest glitter he could find dancing their hearts out to a pounding dubstep bassline while the lasers he’d borrowed from a friend bounced off all and sundry to scatter on the precisely-formed disco ball he’d spent two weeks making into a perfectly-tuned magical focusing apparatus.

But it hadn’t worked. The huge mirrors had remained stubbornly blank, and he was quite frankly at his wits end. As he watched a dark figure enter through the door, he couldn’t help but reach out to the empty space in his head where - until recently - his young friend Wyatt had rested. It was a little like the first time he’d lost a tooth to a hero’s punch, his tongue constantly going to the place where the tooth used to be and feeling the raw tenderness of the newly-exposed gum. Only this time he was worried about what had happened to his missing piece.

“No joy, then?” Ezekiel said as he came to a stop just behind Balthazar’s left shoulder and the sorcerer sighed. “No joy, Zeke. Wherever they are, it’s beyond where my magic can reach.” He hung his head and Ezekiel came close enough to put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Have you asked Hex? Or Butch? We are, the lot of us, in much the same kind of boat.”

Balthazar shook his head, still not looking at one of his most longstanding friends. “I did ask them - well, Hex came to me demanding to know what happened and both Butch and Abbi were with her, but she had no more idea than I. Wherever they are, they have passed beyond our sight.” A cloud passed over Ezekiel’s already-somber expression “Do you mean-”

“Ezekiel, I spent a great deal of my life as a necromancer. Simply because I have given up the profession doesn’t mean I don’t know where to find someone who is dead.” Balthazar said sharply - a little too sharply perhaps, because Ezekiel immediately dropped the hand that had rested on his shoulder. He missed the warmth as soon as it was gone.

“I’m sorry, old friend. This latest attempt has worn me out.” Balthazar kept his voice contrite and Ezekiel’s face eased a little, but he didn’t put his hand back. “Do you really think they’ll find what they’re looking for in space?” Ezekiel kept his voice quiet, even though they were the only ones left in the observatory, and Balthazar sighed.

“In all honesty, no. For all that there is a lot to space, I feel if it were that simple it would not be so important. Additionally,” he gestured helplessly to the room around them, lasers quiescent, disco ball still, mirrors dark, piles of glitter where the dancers had stood, “that is, just a little bit, why I decided to try it here. If what they were searching for could be reached through space, then I had rather hoped that using these space-attuned tools would let me see clearly. But I have seen nothing, Ezekiel. Nothing, just as I have seen for the last four months.”

Ezekiel came closer and put his arm around Balthazar’s shoulders. “I can’t say it’s terribly comforting prospect - you and I both know, better than most, that there are some things worse than death - but where there’s life there is hope.” Balthazar nodded mutely, and they stood in silence for several long seconds before he sighed.

“I suppose I should put this all to rights. Help me pack up? If you could get the disco ball, I’ll re-align the mirrors.” Ezekiel nodded and they set to work in a companionable silence. Balthazar magically restored the positioning systems to their original configurations and did his best to banish the glitter on the floor while Ezekiel put the disco ball carefully back in its carrying case and the lasers back into their high-tech self-propelling storage boxes. Setting the lasers to return to their owner, he picked up the carrying-case just as Balthazar gave up on trying to get rid of any more glitter (the floor still glimmered faintly, but at least now it was an even sheen) and came over to him.

Without speaking, they walked down the steps and out the doors together, keeping easy pace with each other until they got outside. Ezekiel stopped then, looking up at the moonless sky full of stars above them. Balthazar stopped too, content to wait until Ezekiel finished thinking about what he wanted to say. “Did you know Skinwalker contacted me the other day?” Balthazar blinked in surprise. Skinwalker wasn’t the most friendly of beings on a good day, but to actively reach out to Ezekiel…

“No, I hadn’t known.” He paused. “Were they also…attached?” Ezekiel nodded silently, not looking down, and Balthazar had to spend several more moments processing that. “I would hazard a guess they came to you because that is no longer the case. What did you tell them?” Ezekiel shrugged. “The same thing you told me, essentially. We don’t know why or how, but they’re gone and not likely to be coming back without some serious intervention.” Balthazar looked up at the sky as well, when his friend finished speaking and they both stood in silence.

“Wyatt was a good kid. Trying to do better anyway, and sometimes that is what counts the most.” Ezekiel didn’t seem confused by the apparent non-sequitur, but looked at him with something approaching sympathy. “Brony was too, though maybe in a different way.” They stood together in silence again, looking at the glimmering stars far above them.

“Did you want to go with them? The Bakers?” Ezekiel asked suddenly, sliding a sideways look at Balthazar, who didn’t answer for several long moments. “I was tempted; Hex asked as soon she heard what Butch was doing. But I don’t think they’ll find them out there. What they will find is a mystery, but not one I think I’ll have need of. I’m too old for that kind of nonsense.” Ezekiel snorted and Balthazar shot him a shallow grin. “Yes, yes, I know, speaking to the expert. Still, I don’t think what I need can be found out in space, though I’m sure they will take best advantage of the privacy it affords them.”

Ezekiel snickered and nodded, matching Balthazar smirk for smirk. “And who knows, maybe the kids’ll find their way back here before the Bakers do. Wouldn’t want them to find the homestead empty.”

They didn’t speak again, but Ezekiel put his arm around Balthazar’s shoulders as they walked slowly down the path from the Observatory.

The black bag came off his head, and Scicheal Mofield blinked against too-bright light as shadowy figures moved behind it.

He’d been having a quiet drink in an innocuous tavern many, many miles from where his latest heist had left three-quarters of a kingdom in shambles at the sudden loss of noble pedigree papers going back hundreds of years. Mofield wasn’t loyal to much beyond his next paycheck, but stealing from the rich upper classes always made his day just that little bit better.

He’d been paid for the heist and was stopping for dinner before moving out to meet the next potential employer - a high-stakes research company three symbols spinwise on his hopper - when someone had dropped a black bag over his head and injected with some kind of knockout cocktail.

Which had ended up with him tied to a chair in a concrete cell no larger than eight feet by seven. Still, he’d had worse starts to good jobs - for one thing, he hadn’t been roughed up on his way over. Not that an unknown pharmaceutical injection was much better, but it tended to result in fewer broken ribs (if possibly more liver damage).

Mofield leaned back as far as the ropes would let him and smirked coldly at the man in front of him. “So,” he drawled, making sure to draw the syllable out as obnoxiously as he could. “What can I do for you fine gentlemen today?” The enormous brute in an ill-fitting suit sitting across from him - cute, how they thought directional light was going to keep him from seeing them - was silent for a long moment before responding.

“You are Scichael Mofield, thief for hire. You had a partner named Lyndon Burrnow who was killed by Ronald Zenda, and you possess enhanced eyesight reputed to work in places where such things should not be able to do so.” The goon’s voice was monotone and Mofield took a brief moment to wonder what kind of brain damage did that.

Mofield lounged against his seat as best he could. “So you have my life story. Put it in a book, you’ll have the next New Bork Times bestseller. Still doesn’t tell me why I’m here.” The mention of Burrnow was enough to stoke the cold fury that lived in his chest, though he made certain not to let it show on his face. These idiots had just doubled the price for whatever they wanted, but he wasn’t going to let them know that this early in the game.

“Your specialty is breaking into high-security facilities and liberating targets from them.” The goon droned on, seemingly unaffected - or possibly just straight-up unaware - that Mofield had interrupted him. “There is a facility that we wish you to infiltrate, extract as much relevant data as possible, and then leave.”

“Seems right up my alley, which of course you knew or we wouldn’t be here. What’s the facility?” He sat up a little straighter as he spoke, interested despite himself. He could tell by the matching suits on the goon in the room, the two outside the door, and the considerably nicer suit on the guy standing behind the false wall on the left that these weren’t typically the kind of guys who contracted out their break-ins. Which meant somewhere very specialized indeed, which upped the price considerably.

The Meta-End prison.“ Mofield blinked. Surely the guy hadn’t just said - ? "Enforcer Rhodes has just executed one of the single largest mass arrests of pilots in recent history. Get in, find out everything you can about them and if possible facilitate their extraction from the facility.”

Mofield blinked. Pilots were rarer than honest bookies, and Rhodes - the Rhodes - had just netted enough of them to constitute a mass arrest? He himself made it a point to stay under Rhodes’ radar but there’d been a close call or two before he’d figured out how to avoid such unwelcome attention. Nowadays he just had some lesser Metaversal Oversight goons after him, and stayed ahead of them easily enough. Just what the hell had those pilots done to attract the big kahuna?

“Are you out of your mind? Nobody gets into the Meta-End without Rhodes knowing about it, and nobody gets out without seeing the Judge. Everyone with half a brain knows that.” Mofield watched Fancy Suit carefully out of the corner of his eye while keeping his attention fixed on the goon in front of him. The man raised a hand to touch his ear, and the goon in front of him spoke again. “There are always ways; getting you in would be…doable. We have agents inside who would help you, once you have arrived. Getting out…would be up to you.”

Mofield leaned back and scowled. “And how many pilots are we talking about here?” he asked, to cover his unease. Breaking out of prison wasn’t exactly new to him - hell, this wouldn’t even be his first time busting someone else out of prison if he could arrange it. But Meta-End was something else; not quite the bogeyman Rhodes himself was, but impressive all the same.

“Between eight and twenty.” Mofield blinked again. A score of pilots? Where had they all come from? He’d been travelling dimensionally for years and he hadn’t even seen that many, let alone met them. Additionally, it would make breaking them out that much harder - while it would pay more, he was leaning heavily toward simple in and out reconnaissance now.

“You do realize I specialize in thieving, correct? Not mass escape,” Scichael snarked, playing for time to see if he could get a better grasp on their angle. There was something about Fancy Suit that was ringing bells…

“You will receive bonuses for every pilot you bring to us alive; dead pilots are useless to us but you will not be held accountable for them.” Mofield nodded. It was reasonably standard, and also nice to know that he didn’t have to stick his neck out for anyone if he didn’t want to. Which, of course, lead to the most important part of the discussion.

“And what do I get out of all of this? I don’t do charity work.” Mofield kept his eyes forward even as all his attention focused on Fancy Suit. The man touched his ear again. “One of the pilots Rhodes acquired is Ronald Zenda.”

Scichael wheezed like he’d been punched in the chest. That bastard, alive after all these years, and in the big house under Rhodes’ thumb? He grinned, more a display of teeth than any friendlier gesture and looked directly at Fancy Suit. “Deal. Who do I say sent me when I meet your inside men?”

Fancy Suit stiffened, then made a gesture that had the false wall collapsing before him. He walked over and stood just out of the circle of light while Mofield regarded him steadily. For the first time, Fancy Suit addressed him directly. “Antonius Basileus.”

Oh you’ve heard of Captain Rackham

They hung him, they hung him!

Oh you’ve heard of Captain Rackham
Scourge of the Royal Navy
He sunk more than a hundred ships
To face him you’d be crazy

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

Captain Rackham was a pirate

They hung him, they hung him!

Captain Rackham was a pirate
The finest to sail the sea
He’d run merchants to cliffsides oh
And take shelter in the lee

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

Captain Rackham beat the Navy

They hung him, they hung him!

Captain Rackham beat the Navy
For more than a score of years
They gnashed their teeth and stamped their feet
and spoke quietly of their fears

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

It was a stormy day they found him

They hung him, they hung him!

It was a stormy day they found him
Edward Hawke and his royal crew
With an assembled fleet behind them
They knew what they had to do

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

For seven days and seven nights

They hung him, they hung him!

For seven days and seven nights
Hawke chased the Calico Jack
Until they closed the distance
And readied their guns to attack

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

On the eighth day they began a-firing

They hung, they hung him!

On the eighth day they began a-firing
And a shot brought the mainmast low!
The Captain tried his level best
But the Revenge, she began to slow

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

Captain Rackham led the fighting

They hung him, they hung him!

Captain Rackham led the fighting
Locking hilts with Hawke’s sword
The crews stopped their fighting about them
Their battle could not be ignored

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

They took him to Port Royal

They hung, they hung him!

They took him to Port Royal
And he hung by his lovers’ sides
For they’d sworn to always be with him
And together their fates were tied

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

Now Rackham sleeps in a gibbet

They hung him, they hung him!

Now Rackham sleeps in a gibbet
With the corpse of his lovely bride
And out on the decks of Revenge
The blood ran red with the tide

Yeah they hung the Calico Captain
They did, they hung him high

“Now, Mr. Hammer,”

Bruno grimaced as his nickname-come-callsign dripped from his captor’s lips like crude oil. He hated hearing it from his enemies - their disdain was always clear, though this guy also managed to fit in condescension and mockery; impressive for getting it all into one word - but he supposed it was just another reason to replace Lexington’s whiskey with piss when he got the chance since he’d known and had assigned it as his callsign anyway. Not like Lexington’d notice, given the quality of the stuff he seemed to prefer.

Still, it was a name he’d been trained to respond to for years. Ever since his last night of leave before graduating boot camp he’d been known as Hammer or Hammer-ton. One of the guys in his unit had thought it funny to bring a mule into the barracks before the rest of them got back and of course they’d spooked the damn thing by slamming the door open. Bruno had reacted on instinct and punched the mule in the head hard enough to drop it, breaking his hand in the process. Seven seconds of stunned silence had ended when Hendrickson had blurted that the last time he’d someone do something like that it was his paw using a hammer to drop sheep for butchering.

One trip to the infirmary later and the name had stuck. He’d been Hammer ever since.

“We know why you are here.” And this guy was still talking. Honestly, if they really knew why he’d been here, they wouldn’t be here. Round one in a dank concrete room had gotten them the locations of the explosives he’d planted around their base, and they’d gotten to most of them in time. The few they hadn’t found had compromised that base to the point where they’d had to fall back to this secondary location and had earned him a few hours with an inexperienced sadist putting needles under his fingernails.

“We know who you work for.” Maybe the public line, but if these guys had any actual idea who he worked for this conversation would be taking place in a much deeper hole. Even a cursory glance showed four immediate exit strategies with minimal harm to life and limb, with three more being viable if he didn’t love his fingers very much.

Maybe put those on the backburner.

“All we need from you is a location. Your team, their location.” Wow, these guys knew jack shit. Fuck, what a waste of his time. The colonel hadn’t been this wrong about possible info caches in a while, plus now Bruno had to break himself out of prison because damn if he was wasting another 72 hours on these losers.

He sighed, and his captor tensed, pleasant expression disappearing. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hammer, am I boring you? Perhaps you might like to make the closer acquaintance of your namesake.”

Bruno waited until the slimeball had turned away to a tray of tools that gleamed in what would have been a sinister fashion if he’d had any faith that this nimrod knew how to use them. As it stood, the guy’s little charade of sliding his fingers carefully over the instruments as if he didn’t already know which one he was going for was all the opening Bruno needed to dislocate his thumb and slide out of the standard police cuffs they’d used to secure his arms to the chair. It was the work of a moment to pop the other set and then he was free - they hadn’t chained his ankles, more fool them.

The interrogator must have heard something, because even as Bruno stood the guy was turning back to face him with a look of surprise on his face. Bruno casually snapped his neck and the look of surprise became permanent - or at least it’d last until the guy’s face got rearranged, something Bruno wasn’t about to waste time on. The door opened out with hinges on the outside - probably the most professional part of this clown college operation - but the extremely obvious microphone and closed-circuit aftermarket camera blinking away in the corner told him that he wouldn’t have long to wait before it opened.

Sure enough, not two minutes after Bruno took up position beside the door - holding the hammer from the tray, he wasn’t about to break his knuckles on these guys if he didn’t have to - the pounding of feet echoed from the corridor outside the room. They don’t even check through the grill-covered window before kicking the door in and spraying bullets into the room on full auto.

If the guy on the floor hadn’t been dead already, he sure as hell was now. Bruno counted quietly in his head until the shooting stopped and stepped out into the doorway. Sure enough, they’d fired until the magazines were empty - common mistake, but it’d be their last. He didn’t give them a chance to reload; the first went down with one good swing to the head, while the second guy tried some ninja shit that looked like he’d been spending too much time watching d-list karate movies and not enough time in an actual dojo. Bruno broke the knee on the leg the guy had tried to snap-kick him with, then put the guy himself down with a punch.

It was the work of a moment to take their weapons - knock-off automatics clearly purchased in bulk - and pat them down for their spare magazines. The fact that they only carried a single spare clip each was just one more disappointment on a pile of them. Bruno sighed as he moved further into the base; the fact they’d had a fallback plan had brought his expectations maybe a little too high, but this was just pathetic. He could hear alarms going off and stampeding feet heading away from him; they’d made the logical assumption that now that he was out of his cell he’d immediately try and escape, rejoin his unit.

But that wasn’t Bruno’s mission.

A locked door stood in his way for all of five seconds before he kicked it in; behind it, a dusty storage closet full of boxes. Comparing the writing on the boxes to the picture the colonel had insisted he memorize before embarking on this stupid mission, he began pulling boxes open until -

Well.

Maybe the colonel hadn’t been full of shit after all.

And maybe he’d still kick the guy’s ass up and down a long hallway for sending him in counter-espionage style when an infiltration route would have worked just well for extraction and wouldn’t have made him endure eight and a half hours of amateur-hour torture. Grabbing the box and the contents of a few others he’d found, Bruno began making his way out of the base; the layout was a little nonstandard but more straightforward for it - clearly these people had never had any kind of education on how to harden a building against intruders.

Goons were beginning to fall back into the base now that it was apparent he hadn’t conformed to their preconceived notions and run straight for the nearest exit once he’d gotten loose, but they were doing that badly too - at least, the first few were. After that they learned from their predecessors’ mistakes and checked corners before coming around them; he’d be a little more impressed if their ammo discipline had improved along with their caution.

Still, it didn’t take him long to get to the exit; in fact, it took him longer to rig explosives around the exit and set a tripwire with a failsafe than it did to actually reach a door to the great outdoors. A cursory glance was enough to show him that these idiots were as shit with their vehicular security as they were at torture; the nearest jeep has a full tank of gas and the keys in the glove box. Well, Bruno wasn’t above teaching them an object lesson so he punctured the gas tanks on all the vehicles he could find, slashed the tires, and stole all the keys. It’d make the LT smirk if nothing else.

As Bruno drove away, he consoled himself with the thought that since he was heading back early he’d have a shot at the bottle of good scotch the colonel kept in his office where he thought no-one could find it; cute, especially given that Bruno swept the offices once a week if he was on-base and Lexington swept every other day. Damn spook.

Just before the base quite dropped out of sight, a rumbling explosion was accompanied by a bloom of yellow-red flames. Bruno pulled a pair of sunglasses from the glove box, set them carefully on the bridge of his nose, and set his sights for the rendezvous.

Damn, he loved FAE bombs.

It was the last night before he left for boot camp, and Robby was insistent it be a memorable one.

Bruno had never been what one might call the life of the party. He was just a little too serious, a little too aware of the consequences, to really give in to that party feeling. Still, he’d acquiesced when Robby - Robert Orman, who had lived two doors down from Bruno for most of their lives - had pointed out, not unreasonably, that he wouldn’t be having any kind of fun for the next six months and he needed to live a little while he was still young.

So here he and Robby were, standing just inside the doors to the gymnasium where the school was throwing one last dance to celebrate the end of the school year. The music was playing, couples danced on the open part of the floor, and the punch bowl was guarded by a fierce-looking Mr. Edwards. Bruno had to smile at Robby yanking at his arm enthusiastically as they headed across the floor, his friend waxing rhapsodic about the new girls from across town whom he’d heard would be making an appearance.

It didn’t take long for Robby to be thoroughly distracted by a pretty girl; as one of the better-looking boys in the class - and a reputation for being a pretty decent dancer - he rarely went without a partner for long. Bruno took the opportunity to go and loiter by the punch table, nursing a glass of sickeningly sweet fruit drink and earning ever more suspicious glances from Mr. Edwards. It wasn’t that he didn’t like dancing, but at a head taller than most of the class the girls tended to find him…..intimidating.

“Excuse me,”

Bruno looked around in surprise, it taking a hot second for him to look down….into the most heart-stoppingly gorgeous face he’d ever seen in his life. Delicate features almost ethereal in their elfin fineness were accentuated by shoulder-length hair that curled just a bit too much to be fashionable but suited her perfectly. She met his eyes squarely, not even the slightest bit daunted by his much-greater-than-her height. In fact, her chin was up and her face all but dared him to make a comment.

So he did.

“Bruno,” he said, and held out his hand. She blinked, but then gave him a warm smile. “Lori,” she responded, and put her hand in his. Obeying some strange impulse, he bent and brought the hand up delicately to his lips, giving it the lightest of kisses. “You sure? You look a bit more like an angel to me,” he said, and immediately felt foolish up until she blushed lightly and giggled.

“Such fine manners! You’re a real gentleman aren’t you?” She asked, laughter in her voice, and he ducked his head a little in embarrassment. “No, no, don’t hide. I…..I like it,” she said, voice soft. When he looked up her blush was stronger and on an impulse he tipped his head towards the dance floor, where the song playing had just ended. “Would you care to dance with me?” He asked quietly.

Her eyes lit up like stars and she nodded. Still holding her hand, he led her out to the dance floor and put one arm behind her back as she laid hers on his shoulder. As the music started playing, they started gently swaying to the beat.

Wise men say only fools rush in
But I can’t help falling in love with you

He closed his eyes, enjoying the feel of having her tucked up against him in the shelter of his arms, then opened them almost immediately because he couldn’t stand missing even a second of seeing her.

Shall I stay?
Would it be a sin

She looked up at him and grinned, expression lighting up her face. “Say, you’re not a bad dancer.” Bruno couldn’t think of anything to say to that except “My friend Robby is better.” She gave him a wicked glance from under her eyelashes and the grin became a smirk. “Maybe, but he’s not the one I’m dancing with, is he?

Like a river flows surely to the sea
Darling so it goes

It seemed like she was the only other person in the world, like they were the only couple on the dance floor. It wasn’t much of a dance - more like swaying gently to the music with the arms in approximately the right positions - but he was enjoying it and she made no objection, not even when he laid his cheek on her head and probably messed her hair up.

Some things are meant to be

It felt like they’d been dancing for hours when he reluctantly pulled away. "I’m not keeping you from anything am I?” He asked, and she shook her head. “Baby, we got all night. My mother won’t be expecting me home.” He grinned and pulled her close again, taking no notice of the way the lights were slowly coming up in the room, the way that the rest of the people had faded out in a the same fashion the walls were doing. He only noticed when suddenly his arms were empty and he was very cold.

“But you said we’d have all night…”

Take my hand, take my whole life too

Bruno woke with a start, blanket half off and leaving his arms freezing. “For I can’t help falling in love with you,” crooned the radio beside his bed, and he turned it off before putting his head in his hands.

No matter how many times he heard it - from Rhodes, from his teammates, from his enemies - Bruno Hamilton wasn’t a “pilot.”

At least, he didn’t feel like one. He could fly any sort of aircraft built after the second World War, of course, and had a variety of aircraft and naval licenses he maintained under clean pseudonyms in half a dozen countries. Hell, he’d even sailed out of Jiediaosha Bay on an authentic recreation of a 19th century Chinese junk for reasons still not disclosable to the general public.

But these people his granddaughter had fallen in with, these pilots with their superhuman abilities….he couldn’t say he felt like one of them. While he was well-used to pushing through pain, the memory of going out into what they called the Metaverse was somewhat hazy. Perhaps it’d been the gut shot, or the damage the person he’d jumped in to - Blue? Someone had yelled that when he’d called out to Andi but he couldn’t quite remember - had taken before his arrival, but that trip hadn’t felt real somehow. Like he’d wake up and it would have been a dream no matter what had happened in Nevada.

This, however, was no dream. This time, Bruno Hamilton had stepped into a metapod with the full knowledge of what was supposed to happen when he did. This time, Bruno Hamilton had a clear-cut mission and a team to do it with.

This time, Bruno Hamilton had his granddaughter with him.

With that disquieting thought, Bruno Hamilton had been launched into the Metaverse.

Arriving in the body of Michael O'Connor was…..an experience. Bruno was no stranger to the PTSD rattling around in the kid’s skull - god he was young - but it wasn’t his trauma. A tidal wave of desperate worry, anger, and panic flooded over Bruno until he was drowning in it, forcibly a passenger in the avatar he’d been sent to. Visions of burned-out buildings kept trying to overwhelm Michael, sirens turning into the whistle of incoming fire and then back into sirens; above it all, burning with the passion of a younger man was anger at what Aunt Mary had done to their family.

Michael looked over his siblings; Faye was drinking again - she never seemed to stop, these days, eyes desperate for more until they grew vacant in stupor - while Danny was looking at his gun like the thing was about to bite him. The first kill was never easy, and Danny was young even among the kids Michael’d been sent to war with. The ones who hadn’t come home.

Bruno, meanwhile, saw Aquamarine taking a healthy slug of whiskey, not that he could blame her after nine weeks in solitary; the last person he’d rescued from less than a week in solitary had been a raving mess, psyche so damaged he’d been invalided out. Bruno’s deep concern for Aquamarine’s mental state blended so well with Michael’s worry for his sister that Bruno himself couldn’t say where one began and the other ended. Brushing off the thought as a concern for later, Bruno evaluated Thomas through Michael’s eyes as the man checked on his brother. Thomas seemed more alert than the rest of them, his extremely characteristic speech pattern breaking the rolling brogue Michael knew his brother to speak in like rocks in a field.

Bruno considered that as Thomas broke and ran like a rabbit; Thomas clearly wasn’t overwhelmed by his avatar, Bruno recognizing the calculation in his gaze before he’d taken off. Michael lurched off into pursuit, caught flat-footed by his brother’s sudden movement and another wave of deep concern for his youngest sibling - what if Danny had broken like so many of the others had? - washed Bruno back into the depths of the skull they shared. Visions of blackened, stinking mud coming in and out of focus through bilious gases overcame Bruno for several moments until the familiar weight of a gun in Michael’s hand gave him something to hold on to while he dragged himself out of it.

Bruno watched as Thomas faked several slugs of whiskey - good plan, the kid he was in probably weighed 100 lbs soaking wet, didn’t need to be drunk on job - while Michael bickered with Mary. He could feel Michael’s anger at Mary, at the situation, at the mobsters who ran Atlantic City with an iron fist, and his resolve stiffened. If Thomas could control his avatar without being overwhelmed he, Bruno Hamilton, could do no less.

Bruno gathered himself and surged forward, ruthlessly compartmentalizing the feelings coursing through their shared veins. After everything, he was very good at it; visions of death and destruction, the lingering odor of mustard gas, and the whistle of mortar fire were all shoved down into a deep, dark hole that also contained burning yellow sands and a toxic, chokingly green jungle. The panic got shoved in a box to be dealt with later, if the kid ever got one; all it would do now is distract from the mission and ruin his aim.

The frazzling worry and pulsing anger about Michael’s family and their situation was taken and shoved into a priorities matrix; highest priority was Andi, Bruno’s granddaughter. Her health and safety, especially after her behavior during the long weeks in prison, was his number one priority. Next highest was the mission; Bruno had never had cause to put the mission second, but he couldn’t bring himself to commit to any plan that might end up with Andi dead or incarcerated again.

Third was Aquamarine; Bruno would help her as best he could, largely for Andi’s sake, but if she snapped like others he’d encountered in similar circumstances he’d neutralize her without hesitation. If nonlethal methods failed, he’d put her down if he had to. Solitary did strange things to a person’s mind, and he’d not tolerate any threats to Andi or their overriding mission objective.

Fourth was Thomas; the guy seemed like he could take care of himself reasonably well and if he was a little strange, Bruno’d worked with stranger both in and out of the army. That Zenda, though - the man was a snake, through and through, and his first priority was himself. Not to be relied on, but he was their only source of food, material, and information. A secondary objective to keep safe, rather than a teammate to be relied upon.

As Bruno’s years of training imposed order on the mind around him, he could feel Michael be swept to the back of their shared mind. The whole exercise hadn’t taken long; a few seconds at most had restored the clear, razor-edged focus Bruno made sure to bring to every mission. Taking the opportunity to roll the kinks out of his neck, he did a quick sweep of the burned-out distillery they’d found themselves in. “Alright people, I need answers. Where do we get Zenda’s device and how do we get to the target?”

Being in control felt good.

There’s something off in Joe’s Diner today.

Hollywood couldn’t rightly say what it was, but there was a persistent something that was putting everyone on edge. Longtime patrons with whom he’d never had a problem before were snappish and rude, and Hollywood’d walked more plates of food back to Cook in the kitchen today than he had in literal centuries. People were quibbling over their bills - no, the exchange rate for S'mlith shells wasn’t steady but prices were as marked and there was no senior discount.

The franchises that stood empty were almost worse. Without the chatter of people, the silence itself turned oppressive and reproachful. The buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights didn’t fill the silence, merely enhanced it and grated at his nerves today and Hollywood couldn’t figure out why. In a fit of pique he’d gone through and replaced all the bulbs with Cook’s help. Well, he’d mostly supervised Cook replacing the bulbs, truth to tell, but the new ones had hummed in just the same wrong frequency as the old ones did.

The foreboding didn’t make any sense; Milkshake’s lot were off doing things for Rhodes with their associated tagalongs, and there was nothing more apocalyptic than usual in the works. Still, there was something lingering. Something that spoke of terrible things that could not, should not be in whispers just beyond the range of hearing. What made it even more maddening was that no matter where Hollywood was, what branch and basic shape, he couldn’t hear anything clearly. Switching to a franchise that existed entirely as a line clarified nothing, and switching to a storefront that existed in six dimensions and whose normal clientele could detect the entire electromagnetic spectrum and some besides didn’t help either.

Still, he couldn’t spend the entire (relative) day tracking down what was going on. Especially not with whole houses of people waiting just around the corner for their food and drinks. Especially because it looked like one of the rowdier tables had started a food fight. “Alright, that is enough!” Hollywood roared as he turned to the table, a french fry slathered in secret sauce flying past his nose. Dealing with the idiots didn’t take long, but left a sour taste in his mouth. People generally were better behaved than this, what the hell was going on?

Something brushed his face.

Hollywood slapped himself out of reflex, startling a laugh from the table he’d been passing. After mentally making a note to upcharge that group, he looked at his hand. The tiny, tiny body of a fruit fly met his eyes, and he realized that the noise he’d been hearing had faded almost completely. He stared hard at it for a second or two, then wiped his hand on his pants before going to wash.

“Dammit, Cook, what’d I say about taking out the garbage!”

Bruno pulled off the ragged suit jacket he’d put on and tossed it onto his cot before settling down beside it with a sigh. There was a certain timelessness to this place, where the sun never rose and it was daylight all the time anyway, but it still felt like the day had taken months. He felt every single one of his years weighing on him like he hadn’t for several months, mission after mission written in red ink and covered by black making him feel older than his joints ever had.

It should have been easy. It was the mission, after all, and it wasn’t like it would have been the first time Bruno had double-tapped a civilian in the service of the mission. Hell, it wouldn’t have even been the first time it’d been a clergyman. Would have been the first time it was a Protestant, though, a morbidly humorous part of him suggested and he dismissed the thought as irrelevant. What was relevant was the look in Andi’s eyes when he’d made the suggestion.

She’d been deep in her avatar, near as he could tell, but he had always been able to see a pilot in their avatar - so far - and Andi’s reaction had mirrored Mary’s discomfort. It was that pinched, unhappy expression she’d worn for too long in the prison that had kept his gun in its holster, for all that forty and more years of operations were clamoring for him to achieve mission parameters as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

Bruno had always gotten the job done. Didn’t matter what the job was, though wetwork requiring stealth and honeypot missions had always been more the LT’s wheelhouse than Bruno’s, he’d see the job through as economically as possible. He’d executed targets, framed innocents, sabotaged facilities, interrogated prisoners, lied, cheated, and done anything and everything to see each mission completed; cold-blooded murder wasn’t even a blip on his radar anymore. It shouldn’t have mattered.

And yet.

He was used to being the most dependable person in the room. The Colonel was the real brains of the operation no matter whom he was working with and handed down clear and concise objectives, Krieger had never not in charge of the missions he chose, Lexington worked a different arena, Tunstall had been a gifted tactician in his own somewhat limited scope and had always known exactly what to do when things went to hell, and while Cole had been more software than hardware when it came right down to it (a shot to center mass at that distance, with the target distracted? Bruno would have been embarrassed to die at that kind of sloppy shot if he hadn’t had more important things to worry about at the time) he knew how to put a plan together. If there was a mission, Bruno was there to handle it.

And that’s how he’d been treating this whole situation. Andi was a mission, with her happiness as an objective. He’d ensured her safety in the prison, he’d swept Joe’s and Arena first before she went in, and he’d made sure to taste-test all the (so far uniformly horrible) canned food Zenda’d gotten from places he didn’t like to contemplate. Even now, as he rested his head in his hands he was keeping a covert eye on her; he was pretty sure Zenda had noticed, but was also equally sure no-one else had.

That was the problem at the root of it all, really. He’d been treating Andi as a mission, and not as a grand-daughter. The problem was, “grand daughter” wasn’t a label that came with any parameters. Bruno had never known his grandparents; they’d not approved of his mother’s choice to marry a handsome young soldier - and then had refused to take Bruno in when both his parents had died when Bruno himself was in high school, instead letting the system take him until he looked old enough to sign on with the Marines.

Being a grandfather didn’t come with objectives or a mission statement, and Bruno found himself at sea. He was used to being the person who knew exactly what to do next; whom to shoot and where, what the exit strategy was and what the contingencies were, why people broke under interrogation and what to do to expedite the process, how long it would take reinforcements for either side to arrive or if they were even coming. These were things Bruno knew, deep down in the marrow of him, forty years having carved the knowledge into his bones.

Being a grandfather involved very little of that. In fact, Bruno had his doubts whether the pilots - he still had difficulty believing he was one himself - needed him at all. Going to crazy places with powers you could see and still not believe, pulling maniacal computer programs out of peoples’ heads with magic boxes that fell from somewhere further away than the sky…..against all of that a thorough knowledge of how to strip, clean, and reassemble nearly every firearm under the sun seemed less than useful.

He glanced over at Andi again, where she was sitting against the wall of the bunker humming something under her breath with her eyes unfocused, and something in him solidified. Grandfather may not have mission parameters or an objective, and he might be nothing more than an old dog with older tricks, but he’d be damned if let go of one of the only good things to come out of his life. Until she told him to go, he’d stay and help.

With that thought Bruno stood up and stretched, and went looking for Thomas. He needed to research, and the man had been described as a walking encyclopedic knowledge of everything; Bruno couldn’t think of a better place to start.

Where do all the stories go
Where the green grass grows
And the sun shines bright
And the wild winds blow

Where the wild Kid Bill
Walks over the hills
And Richard Gatling
Turns tubes to his will

Where Calico Jack
Flew his flag so black
And his two merry wives
Faced the world at his back

And Slough-Foot Sue
And her catfish too
Ride out with King Teddy
And his motley crew

Where Miss Emily
Walks with Johnny Appleseed
And Hardin himself
Rides with Doc and James Jesse

Where Annie Oakley
Rides fearless and free
And Wilbur Orville Wright
Crashes his plane in a tree

These folks walk along Yosemite’s shore
And many many other further lands more
They step straight out of legend
And wage a very strange war

Where do all the stories go
Where the green grass grows
And the sun shines bright
And the wild winds blow

Bruno looked down at Sgt. Baxter’s hands as Thomas expertly guided the plane up off the tarmac and into the deep indigo sky.

Sergeant Baxter Wazacowski. It’d been more than a decade since he’d been a sergeant, yet the rank fit like a glove. Unlike the turbulent Michael, Wazacowski was focused, his world centering on the mission and the objectives. Bruno could appreciate the clarity of purpose so very like his own. Granted, in this case it was tempered by an almost overwhelming urge to smite the unnatural beings inhabiting the cargo hold around him, but Bruno’d done plenty of missions with guys he didn’t like and knew exactly how to redirect the feeling into something productive.

Still, the sense of satisfaction at a job well done was a warmth in his heart that he hadn’t felt since the Diner fell in. Not only had they thoroughly torched the lab and fulfilled Wazacowski ’s primary objective, they’d also managed to collar - literally - TOM and satisfy Bruno’s primary mission objective. And they’d gotten to kill Nazis, always a plus; nothing quite like unambiguous evil to instill a clarity of purpose in the pull of a trigger.

Rubbing the warding-marks on his wrists - those scars went all the way down to the bone, damn - Bruno studiously avoided looking at Dr. Clarkson and instead looked over at his granddaughter, laughing with the weirdly horned face of a demon. She’d surprised him in more ways than one, on this mission. First, she’d pulled herself completely to the fore of her avatar’s mind; he’d done it to Michael, and largely to Wazacowski , but the others seemed much more comfortable letting their avatars have the reins. Andi especially, or so it had seemed from his limited experience in the 20s where she had only stepped even a little forward in the last few minutes of the mission.

The second, even more surprising fact was that she’d come to the fore in her avatar to consult with him about their strategy for infiltrating the chateau. Bruno had never really been the one making the plans. Oh he’d been in charge of making the plans work for thirty and more years, but making the plan? Not his department. There were always other, better men who co-ordinated the strategy, who would set the objectives and the priorities, men who had the rank to make people listen to them no matter how left-field their plan had turned out to be.

And that had been fine with Bruno. He was the blunt instrument, the boots on the ground that made sure everything happened the way it needed to, to finish the mission - though rarely the way it was supposed to. ‘According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans’ after all, and Bruno knew through bitter experience what exactly it took to salvage even the most FUBAR of missions.

But then Andi had asked him. Andi, not her avatar, and him, Bruno Hamilton, not Sgt. Wazacowski . It wasn’t his area of expertise, he’d never been asked about such things before, and he was already overwhelmed with trying to keep track of all this piloting business. But. She’d asked him. Not Thomas, not Dr. Clarkson. Him.

She was his granddaughter, and he would have been damned if he’d started off by failing her as he had so abysmally failed her grandmother.

So he’d stepped up as best he knew how, drawing on the men he’d worked for and with in the past - Jaxun, Krieger, Thornton, and others - to try and cobble together some semblance of a plan. He’d started by categorizing their priorities, then their assets, and what had emerged had been…..a plan. A ramshackle Hail Mary of a plan - but a plan nonetheless. Papers and Thomas’ Austrian avatar to get them through the gate and grounds, bluff through the door, contain casualties to the house to avoid witnesses, destroy the lab, grab TOM.

The look of warm gratitude on Andi’s face as she’d faded back to let her avatar do the necessary deeds had been….something. Another surprise, certainly. Bruno wasn’t sure what, yet, it was, but the memory of it redoubled the feeling of warm satisfaction in his chest from a job well done and he had to smile as the lady demon and Andi nearly fell off their seat laughing at Aquamarine’s attempts to get Dr. Clarkson to put the lab coat back on.

In the end, the plan had gone off almost to a T. Neither gate guards nor the doormen looked closely enough at the forged papers or those wielding them to hinder their progress, and Thomas’ timely silence spell had allowed them to end the inner guards before they’d had a chance to set off any alarms. Bruno’d been on supply runs that had gone worse than this.

Their luck couldn’t hold forever, of course, and the demon had been a nasty surprise. Bruno had felt his avatar surging to the front with the absolute confidence of someone who knew exactly how to deal with the situation in front of him, and Bruno had taken his cue from Andi and…let him. Sgt. Wazacowski had known exactly what to do to overload the summoning circle and blow the Nazi protection and control runes all to Hell, and the following chase to catch TOM had been as confusing as it was anti-climatic.

Bruno shivered and rubbed his arms. The warding-marks were weird, but the feeling of fur and distinctly inhuman bone structures were somehow worse. Not to mention the wild abandon he’d felt while chasing the car; for one almost sickening second the chase was more important than the mission, than the capture, than Andi. He shook his head to dislodge the memory, quietly thanking every single one of his lucky stars not to have been put in that avatar full-time. The heightened senses and strength were not worth the loss of control he’d felt, the complete upset to his objectives hierarchy.

Finding himself back in Sgt. Wazacowski standing less than seven feet from the truck had been disorienting, but the return of the other man’s more familiar way of thinking was a comfort Bruno didn’t have words for. It was like sobering up without the hangover, a fact for which he could only be grateful.

And now here they were. TOM was in custody, Dr. Clarkson was indulging her avatar’s mischievous tendencies, Thomas was patching up the more obviously gaping holes in Yannic, and Aquamarine and the demon were egging on Dr. Clarkson. A job well done, by any definition.

As the brilliant white light gathered, Bruno closed his eyes and surrendered to the pull willingly. It was time to see what had happened in their absence.

“How did it go?”

Zenda’s innocent question was met with an almost unbearable silence. Even Thomas seemed disinclined to answer, where usually the man would take the slightest opportunity to ramble - especially when he wasn’t the subject of the question. Zenda seemed surprised at their cumulative lack of response and opened his mouth as if to ask another question, but Bruno couldn’t stand the thought of a thorough debriefing. Not now.

“Mission objectives accomplished, no friendly casualties,” he stated brusquely, ignoring the little voice in his head that said not for lack of trying. He turned away from the group and headed for the door to the bunker, grabbing a canteen on his way. “I’m going to go scout the perimeter.”

Zenda looked perturbed. “That is not a wise idea, what if-” Bruno rounded on him with a glare and Zenda wisely shut his mouth. “I’m going. To scout. The perimeter.” The one-armed man still looked deeply unhappy but didn’t try to stop him again and Bruno walked out the door into the indeterminate and interminable sunlight.

It wasn’t as hot here, in this place, as some of the deserts he’d been to over the years, but it still wasn’t exactly what you’d call balmy. As Bruno tromped over the sand, always keeping the base within 50 yards of his left side he could feel the sweat begin trickling down his neck and he glared out over the odd ruins and ever opening and closing gates.

He could still feel the shadow of Kaldegga in his mind, like an oil slick. A man whose not inconsiderable talents had been focused almost entirely on a mission that made Bruno want to retch, whose mind had been filled with hate and an empty sort of pleasure in the death and destruction his actions caused because there was nothing else left - if that was the kind of person Bruno was sent into, what did that say about Bruno?

And the way Kaldegga had looked at his granddaughter…Bruno kicked at the sand, scowling ferociously at the serene golden dunes around him. He’d done his best to suppress Kaldegga for the good of the mission, but the man had had the wherewithal to whisper to him anyway. It was the most acutely he’d ever been aware of the dividing line between him and an avatar; Kaldegga had pressed hard to take control, growing angrier and more spitefully malicious every time Bruno had ruthlessly shut him down.

Even slapping himself hadn’t made Kaldegga retreat, the man instead treating the pain as a goad to thinking even more explicitly uncomfortable thoughts - and not just of what he’d do to Andi. Thoughts of burning the death-seeker alive as Aquamarine screamed, of shutting down all the electronics inside Thomas’ avatar and watching as the man choked to death on fleshy bits that no longer functioned on their own - of having his way with Andi’s avatar and dragging her with him on the path to his inevitable victory. Of hanging the corpses somewhere highly visible to illustrate what would happen to those who opposed his vision.

All that and more had run through Kaldegga’s head as he homed in on the thoughts that made Bruno uncomfortable, the ones that made him want to take an ice pick to the brain he was in. And, what was worse, was the methodical way Kaldegga set up the fantasies; each one unfolded in the kind of exacting detail Bruno used to adapt to circumstances on the fly to achieve mission objectives. Each thought in Kaldegga’s mind was made with the same ruthless calculation that Bruno himself used when he was out on a mission.

It had distracted Bruno for a crucial second, and Kaldegga had clawed his way back into some semblance of control. The sexual rejoinders traded with both Dr. Clarkson’s and Andi’s avatars had covered up the far more vicious struggle inside his head as Kaldegga fought for complete control and Bruno had opposed him with equal determination. That stalemate had lasted them most of the way through the ensuing fight on the capital ship until Kaldegga had mentally flinched away from a lightning strike that Bruno knew with his many years of experience dodging projectiles wouldn’t hit them; he’d exploited Kaldegga’s flinch to shove him all the way back down to the depths of their shared existence where he belonged.

He hadn’t been able to make him stay down for long, however, and Kaldegga had again clawed his way to almost complete equilibrium between them. The man’s smug satisfaction at killing the 400 and more other people on the capital ship - of the message that would send to the galaxy - left a foul taste in Bruno’s mouth, and the memory of the smirk that had twisted Kaldegga’s face when Thomas had overridden Bruno’s concerns about possible avatars on the ship made Bruno wipe his own mouth now in disgust, grimacing at the feel of several days worth of stubble.

Bruno felt foul, like he’d been wading through hip-deep sewage instead of merely climbing in and out of a pod. There wasn’t enough water for more than a shower every few weeks in the bunker - Zenda’d done what he could and there was a filtration/recycling unit to reclaim as much as humanly possible - but Bruno couldn’t wait until it was his turn again. And while it had been a long time since last he’d had to do it, he knew a few tricks on getting relatively clean in the desert.

Kneeling, he shucked his shirt and pulled out his canteen. Brushing away the topmost layer of sand, he took a handful of the deeper layer and wetted it a bit before beginning to scrub his head and chest down thoroughly. The feeling of Lothar Kaldegga slowly faded down the back of his throat, like bile. It had been - overwhelming. Suffocating. When he’d willingly surrendered control to Kaldegga, it had been like diving into crude oil. He’d watched Kaldegga attack Thomas, unable to move a muscle or even speak out against it. Screaming inside his own head, helpless, was an experience that had him scrubbing sand through his hair more vigorously than he should’ve done, but the scrapes would heal quickly enough.

And then Thomas - Thomas’ wispy, pilot form, not the body he’d been inhabiting - had reached out and pulled Bruno to the fore of his avatar. He’d seen Thomas do it to the others, but to have it done to him was…weird. For the briefest instant it was almost like Thomas had joined him in the body of Kaldegga and the welter of thoughts and emotions not his own - distinctly unlike him, in a way that Kaldegga’s thoughts disturbingly weren’t - had only lasted the space of a hairsbreadth and then it was gone and Bruno had been mostly in control of himself.

As he finished his ablutions, Bruno felt a little calmer. Cleaning off with the gritty, abrasive sand had helped ground him, reminded him that he wasn’t Kaldegga and that Kaldegga had no place here - though he might have. Bruno was self-aware enough to realize that he might very well have become the angry, bitter shadow that had comprised the sum of his avatar. If it hadn’t been for his team and his officers - well. Bruno had seen the outcome in Kaldegga, and he would not let himself slide that far.

Brushing off as best he could, he started trudging back towards the bunker. He had to face Andi and the rest of them at some point; no reason to put it off any longer.

Conference Room 1A, Capital Ship Rod-7

Lieutenant Commander Tyra Powell strode confidently into the room and looked at the rather disreputable figure slouched at the table before her. Captain Grace Lyonns, bounty hunter and registered owner of a small civilian ship called The Queen of Spades, had been taken from the bridge of the Capital Ship Prism-5 claiming to have captured the notorious terrorist Lothar Kaldegga. It was up to Powell to acquire the real story for UL records, not the highly sensationalized version already racing along the Inter-Stellar Communications System thanks to Lyonns’ own allcall broadcast from the aforementioned bridge.

“Look, is this going to take long? I have a hot date.” Lyonns’ drawl interrupted Powell’s thoughts and the Lt. hid her irritation in a short shuffle of the datapads she carried. Settling herself into the chair opposite Lyonns, Powell brought out the dedicated datacorder and triggered the comprehensive recording function on it before deigning to address the woman in front of her.

“Please state your name for the record.” Something in Powell’s tone seemed to amuse Lyonns as she leaned back even more precariously in her chair.

“Grace Lyonns.”

“What is your current occupation?”

“Civilian ship captain and sometimes-bounty hunter.”

“Current associates?”

“Skinny and Kitty.”

Powell consulted her notes. “That would be one Mr. Hank Herbert and a Kae’La, registered Deathseeker of the Kala’Kah?”

Lyonns waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what I said.”

Powell pursed her lips and made a note on her datapad before looking up at Lyonns and folding her hands in front of her. “Please state for the record a true and accurate account of events as they occurred on the bridge of the Prism-5. Please note that this statement is for the official record and is not intended for use as material for prosecution.”

Lyonns seemed piqued by the last note, but leaned forward anyway to rest her arms on the table.

“Look, it went down like this….”

———————————————————————————–

Bridge of the Prism-5, 36 hours ago

“Hah! I have done it! I have blown up a planet!” Lothar crowed, the sweet sunglasses he wore doing nothing to detract from his expression of maniacal glee. Grace pulled her weapon from its holster and pointed it at him, finger on the trigger.

“Alright Kaldegga, put your hands up! You might’ve gotten this far, but you sure as hell ain’t getting away from me! You’ll pay for trying to fry Skinny!” Kaldegga turned and sneered. “Hah! You’ll never get me, not even with your super-hot body! We could’ve been so good together, you ruling the world at my side!” He raised his hands and fired off a spear of ice, which Grace deftly rolled to avoid. He certainly wasn’t to get her with that old trick!

“Sorry honey, you’re good but not that good. It’d take a real man to lay me out flat, and you don’t even measure up.” Grace took the opportunity to fire and got a clean through-and-through shot on his shoulder that left him howling in pain and clutching his arm. Two shots rang out from behind her in quick succession, and Lothar’s gauntlets sparked and popped as their channeling circuits were comprehensively destroyed.

“Glad you’ve got my back, Skinny!” She called. “Yep, Gracie!” She snorted. “What’d I tell you about calling me Gracie!” she shouted as she ran forward, pulling a suppression collar out and snapping it around Lothar’s neck even as she yelled. His scream of rage was almost as satisfying as the scream she’d gotten from that sweet barmaid back on Campinodia 7, in the little dive bar. It had been a very satisfying night, and the screaming had just been the start.

“You sinfully beautiful witch! Why could you not acknowledge my obvious superiority and our sexual connection!” Lothar raised a fist to punch her, and she managed to snap a cuff on it before he could lay one on her. “Skinny! Any time!” she yelled as she struggled to keep a hold on his arm so he couldn’t bash her brains in. Skinny ran in and jumped on Lothar’s back; the sudden weight was enough to send Kaldegga staggering and Grace used the opportunity to cuff his other wrist before activating the stun function in them and sending Lothar to dreamland.

Skinny pulled himself out from under the guy and brushed himself down a bit before Grace punched him on the shoulder. “What were you thinking, Skinny! You’ve got pistols, you could’ve just, I don’t know, shot out his knee or something.” Skinny ducked his head.

“Sorry, Grace. Wasn’t thinking.” He looked so despondent she couldn’t stay mad at him - not that she could ever stay mad at Skinny. “It’s alright. Hey, look at the bright side! We’ve got our meal ticket for the rest of our lives if we play our cards right, and neither of us is dead! I’d say we came out on top,” she said with a laugh, and Skinny brightened. “Guess we sure did, Gracie. Guess we sure did.”

———————————————————————————–

Conference Room 1A, Capital Ship Rod-7

Powell blinked for several seconds before shaking her head. “Well. Do you so affirm that what you have stated here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Lyonns leaned back, amused smirk firmly in place on her face. “My hand to whatever deity you choose, that’s what happened.”

Powell stopped the comprehensive recording with a flick of her wrist and made one more note before she stood and gathered her devices. “Thank you for your co-operation. Processing will be completed within the next four hours and your monetary compensation determined at that point. If you need refreshment or to use the facilities before that point, please let the complimentary honor guard know and they will fulfill the requests as required. Good day, Miss Lyonns.”

She turned and headed for the door, pretending not to hear the grumbled “It’s Captain Lyonns, dammit.” behind her as she left the conference room.

———————————————————————————–

Conference Room 2B, Capital Ship Rod-7

Lt. Cmdr. Powell strode confidently into the room, the twitchy figure sitting at the table obsessively shuffling a pack of cards so worn you couldn’t read the faces anymore a studied contrast to her last interview. Hank Herbert, registered cyborg and unofficial pistolero. One of Grace Lyonns’ known associates and picked up at the same time from the bridge of the Prism-5, he had been deeply unhappy to have his pistols confiscated as the illegal weapons they were.

He didn’t speak as Powell walked over and took the seat opposite him, merely kept on shuffling his cards. Powell took her time in setting up her equipment, but even at the end of several minutes Herbert hadn’t even looked at her. Reaching the end of her patience, she cleared her throat loudly and brought her datapad down with a snap. He twitched, cybernetics making almost-inaudible whining noises as they reset themselves, before stopping his shuffle and looking up at her.

“Please state your named for the record,” she said clearly, slightly over-enunciating her syllables; nonmilitary cyborg enhancements tended to be hit or miss on audio input quality, and she suspected his were more miss than hit.

“Oh. Uh. Are you recording this? Yeah? Huh. My name is Hank, but my friends call me Skinny.”

“To confirm, you are Hank Herbert, registered cyborg?”

He pulled as much of a face as he could around his augments. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“What is your occupation?”

“Uh, odd jobs mostly. Whatever the Captain finds.”

“That would be one Grace Lyonns, correct?”

“Yeah. Captain Grace Lyonns.”

Powell made a note on her datapad before folding her hands in front of her. “Please state for the record a true and accurate account of events as they occurred on the bridge of the Prism-5. Please note that this statement is for the official record and is not intended for use as material for prosecution.”

Hank looked a little green in the organic parts, but put away his cards and leaned forward gamely.

“Okay, so, here’s how it went…”

———————————————————————————–

Bridge of the Prism-5, 37 hours ago

“Finally, my evil plan is complete! I have destroyed a planet! Ha hahahaha!” Lothar shouted, still elbows-deep in his connection to the weapons system. Skinny reacted on instinct, pulling both his pistols and putting a round in the floor on each side of the maniac’s feet.

“Whoa there now, don’t go making a mess we ain’t got the time to clean up! In fact, why dontcha just give up and make this real easy on yourself?” Skinny called back, cycling the chambers on his pistols with a flick of his thumb. Grace appeared stunned by the comprehensive destruction of even so minor a planetoid, and it was up to him to make sure this terrorist asshole didn’t barbecue them both.

“You think you can defeat me? Me? Lothar Kaldegga?? I have the power of a capital warship on my side! I am unstoppable!” And the guy had gone full megalomania. Neat. Skinny took two more neat shots and suddenly Lothar had a few more things on his mind besides universal domination. Namely, the two holes Skinny’d just shot in his knees.

“You son of a bitch!” Lothar howled, dropping from the console to clutch at his legs. Skinny frowned. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? Captain, get the collar ‘n stuff on him, I got you covered.”

Grace finally blinked out of the stupor she’d been standing in and went to go grab one of the suppression collars and a set of stun-cuffs from the nearest storage point. Kaldegga glared hatefully after her for a long moment, before turning his eyes on Skinny.

“You’ll never take me in, you know. I have powers far beyond your pathetic machinery!” Skinny pretended to consider it for a moment before shrugging, gun muzzles never losing their train on Lothar. “And I have guns. Which one of us is sitting on the floor bleeding, again?”

Kaldegga didn’t have time to retort as Grace chose that moment to stride back on the bridge with collar and cuffs in hand. “Put 'em on 'im,” Skinny said and gestured to Kaldegga with one pistol.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Grace replied breezily as she walked over to Lothar….right through Skinny’s line of fire. “Grace -!”

With a roar, Kaldegga came up off the floor and grabbed Grace, spinning her around and putting an arm around her neck. “Drop your weapon or I’ll snap her like a twig!” he shouted, and visibly twisted her neck until she whimpered when Skinny hesitated.

“Woah, woah! I’m putting them down, I’m putting them down slowly…” Skinny crouched slowly and brought his guns down like he was going to put them down on the deck, before whipping them up lightning-quick and shooting Lothar in the shoulder. Kaldegga dropped Grace with a scream of pain, and she spun around and kicked him in the junk before snapping the collar on his neck and the cuffs on his wrists.

When she finished, she turned back to Skinny. “Damn it, Skinny - ” “You stepped in front of my shot! What was I supposed to do!” He rebuffed before she could finish, and she shook her head. “Well, we got the guy. Guess that counts as a win.”

———————————————————————————–

Conference Room 2B, Capital Ship Rod-7

Powell made a few notes on her datapad before she sat back in her seat and regarded the cyborg sitting in front of her with a level stare. He fidgeted under her gaze, and she waited until he went for his pack of cards before speaking. “Do you so affirm that what you have stated here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

He started, nearly dropping his cards. “Uh, yeah. Definitely. Word for word, exactly what happened.”

Powell stopped the comprehensive recorder with a practiced motion, and made a few more notes in her datapad before standing up. “Very well. The United League thanks you for your co-operation. The data processing will be completed within the next three hours and your monetary compensation will be determined and transferred at that point in time. If you need refreshment or to use the facilities before processing is complete, please let the complimentary honor guard posted outside the door know and they will acquire it as required. Good day, Mr. Herbert.”

He was shuffling his cards again before she’d even left the room.

———————————————————————————–

Containment Unit 311144, Capital Ship Rod-7

Powell walked briskly into the interrogator chamber, separated from the containment unit by thick plates of duracrystal layered with force fields. Inside the containment chamber, the Kala’Kah continued to stretch languidly into poses no human could ever hope to achieve, paying no attention to the chime Powell had sounded before entry. Frowning, Powell took out her datapad before prodding the intercom system.

“This is Lieutenant Commander Powell of the United League. Please state your designation and occupation, now, for the official record. This conversation will be recorded for later review.” The Kala’Kah took one last impossible stretch before leaping lightly to her feet.

“I am Kae’la, Deathseeker. Grace Lyonns holds my contract; my will is her will. My actions are her actions. My job is her job.”

Powell made a note on her datapad before turning back to the intercom. “Please state for the record a true and accurate account of events as they occurred on the bridge of the Prism-5.”

The Kala’kah leaned toward the duracrystal viewport. “The way it happened was thusly…”

———————————————————————————–

Bridge of the Prism-5, 39 hours ago

“It is the inevitable end produced by my will; look upon what is no more, and despair at my power,” Lothar Kaldegga stated forcefully, has hands clasped tight to the weapons system that had, mere moments earlier, reduced a planetoid to its base components. His dream of catastrophe realized, he turned to face the three arrayed behind him. “You cannot hope to defeat me. I have triumphed, and all who oppose me shall find themselves condemned to the same fate. Join me, and know what true power is.”

Grace Lyonns stepped forward. “You are as mistaken as you are cruel, sir. After your vile and calamitous attack upon my comrade, there is no avenue for you to pursue that ends in victory. I was not in time to stop you from destroying that planet, but you will not find me so slow on a second try.” Her speech as aggressive as her movements, she brought her gun to bear on Lothar Kaldegga, Skinny Herbert’s guns already there.

“Kae’La, go and retrieve a suppression collar and stun cuffs for his wrists; we would not wish to be found wanting when this vile villain finds himself victim of our combined wit, and given over to those who would rewards us for such actions in the United League.” Grace Lyonns’ body was as wary as Skinny Herbert’s was still; neither his guns nor his eyes left Lothar Kaldegga’s form even as Kae’la pulled the requested items from their storage.

It was only as she approached to clasp them in their proper places that Lothar Kaldegga made his move. Fire flew from his hands as he made to move around Kae’la and out the bridge door, and Skinny Herbert screamed as the flames licked what was left of his skin. Grace Lyonns, however, remained undaunted and fired a single round into Lothar Kaldegga’s shoulder. Kae’la, in her turn, tore his gauntlets off with two arms while the other two secured the collar around his neck.

Apparently, putting on a suppression collar while magic was in active use was an extremely painful experience; Lothar Kaldegga’s screaming ceased only when the stun cuffs were also applied, and activated in the proper fashion. As he slumped unconscious to the floor, Grace Lyonns assessed Skinny Herbert’s condition and pronounced him to be both fine and a large, immature form of the species.

“And to think, with the bounty we shall receive from turning this miscreant in to the proper authorities, you may yet get an upgrade to what burned.”

———————————————————————————–

Containment Unit 311144, Capital Ship Rod-7

Powell waited a few seconds more, but the Kala’Kah seemed to have finished its story. “Do you so affirm that what you have stated here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” she asked; the form was required even if the testimony would likely be stricken from the record as irrelevant. Still, nothing was ever lost by being thorough.

“I do so affirm,” was the Kala’Kah’s calm response, and Powell deactivated the intercom system before walking out. She had an hour to compile all this into some kind of coherent report for the record, and she wanted a stiff drink before she buckled down to it.

———————————————————————————–

The Queen of Spades, 2 hours later

“Think they bought it, Gracie?” Skinny asked as he pulled the disassembled pieces of a power-armor gauntlet out of his pockets and dumped them on a nearby table that also housed a bowl of dried, unidentifiable sludge and six shot glasses stacked into a pyramid. The topmost glass fell and shattered, and Skinny cursed.

“I mean, even if they didn’t buy it it’s not like they can charge us with anything. They can’t prove it didn’t happen like we said, and that’s the important bit. You remembered to sic Sweet Pea on those camera feeds, right?” Grace asked as she flopped into her favorite chair on the Queen.

“Yeah, yeah, Sweet Pea went in and deleted the last day from all feeds, smooth as Sakissian silk.” Kae’La padded silently to a corner and curled up on the heap of fabric and pillows she’d carefully constructed there while Skinny talked, earning her a raised eyeridge from the man.

“Good. Long as they don’t know what actually happened, it’s smooth sailing from here on out…”

———————————————————————————–

What Actually Happened

Bridge of the Prism-5, 41 hours ago

“Skinny, what the hell happened?” Grace’s voice sounded unusually annoyed and Skinny brought a hand to his head to massage away the ringing ache. Clonking himself in the head with the gun already in his hand didn’t help that ache any, and he swore.

“I don’t know, Captain. One minute I’m shooting the shit out of some damned UL goons and next I remember, I’m here and he’s there. Everything between’s a blur.” He glanced over to where he’d gestured towards 'he’ and almost had a heart attack at the sight of Lothar Kaldegga, cuffed and collared and looking ready for murder. “Holy shit, Grace, how the hell’d we catch him?”

“Don’t call me Grace in front of the captive,” she responded absently, eyes darting around the bridge and taking in the relatively undamaged state of it….except for the scorchmarks around Skinny’s feet. Her gaze focused on those with an almost laser intensity before snapping to Lothar. “What did you do?”

Lothar sneered and shrugged as best he could in the cuffs. “He was in my way. Removing him was step one to taking complete control of this ship and crushing my enemies.” He seemed unperturbed by the relatively petite captain marching towards him as he spoke, and merely let his eyes wander suggestively up and down as she got closer. “You know - ”

Grace pulled out her gun and shot him in the shoulder. He dropped with a hoarse cry, and she planted a toe-kick in his crotch. “That’s for trying to kill Skinny, you bastard, and that’s for thinking I’d pick you over him for some dick.” She stalked back over to where Skinny stood in appreciative silence and glared at Lothar some more before looking around again.

“Okay, we’re on the bridge of what looks like a Capital Ship - ugh - with a wanted mass murderer who apparently just blew up the planet for which I was promised some pretty damn magnificent beard. How far up the creek are we?” She cut a glance over at Skinny. “And why are you wearing power armor?”

Skinny looked down at himself. Huh, he’d wondered why his pants were so tight. “I don’t know, Captain.” “Well, take it off, then, you look ridiculous. Get Kitty to help you.” She looked back out over the bridge and he turned and nearly jumped out of his skin at the enormous Kala’Kah standing right behind him.

Swallowing down a curse, he held out one power-armored hand. “Careful with the gauntlets, I think the Captain will be wanting them later.” Kitty merely nodded and tore the arm from the armor without apparent effort. In fact, it didn’t take her long at all to reduce the armor to so much scrap and two arm-pieces; Skinny, in his turn, wasted no time starting to disassemble the gauntlets.

Grace spoke up suddenly, nearly causing Skinny to drop the wrench he’d been using to pry the casing off. “I think I’ve got a plan,” she said with confidence, and Skinny and Kitty shared a Look before Kitty shrugged and Skinny sighed. “Well, I got nothing, Captain, so I’d be glad to hear it.”

She turned to them with a manic gleam in her eyes. “We turn Kaldegga in.”

Skinny waited several seconds but there was nothing else forthcoming. “We turn him in, we get arrested for conspiring so the UL doesn’t gotta pay his bounty, and they shoot us. I don’t see how that helps,” he said finally, setting his wrench on the floor to grab the screwdriver Kitten helpfully held out for him.

“Not if we tell everyone else at the same time,” she responded smugly and he dropped the screwdriver. It would’ve gone right through his foot if Kitty hadn’t caught it, but he was too busy staring at Grace to notice. “You mean - ”

“Broadcast it to the ISCS that we caught Lothar Kaldegga just as he was testing a capital ship he stole, yep.” When the other two didn’t immediately jump for joy, she made an impatient noise. “Think about it. All capital ships are equipped with direct-line ISCS access, we wouldn’t even have to hop a node. All we need is Sweet Pea to set up the broadcast and then we’re whatever we wanna broadcast we are. Big damn heroes, even.”

Skinny had slowly warmed up to the idea as Grace talked, and now he was nodding enthusiastically. “Right. What should we say happened?” Grace paused for a second, frowning. “Well, we didn’t get here in time to stop Lothar from blowing up that planet - does anyone remember what was on the planet?” Her question was met with shaking heads and she shrugged. “So we didn’t get here in time to stop him, but we get here and he’s doing the whole evil villain thing, we stopped him, we saved the ship and probably half the galaxy. Sound good?”

Skinny thought for a second, then pulled out one of his pistols and shot Lothar in the leg. “Authenticity, captain. If that’s what you want to do, then I’m with you.”

Grace grinned. “Let’s do it.”

Sergeant Bruno Hamilton checked the few bushes he’d tethered together to cover the mouth of the cave, and waited for the rain to stop.

He and three other men - Cpl Ben Willkins, PFC Kyle McKlevin, and PFC Werner van Kemseke - had been dispatched to this particular piece of godforsaken jungle with a very simple mission; locate the Pathet Lao base, extract the high-value target, and fall back to the handoff point where a detachment from the Royal Lao Army would take the target from there. No witnesses.

Simple enough on paper, but they’d been delayed in transit and now the area was under heavy bombardment from the Air Force.

The base itself was unlikely to be hit; Bruno had to admit that whoever had chosen the location had chosen well, a small slot canyon leading into a narrow valley sheltered on three sides by sharply angled cliffs. It’d take an extremely lucky bombardier to plant a bomb in there, and of course the Air Force was going for quantity over actually aiming. But he and his men had barely been in the area a day when the first whistle dropped and they’d been forced to take cover themselves.

Fortunately, the same geography that sheltered the base also lent itself to protecting himself and his team; they’d managed to find a small overhang just deep enough to maybe be called a cave on a good day, and had concealed it and themselves from prying eyes as best they could. That had been four days ago, and there hadn’t been a long enough gap between bombings since to make infiltration of the base feasible.

PFC McKlevin wasn’t taking it well; it wasn’t his first mission, not with Bruno and not with IMAF, but you wouldn’t know it from the obsessive way he cleaned his weapons. And then Willkins’ weapons. And van Kamseke’s weapons. He’d tried to do Bruno’s as well but Bruno wasn’t about to let someone else disassemble his weapons in a combat zone so McKlevin had cleaned his weapons again. And again.

Bruno understood, to a point, but the cave was only keeping the bombs off their heads and if they had been discovered a gun stripped for cleaning would do nobody any good; an idea he’d driven home as hard as he could when yelling was Not An Option. The kid had stopped cleaning his guns anyway, and started sharpening his knife.

That had been a day and three bombing runs ago, and the only thing keeping the others from strangling McKlevin was the fact that the bombings had started moving off; the flyboys had finally gotten orders to move to a new sector, nearest any of them could tell, and this latest bombing was the furthest away yet. It was time.

Bruno let the bushes go and turned to the others several long minutes after the last rumble had stopped. They had to move fast, to take advantage of any gaps in perimeter defenses the bombs might have made. In less than ten minutes their gear was stowed and the traces of their time spent here in the cave minimized; they moved out silently, the quiet stillness of the landscape after the bombs had fallen engendering the necessity of hand signals in place of the spoken word.

Their chosen route was, miraculously, still passable - though almost unrecognizable, the fallen bombs having created a scene that looked more like the surface of the moon than any kind of terrestrial habitat. They crept through craters that still stank of the explosives that had created them - though the wind had whipped away most of the chemical stink from the older ones. The grass rustled in the wind, but none of whatever animals were left were stirring. Dirt crumbled away at the edge of the impacts, and made footing tricky; for all that, they moved with practiced swiftness.

“Sarge.”

McKlevin’s voice wasn’t particularly loud, but the absence of sound turned it almost into a shout. Bruno looked around, a reprimand at the ready, but didn’t see the guy. Willkins and van Kemseke he marked mentally, both having frozen at the unexpected noise, but McKlevin was nowhere to be seen. Frowning, Bruno gestured for the others to move up to the shelter offered by a meager treeline a hundred yards in front of them, while he himself began making his way over to where McKlevin’s voice had come from.

As he reached the lip of one of the impact craters, he froze. The crater was deeper than it had first appeared, and McKLevin was laid out flat along the bottom. A crumbled edge told the story of uncertain footing, and the UXO pressed up against McKlevin’s side was enough to make Bruno’s blood run cold.

“Can you move?” He asked quietly, and McKlevin nodded. “I’m not hurt, sir. But…” he trailed off and Bruno’s mouth set in a grim line. If he moved and the bomb exploded, that would give away their position and potentially wipe out the team. If he didn’t move….Bruno thought rapidly and all the scenarios he could imagine were bad. He looked down, and noticed distantly that the kid’s hands were clenched so tightly to his gun they were shaking.

Making up his mind, Bruno slipped off his pack and set his weapon down before scooting carefully into the crater with McKlevin. “Sarge!” he hissed, dismay written on his face even with the whites showing all the way around his eyes. Bruno cut him off with a glare before puling out his knife and gently teasing the casing open on the bomb.

Ignoring the full-body tremors now running down McKlevin’s back, he very, very gently began moving the wires around inside the casing. Fortunately for Bruno, he was at least passingly familiar with most American-made explosives and this bomb was no exception. A brief inspection was enough to tell him the triggers had been jarred loose by the impact with the ground instead of striking true, and a few cuts of his knife later had both the triggers and the backups set on the ground next to him.

He breathed a sigh of relief and felt McKlevin go boneless beneath him. Shuflling back on his knees, he offered the younger man a hand up to a sitting position. Keeping hold of the PFC’s hand just a moment longer than necessary, Bruno stared deep into his eyes.

“Watch your goddam step, McKlevin.”

It took twenty minutes for the plan to go straight to hell.

Bruno cursed under his breath as sirens blared in the camp and yet another explosion rocked the shallow depression in the land that was only a valley by virtue of the hills to either side. The camp itself was heavily netted to disguise it from the air, and the bushes dragged to ring the camp had razor-wire hidden in their branches; now it started to more resemble a kicked anthill, men in several different kinds of uniforms shouting in seemed to be mostly Cantonese.

Bruno had been dubious about the premise from the start, but it hadn’t been his place to speak out. A couple of spooks had put a bug in Colonel Earnest Sandhever’s ear about the place, and nothing would do but a covert infiltration of it to get all the goodies the spooks’d promised would be there. Its tactically unsound position, added to reports of a lot of Chinese involvement and the possibility that more serious construction would likely be underway soon had the colonel hopping and Bruno had been sent with two fireteams less than 48 hours after the spooks had arrived with the initial report.

By luck or by providence there’d been a sheltered drop point less than 10 miles out from their target, at the base of some cliffs. They’d dropped in quick and quiet, and had spent the next twelve hours getting into position. One team would approach from the West, the other from the North-East, and both would ex-filtrate South. Primary objective was intelligence gathering; secondary objectives included removing any identified Chinese officers or other key personnel, sabotaging any research or defenses they could get their hands on, and - if determined to be necessary - destroying the encampment.

Bruno had elected to lead team two, approaching from the Northeast, and had given Cpl Yancy Watkins command of team one and their westerly approach; team two would have to come up and over the hill so if anyone was likely to be spotted on approach, it would be them. Team one would have a more sheltered approach between two hills and would likely have made entry into the compound first, if not for -

Another explosion sounded and Bruno scowled. Either team one was still trying to push forward through the minefield - unlikely, they knew better - or the minefield had been done by a piss-poor excuse for a demolitions expert and the mines were too close together and debris was setting them off. Either way, this action had just gone very loud.

A quick gesture had his team scrambling down the side of the hill as quietly as they could, and into the shadow of the bushes around the perimeter. Cutting the wire took time, long seconds dragging by as PFC Cook clipped and bent the evilly glimmering wire away from a thin spot in the bush itself. The alarms had thankfully stopped, but the shouting continued and while Bruno wasn’t exactly what you’d call fluent in the language, he picked up enough words here and there amidst the hubbub to know not to expect a rendezvous with team one.

For all that Bruno might have wished otherwise, team one’s mistake afforded them an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. With all the attention firmly fixed on the opposite side of camp, and a silent thanks to whatever was left of team one, Bruno and the rest of team two slipped through the makeshift bush fencing virtually unnoticed. One unfortunate young man in the uniform of the local military had caught sight of them, but LCpl Wayne’s knife caught him in the throat before he could compromise their position, and PFC Higgs dragged the body under the cover of a nearby tarp before they moved on.

A few more bodies dropped as they moved through the compound, and Bruno could feel his nerves stretching like piano wire. His men were good, but with the base on high alert they should not have been able to get this close to what appeared to be the central command tent; that feeling solidified when, cutting through the canvas back of the tent, they found the thing empty. Papers were strewn about like snow, like someone had left in a hurry with whatever they could carry and had dropped the rest.

Bruno didn’t like it, but the primary mission objective was intelligence so with a series of hand gestures he set the others to gathering up the papers as he took a look around. The hubbub in the compound was starting to die down - not good - but nobody was approaching the command tent from outside. Yet.

A quiet exclamation from PFC Cook had him back to the room with the others in the space of a heartbeat. There, only half-covered in obvious haste, was the entrance to what appeared to be some kind of tunnel and Bruno’s resolve sharpened.

“Rig it.”

The command was delivered quietly but PFC Cook wasted no time in getting out what explosives he had, the others handing over their munitions as well. In the space of about twenty minutes the tunnel mouth was wired with small blocks of C4 and a timer, while grenades with tripwires were placed at every entrance. One last sweep for any papers or valuables they might have missed, and they were back out the slit in the back of the tent.

Ex-filtrating south proved much harder than infiltrating from the north had been. As the alarm had died down, internal sentries had resumed their patrols and anyone who had been off-duty had gone back to their preferred off-duty activities. More than once, Bruno and his men wasted precious minutes frozen in the shadows while two sentries chatted with each other less than ten steps away. It took them three-quarters of an hour to finally reach the south-facing bushes, and another ten minutes to cut through enough of the wire for all of them to be able to slip through.

The original ex-filtration route beyond the perimeter had called for both teams to follow the landscape down between two hills; given what had happened to team one, Bruno elected to go up and over the nearer hill. Team two was halfway to the crown when a muffled thud slammed through the ground beneath their feet and the alarms that fallen silent in the compound began blaring again. A series of smaller explosion follow shortly, and a tell-tale red flickering light begins painting the hillside.

At the top of the hill Bruno looked back just once. A third of the camp was on fire, while a surprisingly large crater marked where the command tent used to be. It didn’t make up for the loss of team one - Watkins, Smith, Freeman, and Jones, may they rest in peace - but an accomplishment of stated mission objectives would have to be enough.

Bruno didn’t look back again.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The rain wasn’t surprising, just the timing of it. Here in the jungle-y marsh they were trudging through, the rain tended to come in the afternoon. When it rained it poured, of course, heavy drops falling so thick and fast you’d swear you were underwater and the drips from the trees above continuing for hours after the rain itself finished, but the pouring tended to happen earlier than this.

Bruno couldn’t say for certain what was causing it, but at 2200 local the rain was still going strong and he couldn’t justify going any further when conditions were this bad - even if those same conditions would make it nearly impossible to sleep. Finding a patch of ground tall enough that it likely wouldn’t flood took longer than he’d like, and creating a temporary shelter over it ate up even more time, but with two injured - Cpl Owen Daniels had fallen down a previously hidden cliff and broken his arm, and PFC Trey Wynters had gotten himself stabbed by a sentry who’d turned at just the wrong moment - Bruno thought the benefits of a shelter outweighed the risks of someone finding evidence of their passage.

PFC Wynters concerned him. They’d done the best they could, but none of them were a specifically trained medic and nobody carried more than the basic medical kit. Here and now, after four days of hiking and still two more from the extraction point, those supplies were running low. Cpl Daniels was splinted with strips of Bruno’s undershirt and tied up in an awkward sling of his own shirt, and wouldn’t need any further supplies until they hit base and an actual doctor, but Wynters’ bandages had been changed twice and the last unwrap had revealed red and puffy flesh around the wound.

The man was sitting now in the middle of what was rapidly becoming camp. Bruno couldn’t be sure if he was sweating or not - they were all, to a man, soaked to the bone and looking more like drowned rats than marines - but his face was red and his eyes were glassy. Bruno directed Daniels over to keep an eye on Wynters with a jerk of his head; being down an arm hadn’t stopped Daniels from trying to help pitch camp, but it had lessened his efficiency and there were enough of them that he could be spared.

Daniels went and Bruno directed his attention to helping build the shelter. It was quiet, save for he rain; a long day of hiking through claggy mud was enough to dampen any enthusiasm for talking, and tying some branches together with leaves strung over them was something any marine could do in their sleep. In fact, Bruno half-suspected a few of them were actually asleep on their feet and just going through the motions on autopilot. It didn’t take long, any which way, for them to cobble together something that kept most of the rain off and Bruno moved on the confirming the night’s watch rota with his SIC, Cpl Wilford Trask, when a voice interrupted him.

“Sarge.”

He looked, and saw Daniels motioning for him. With a last nod at Trask, he walked over to where the two walking injured sat - or rather, where Daniels sat and Wynters slumped in a daze.

“He doesn’t look good, Sarge,” Daniels said, voice pitched not to carry. Wynters did not look look good at all; still red-faced and glassy-eyed, he now seemed unable to hold himself upright and while none of them smelled particularly nice after more than ten days on mission, there was an edge to Wynters that had the hair on the back of Bruno’s neck standing up.

Bruno grimaced and waved over two PFCs - Cook and Higgs - who’d graduated from stuffing their faces to making themselves as comfortable as possible in the mud. Higgs pulled a face but both of them came over in short enough order. “We need bandage substitutes. Go and find what you can in half an hour and bring it here.”

Higgs looked like he wanted to object, but Cook elbowed him smartly and said “Yes sir.”

Higgs opened his mouth but Cook dragged him away and Bruno watched them go. Higgs was a motormouth, but he usually had better sense than that.

Turning back to Daniels, he was met with a questioning look. “Drain and clean it and hope to Christ it works,” Bruno said quietly and Daniels nodded grimly.

“Think he’ll lose the arm?” he asked, matching Bruno’s tone, and Bruno shrugged.

“I figured he’s got even chances on keeping it if we do something, but no chance if we don’t try.”

“Christ,” Daniels muttered with feeling and Bruno could only nod.

They managed to force some water down Wynters’ throat before Higgs and Cook returned. None of the leaves or moss-like greenery they’d gathered was dry, but then almost nothing was in the pounding rain. Bruno set Daniels to cleaning them as best he could while Higgs and Cook went to lay down alongside everyone else not on watch and Bruno himself went to take the old bandages off. When tugging didn’t budge them, he wetted them down with what water he had left and tried again.

Wynters began babbling as the fabric of the bandages slowly peeled away from the injury underneath. Something about oranges and sailors; Bruno ignored him to keep slowly but surely peeling the bandage away from the injury underneath. The smell hit him in the face and Bruno had to pause and breathe through the nausea as his stomach turned. The wound itself was clearly infected; thick white-green ooze trailed sluggishly from the lower end and the skin to both sides was a dark and angry red where it wasn’t stretched to a shiny off-white.

Daniels made a desperate noise in the back of his throat and thrust the now-cleaned-and-mostly-dried moss toward Bruno, Bruno shook his head grimly and pulled out his knife. Drawing the knife perpendicular to the wound brought a gush of stinking green-yellow goo and an increase in the volume of Wynters’ babble - he was nearly screaming, now, incoherent words that echoed far too loudly for Bruno’s peace of mind and brought everyone who’d been trying to sleep to adrenaline-fueled wakefulness.

“Keep him quiet,” he gritted out to the nearest form in the darkness that resolved itself into LCpl Thomas Yates, looking paler than Bruno had ever remembered seeing him in the light of the small flashlight Bruno held in his off hand. Yates gulped and pulled what might generously have been referred to as a handkerchief from his pocket and muffled Wynters with it as best he could, taking care to keep his nose free. Bruno grunted in approval and pressed on the puffy sides of the wound to a fresh gush of ick and renewed - if now muffled - screaming.

When pressing finally only yielded clear-ish ooze and the swelling had reduced somewhat, Bruno grabbed the cleaned leaves from Daniels - who looked distinctly green around the gills - and did the best he could to improvise a bandage. Sitting back on his heels, he looked over Wynters to Trask, who’d remained awake even after the screaming had stopped. Trask met his eyes squarely and shrugged, and Bruno looked down at the stinking mess at his feet. He’d done all he could for Wynters; now it was down to dumb luck.

Bruno stood and went to go refill his canteen in the rain.

Bruno waited patiently for his opening.

Breaking into the facility had been surprisingly easy. The captain’s intelligence about the location and composition of the convoy had been right on the money, and it had been a simple enough matter for Bruno to hitch a lift as the convoy had slowed to a checkpoint. Tunstall and Weber - Lt. Jack “Pick” Tunstall and Cpl Frederic “Chisel” Weber - had similar luck, and had secreted themselves into the truck behind him, a fact for which Bruno could only be grateful. Several uncomfortably bumpy and dusty hours later had seen him undetected into a small facility tucked into the mountains near Pha Nang.

Their teammate, one Cpl Amos “Tongs” Graves, had already been inside for several days; captured alone with incriminating evidence, he’d been taken to this facility precisely as planned and had spent the last few days alternating torture with recon sweeps of the place. Now, 72 hours later, Bruno and the others were here to extract him and the information Captain Jaxun had wanted, and blow the place sky-high behind them.

Well, maybe not entirely behind them.

Bruno’s internal counter hit zero and a heavy thump preceded a screeching alarm. Nothing quite like a plastique explosive padded with some gasoline bottles to really ruin a person’s night. All the main lights in the hallway outside the office he was lurking in went out and for a long minute all was darkness until emergency lighting flickered into existence.

Time to move.

Bruno unfolded himself and pulled out a peculiarly bulbous flashlight, sweeping its nearly invisible beams over the room once more before heading out into the hallway. This part of the building was largely unpopulated at this time of night, according to the report-marks done in UV paint by Graves, and Bruno met no-one on his way toward the detention areas even as a rising hubbub could be heard from other parts of the base; Tunstall and Weber had their own light, and a slightly different target.

Bruno pointed the odd flashlight at the upper corners of the hallways as he went, following the marks Graves had left over the preceding days and nights. The new paint they’d been issued was invisible to the naked eye - or nearly so - and technically a considerable improvement over the more obvious chalk marks they’d used previously, but old habits died hard so the marks were still left in the same out of the way spots the chalk marks had been put in. The downside was the need for the flashlight - much bulkier than a standard issue light, it weighed more than twice as much as one and somehow managed to only hold a twenty-minute charge in its batteries.

He crossed paths once with Tunstall and Weber on track to their own target. Their mission was at once simpler and more difficult; find and secure the actionable intelligence marked by Graves. Once done, they were to rendezvous outside with Bruno and, if Bruno was successful, Graves.

A quick nod was all they had time for, and then the other two men were on their way to the offices marked by the UV paint, while Bruno continued to make his way along the trail left for him that would - hopefully - lead him to Graves.

Running feet echoed down the empty hall, and Bruno ducked into a nearby room, grimacing at the smell of harsh chemical cleaning agents and old blood; not an office, then. The flashlight in his hand flickered alarmingly, and he scowled at it; hopefully the thing wouldn’t die before he got where he was going.

A quick glance through the small window in the door showed one man an assault rifle skid around the corner, then slow to start checking the doors to either side. Bruno cursed internally, but stowed the odd flashlight in favor of pulling out his knife. Bruno readied himself as the man drew near, and when the guy pushed the door to the room open grabbed him, spun him inside, and stabbed him in the neck with a quick in-and-out that had the man dropping his gun as he uselessly tried to staunch the arterial spray. Bruno reversed the knife and brought the hilt down hard and the guard dropped to bleed out in unconsciousness. Bruno paused, listening for more footsteps - if the guy’d been smart, he’d’ve brought back-up - but heard nothing. Not a smart guy, then.

As he left the now thoroughly-redecorated room, he could hear gunfire in the distance, the higher sounds of Chinese knock-offs mixing with the deeper staccato of American weapons; apparently their outside team had moved in to engage and distract, which meant Bruno had less time than he’d previously thought.

Leaping forward, he started running as full-out as the maze of corridors would let him, the strange flashlight now flickering wildly in his hands. Not as fast as his top speed, but decent enough for all the damned corners that he had to both round and check for paint with a light that spent half the time dead and the other half on dim.

The guards he encountered singly and in pairs - slipshod work, really, but he did set half their base on fire and from the sound of it the second team under Boots was really going to town, so they could possibly be forgiven - went down almost without slowing him. The Ka-Bar in his dominant hand was glistening red in the dim emergency lightning, but Bruno couldn’t stop to wipe it down properly. It was now almost twenty minutes after the first explosion, and if he didn’t get to Graves before thirty he’d have to find him in the dark as the secondary explosives Tunstall and Weber had planted earlier took out the backup generators.

The trinary explosives would raze the building.

The walls of the corridors around Bruno were now a flat and dingy sort of white - the color white became when it had been washed too many times with the same bucket of water - and he knew he had to be close. Pulling his Beretta out of its holster he slowed, taking the time to check the corners before he turned them. Better careful than dead, after all. It took him a few minutes more before shouting from around the corner told him he’d hit pay dirt; none of the guards had cursed in English.

Checking the next corner revealed four guards struggling with a very familiar - and very battered - figure. Bruno took careful aim and managed to shoot two of them before they noticed him and brought their own weapons to bear. He got one more shot off before the last man standing grabbed Graves and put a gun to his head, pulling them both around to face Bruno. Graves grinned.

“What took you so long, Hammer?”

Bruno snorted. “Damn flashlight went out.”

Graves grinned. “Never could trust those tech monkeys. Too damn complicated for their own good.”

The guard shouted something nearly indecipherable in the general echoing clamor going on in the building and tightened his grip, causing Graves to gurgle and Bruno to tighten his own grip.

“Hey Hammer.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t miss.”

Bruno fired.

Bruno was having what might politely be called a bad day.

But, since there was no-one around worth being polite to, he was having an absolute shit day. A day where the high point was the coffee machine joining the goddamn choir invisible because at least that meant they’d get a new one or the spooks would revolt en masse.

It was the kind of day that started with all off-duty enlisted men getting rousted at o-dark-thirty to attend the two-hour monologue of a brigadier with a bee in his bonnet and more stars than sense. Bruno and his team had only gotten back to their respective bunks a few hours before the shitshow started, and he had basically slept while standing up through most of it. It was only near the end, when the general started handing down orders that Bruno really woke up.

Apparently, whatever had gotten the general going had something to do with the state of the place, because Bruno found himself in possession of a squad of damned FNGs with mops, buckets, and bad attitudes. The base was full of spooks and there was no way in hell they could clean all of that off, but the general sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to a sergeant on the matter - for all Bruno wasn’t technically under his command.

But orders were orders, and Bruno’s job was to implement them, so he went at it with a will.

His general mood deteriorated rapidly in the face of the general truculence displayed by his pro-tem squad, but also by another feeling. A tiny, niggling feeling that crawled up and down his spine in a too familiar fashion. Someone was watching him, specifically; someone good enough that couldn’t catch more than a glimpse here and there.

It made no sense. He was in the middle of a damned army base, doing one of the most scut jobs he’d ever been ordered to do with a squad of FNGs, and someone was watching him. He’d thought it was a new spook, at first, but it didn’t fit; spooks liked you to know when they were watching, and this guy was staying out of sight. It could be an enemy infiltrator, but Bruno wasn’t the brains of the operation for all Jaxun had hand-picked him for the so-called “Alpha Squad” so there was no way he was a higher-value target than half the officers on base.

Bruno couldn’t out his finger on it, and as the surveillance continued into the early evening hours he’d finally had enough. Ordering the FNGs back to barracks, he approached the corner of a nearby garage where he’d last seen movement and loosened his Ka-Bar as he went. He wasn’t stupid, for all he was tired of this game, and came around the corner hard with his knife out and ready to be greeted by……

Nothing.

Keeping his knife out, he began a slow seep of the alley between the two buildings when a very familiar click from next to his ear made him freeze. “So this is Sergeant Hammer. I gotta say, I’m kind of disappointed. I thought you were better than taking a corner all by your lonesome when you know someone is waiting on the other side.” The voice was light, teasing, and totally unfamiliar, but the gun didn’t waver an inch and it was just far enough back that Bruno couldn’t see the trigger.

Bruno grunted. “That’s because,” he said, and twisted to plant a hard elbow into the man behind him’s gut. The guy wheezed but didn’t drop the gun - not bad, guy clearly knew what was important - and Bruno turned to follow up the elbow with a knee. The guy dropped, and Bruno was on him in an instant, laying him out on his front while simultaneously twisting the gun out of his hand and pointing it at the back of his head.

“Who sent you?” He growled, keeping his finger on the guard of a weapon he could clearly see had the safety engaged.

“Jebediah Lexington.”

The response, somewhat muffled by the fact the guy’s face was pressed into the dirt, wasn’t surprising and Bruno snorted before taking his knee out of the guy’s back and putting his knife away. The guy coughed a bit while standing and brushed himself off a bit before he caught Bruno’s distinctly Not Amused look and grinned sheepishly. “Lexington might’ve talked you up a bit while he was giving me this assignment. He said you didn’t respect anyone who couldn’t get the drop on you, and that you were the backbone of the operation; when’d you notice me?”

Bruno simply gave him a look that made the Sahara look like a tropical paradise and didn’t answer his question. “Jaxun told us we were getting a new guy. You Tongs?”

The other man nodded. “Corporal Amos Graves, callsign Tongs.”

Bruno nodded, and looked steadily at the younger man. “Did Lexington assign your handle?” The younger man shrugged. “Could be worse. I guess he thinks he’s being clever,” Graves noted, and Bruno shrugged in return.

“Don’t try that stupid shit on anyone else. Tunstall’d shoot you before asking questions, and Weber can get……creative. I’m the nice one. That being said,” he deadpanned before lashing out with one huge fist.

Graves went down in a heap, blood beginning to trickle from a new split in his lips.

“Don’t point a gun at me.”

Crunch, crunch, ssssshhhhf. Crunch, crunch ssssssshf.

Bruno paused, and squinted up into the remote, relentless sunlight. He’d been walking for hours and the sun was high overhead, beating down on the waves of golden grass for miles in every direction. Tunstall and Weber were nowhere to be seen; he’d missed the rendezvous hours ago but he couldn’t stop now.

The compound is silent in the dark hours after midnight, sitting quietly in the deep stillness between floodlight beams. Dogs and men walk the fence as the swiveling lights make lazy arcs from high towers. Four men crouch in wait just beyond the furthest arc, their only sign of life the breaths that stir the grass in front of their faces. More men lurk on the further side of the base, waiting for a signal, bodies taught with tension stretched like a piano wire. The men with dogs turn the corner for another section of the fence; the floodlights flash away in relaxed silence.

The four men move.

Bruno dropped the end of the tarp and shook out his hands, grimacing against their stiffness. He wiped his face and took a sip from his canteen.

The four men move silently, in sync as they cross the last open field to the base of the fence. It is not electrified, and a few quick snips open a careful tear to admit first the smaller men, then the larger ones. A few precious seconds are sacrificed to minimizing the visible damage, and the four are on their way across the compound. A barracks is passed, an infirmary, a mess hall. The four split silently into two groups as the headquarters appears at last; the taller men veers left towards the main building, and the shorter pair to the low-lying outbuilding that has two bored and sleepy guards standing at the door.

The blood glistens where it falls silently on dirt, and the door is open.

Bruno turned and propped up Graves’ head as he tipped some water down his throat. “Guess I finally found a way to make you shut the hell up,” he mutters to the unconscious man.

The first group makes their way through the headquarters building, the taller one’s knife shining in the light of the passing floodlights. Four charges have been placed, and the fifth is resting comfortably in his hand. The door swings open as they approaches, and the knife of his shorter companion - no less red - flashes as another guard fails in his duty. The larger man places the fifth charge with some delicacy in a room full of desks, and takes three specific folders from a nearby cabinet before leaving the room.

The second team places their explosives with care as menacing chemicals shine dully in the light that passes sightlessly through dirty windows, floodlights uncaring in the night. Their steps are light and quick, their way unhindered by guards, and seven charges are placed before the sky begins to dim with approaching dawn. They slip from the stooped building and out into the dimming night; the appointed place of meeting is not far as the crow flies, but they must reach it before full dawn.

A dog begins to bark.

Bruno grunted as he checked the bandages on Graves’ arm. The bite hadn’t been too bad, and the dog was unlikely to be rabid. Still, the guy was in for some painful shots when they got back to base.

The first team is running now; the man whose dog had sounded the alarm releases it and others join it in leaping toward the two figures. The floodlights no longer follow their meandering arcs, and are now sweeping the ground with dangerous purpose, each definitive line traced closing the distance on the two remaining men.

The dogs do not require the light from above, and launch themselves at the two fleeing men. They find no purchase on the larger man; he bats them away as gnats with the butt of his gun. The shorter man is borne to the ground; his compatriot kicks the dog off him and hauls him to his feet and towards the slit made earlier in the fence. The shorter man’s cursing is audible only to the man who has hold of his arm, who has heard it all before. A light finds them ten steps shy of the fence, and bullets follow it immediately in a harsh stutter.

The shorter man stumbles.

Bruno re-wrapped the bandage on the bite - he’d been in a hurry and had tightened it too much the first time - before turning to the bandage on Graves’ calf. A through and through shot, which was something to be grateful for later but for right now just made wrapping it tightly a priority.

The larger man takes the shorter man under one arm and drags him bodily through the wire; he can only hope the other team made it out before the shitshow started. The lights are following them beyond the fence and more shots ring out. A rising alarm is beginning to wake the base, and more hounds can be heard baying into the night. The larger man shifts to make a continued half-carry easier, and reaches into one of the many pouches on the shorter man’s belt. The shorter man makes no objection, and the larger man pulls out a small box with an antenna and a button on the side, and presses the button.

The world explodes in light.

Bruno tied a new bandage over the bullet holes and stood with a groan. Gathering the end of the tarp, he turned and re-oriented himself against the sun; they had a long to go for the rendevzous, and Tunstall was probably fretting himself to flinders in his own, stoic way.

Crunch, crunch, ssssshhhhf. Crunch, crunch ssssssshf.

Breathe in.

It was a surprisingly cold day, in late November, and the grass bent before the wind in rolling waves interrupted only by unseen wildlife. The smell of frost rolled down the mountain, but the earth was still soft beneath Bruno where he lay motionless. Waiting.

Graves would have made some inane comment on the weather, probably at length as he was slowly driven mad by the inaction, but he had still been recovering from both his rabies boosters and the stitchwork on his leg when the call had come down from the captain and the usual suspects were dispatched out to the ass end of nowhere with a new mission.

Breathe out.

The orders were reasonably straightforward; in a week’s time there would be a convoy along the road that wound down through Viang Xai with a VIP riding on the third truck from the rear. It was up to the teams to make sure that VIP never reached his destination. Or if he did, that he wasn’t in any fit state to do anything once he got there.

The two teams would be airdropped into the area from one of the planes on the run scheduled for the area the next night; they had only just enough time to grab the kit he’d need before Jaxun packed them into a jeep and off for the nearby airbase. With any luck, the drop would put them no more than four days away from the target area and they could be in position well before the convoy that particular stretch of road.

Breathe in.

The trip to the airfield hadn’t been bad, but the reception was…frosty. The flyboys very loudly did not appreciate the extra hour it would take them to drop “some bullet-soaked jarheads” on the target co-ordinates, but there was an undercurrent of something more virulent that spoke of a deeper reason. They made a pointed effort to snub the team as a whole and Bruno in particular, mocking IMAF audibly when he was in range and refusing to speak to him directly when they could at all avoid it.

Their problem, however, was not Bruno’s problem. He knew better than to rise to their distinctly juvenile attempts to rile him - though he did save some of the choicer comments about his division to pass on later to those who would very much care and were in a better position to do something about it. For now, Bruno had a mission and a team and if the clowns in the air force wanted to nurse a stupid grudge they could find another sucker; as long as they delivered them where they needed to be.

Breathe out.

Whatever their personal feelings, the flyboys were good at their jobs and managed to drop them all almost half a day’s walk closer to the destination than he’d thought they’d manage in between all the snide remarks and cold shoulders. Of course, it helped that none of the team had been able to hear the parting shots over the howl of the wind as they dropped from the open door into freefall.

Bruno enjoyed aerial drops. The feeling of the wind his face, the blood in his ears, and the vistas expanding out below him - it was a silent enjoyment he knew few shared. Most of the rest of the men he’d deployed with over the years were either terrified and watching their altimeters like hawks (Graves) or whooping and hollering in excitement, screwing around - as much as mission parameters allowed - with their trajectories by moving their arms and legs and playing with the air currents that battered them (Weber).

Breathe in.

After landing safely, it had taken both teams three and a half days to reach the co-ordinates they’d been given. It was a hilly area, with the road cutting through several low points and open to wide grain fields on one side. The heavily forested hills offered good cover but reduced sightlines, and while pursuers would be hampered by brush it wasn’t the kind of protection offered by even a small cliff face.

The road itself wasn’t the most well-traveled, and in the days before the convoy was due to arrive Bruno saw maybe two cars driving along it. Still, the reduction in visibility from the trees meant they would have to find a way to get the convoy to stop or risk missing - and that was entirely unacceptable. Tunstall had worked through a dozen different strategies before metaphorically tossing in the towel and ordering the felling of a number of young trees the night before the designated day and winding them together to form a crude but resilient and natural-looking barrier across the roadway.

Breathe out.

And then there was no time. Everyone was in position. The noise of the convoy echoed up the road long before the trucks themselves hove into sight. A lead jeep, followed immediately by two cargo trucks that were likely packing rations, given the way the canvas on them was tied in the cross-ties favored by civilians, followed by one of probable munitions, one with the canvas bulging in odd places, another of munitions, another two of food, and a trailing jeep that would occasionally range out to the side of the convoy if the ground wasn’t too torn up.

As the convoy came into sight, Bruno didn’t tense. His finger rested easily along the trigger guard and the scope rested comfortably in front of his face. The sun was behind him, and he’d taken the time to arrange enough shade to prevent any tell-tale winks. The rest of his team had taken up defensive positions, with Hurley’s team further down the road ready with the fallback plan just in case. The butt of the rifle rested easily against his shoulder and the rhythm of his breathing didn’t change. His focus narrowed, the world dropping away as his eyes found a hawk-faced man in plain clothes sitting in the passenger seat of the second to last food truck. The convoy slowed as the leading jeep saw the obstruction. Bruno’s finger drifted to the trigger.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Squeeze.

Bruno snorted forcefully as he fumbled with the hem of his shirt.

Half a day’s hike from extraction, and they just had to run across a patrol right where they shouldn’t be. The only bridge for nearly twenty miles over a jagged scar of a gorge, and the patrol right on top of it and looking in no hurry to move any time soon.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Tunstall had given them the order to engage.

Weber managed to get one of them before they knew he was there, but the other six wasted no time in leaping into the fray when their comrade took the final tumble. The first man unwisely chose to try and grapple with Bruno head-on, and received a kick to the diaphragm for his troubles. He dropped, wheezing, and the second guy tried his luck by jumping on Bruno’s back and clinging around his neck while guy number three went low with a knife; apparently they thought the biggest guy equaled the biggest threat, and while they weren’t entirely wrong Bruno was far from the only one they had to worry about. Bruno kicked guy number three in the face and a nasty crunch signaled the end of number three’s participation in life.

Numbers four, five, and six had their own troubles to deal with. Mindful of how sound carried, nobody on the team was using a gun - not that it materially affected their prowess. Graves had guy number four by the shirt and was apparently engaged in punching the guy until he couldn’t stand up straight anymore; Tunstall already had guy number five on the ground in a spreading pool of what probably wasn’t strawberry syrup, while Weber was playing a weird cat and mouse knife game with guy six.

Man number two was dedicated to trying to strangle Bruno to death, and Bruno was starting to get light-headed. Still, he was almost a foot taller and had almost a hundred pounds on the guy, so he did what seemed like the most logical thing to do at the time, and threw himself over backward. Taken by surprise, the smaller man had no chance to escape and Bruno landed on him very heavily. A gasping wheeze was followed by the arms around his neck loosening and Bruno rolled out of the now-slack grip and back to his feet.

Graves had dropped his guy - there wasn’t much face left, and Bruno suspected there wasn’t any breath either - and as Bruno rose he ambled over to kick number two in the head hard enough to leave said head at a funny angle, and Bruno nodded at him. Tunstall had apparently gotten tired of waiting for Weber and had stabbed guy six in the neck; a blood-covered Weber was complaining about either the mess or the fact that Tunstall had taken all the fun out of it, it was hard to tell.

Bruno sighed as he wiped his blade on the uniform of one of the dead men. Weber was a weird one in close combat, but in a firefight his aim was steady and he never shirked a dirty job. Bruno had straightened and hissed as pain streaked up and down his side, and the fingers he’d gingerly patted the area with had come away bloody. Seems the fucker with the knife had been faster than Bruno had originally given him credit for.

Which lead to his current predicament.

Bruno finally managed to get the shirt off, and just above his hip was a gash nearly three inches long. Graves hissed in sympathy, but Tunstall and Weber were too preoccupied with their argument to notice. It bled sluggishly, and Bruno cursed fluently in Cantonese to Graves’ raised eyebrows. He’d have to stitch the damn thing now or risk bleeding out before he could reach professional help; he was the only one in the squad who could sew worth a damn in skin.

With fingers that only trembled slightly, he yanked the medical kit from his pack and flicked it open to the needle and thread he’d taken to adding to the standard issue kit. Gritting his teeth, he flushed the wound as best he could and pulled one of the pre-threaded needles from the pack. The feeling of the needle sliding through flesh was as unpleasant as he remembered, and the thread that followed it moreso, but the prospect of bleeding out was even less appealing. A gentle tug pulled the edges of the wound shut and he tied off the first stitch.

Only five more to go.

Lucky him.

Chains clinked and rattled across a cold concrete floor.

Bruno shuffled along as best he could, hands cuffed together behind him and a chain between his feet that ran to connect to a larger chain that several other prisoners were also attached to. Political prisoners, most of them; Bruno was head and shoulders taller than all of them and had at least two inches on the largest guard. Most of the prisoners shuffled silently - save for the chains - with their heads bowed, eyes on the floor, and expressions resigned. One or two of them looked mutinously at the guards, eyes darting black hate at them whenever their attention was elsewhere.

It was one of the latter Bruno was interested in; a young man, late teens-early twenties, with a black eye and a terrible tendency to mouth off in Vietnamese. Bruno neither knew nor cared why the Chinese had taken him here; all that mattered was that Colonel Rupert Thornton needed him alive and relatively intact and not in a classified Chinese prison for enemies of the state. Captain Jaxun had provided some sort of intel from the spook Lexington about the kid, and that was as much as Thornton had decided to share. It was all that was relevant, really.

Bruno had gotten himself captured four days ago, on Thornton’s orders; extraction without internal assistance had been deemed too risky, and for whatever reason Bruno had been chosen to go inside. Normally Bruno was the one breaking people out, but orders were orders. He’d already been tortured twice - grueling six-hour sessions both - and currently sported a variety of electrical burns on his face and chest against which the shirt they’d given him itched abominably. He’d fobbed them off with some impressive-sounding but otherwise useless facts about military “operations” in the area - he’d give a lot to be a fly on the wall when the Chinese figured out “Operation Peacock” was what the guys in the motor pool called the Master Sergeant’s repeated and hopeless attempts to woo a local girl he was sweet on - and they’d left him alone to stew for a bit, presumably while they verified his intel.

More fool them.

The first explosion took out the lights, and Bruno threw himself on the largest guard so they both went down in a heap. Pandemonium predictably followed, orders put his hands over his head overlapping orders to lie perfectly still on his stomach overlapping orders to get off the guard and let him breathe. Bruno was spared the choice of which to comply with when a boot met his ribs and forced him to roll away, taking down half the chain of prisoners with him when the slack ran out in the ankle shackles.

Bruno received several prods from the butt of someone’s rifle, trying to get him to untangle and rise so they could hustle them all to cells, before the sharp report of a gun put an end to it. More shots rang out, and the thud of bodies marked the end of most of the shouting. Only more distant cries remained, nearly covering up the whimpering coming from some of the other prisoners. Boots walked themselves up to Bruno and one more shot marked the end of the wheezing from the guard Bruno had landed on before hands undid the cuffs on his wrists and he could push himself to a more upright position.

Lieutenant Roger Elliot met his gaze squarely, expression unreadable, before handing him some keys as the rest of his squad - not one Bruno was familiar with - fanned out behind him into defensive positions. Bruno nodded to the corpse a few inches away before going to work on his ankles. “Did you have to kill him, Sir? I laid him out hard.” Bruno was not a small man, and the Marines had taught him the most efficient ways to use his mass long before they’d sent him to the Asian theater. Something in Elliot’s expression curdled before he smoothed it out again, voice taking on an unpleasant tinge. “Orders, Hamilton; no witnesses. We’ll have to get rid of most of them, too, when you’ve got the one we need secured.”

He nodded at the huddled prisoners as he spoke, and Bruno’s hands stilled on the last shackle. “Sir, with all due respect -” The lieutenant rounded on Bruno before he could get the sentence out. “You have your orders, Sergeant, and I have mine. Extract the prisoner.” His tone was biting, and there was a gleam in his eyes Bruno didn’t like. Bruno looked at the line of chained men; there were eight besides the target, all in various stages of healing and malnutrition. He did some quick mental math, then looked back at the lieutenant. “Sir, yes sir,” he said, and grabbed one of the dead guards’ rifles, ejected the magazine and released the round in the chamber before going along and striking all the ankle chains from the main length.

“What. Are. You. Doing?” Elliot hissed, each word cold with a smoking fury. Bruno didn’t pause in what he was doing. “I couldn’t identify the target, sir. I narrowed it down to this group before you arrived, but they did something to my eyes. We take them all back, let HQ decide which one is the right one.” He began unlocking wrist cuffs as he spoke. not daring to turn and look. Elliot puffed out a sharp breath through his nose. “Fine. Your….lack of attention will go in my report. I trust you don’t have any trouble with your eyes while aiming at the enemy?”

The lieutenant’s words were silky and his eyes poison, and Bruno picked up another weapon from the dead guards. “Ready when you are, sir.”

Bruno blinked at the stars glimmering high overhead.

That wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be laying down, he should be moving. There was something, something that needed doing, and he had been told to do it. He braced his elbows against the ground, and started to pick himself up into a sitting position. Pain exploded behind his eyes and darkness rushed in from the corners of his vision as he heard someone else exclaim. “Goddammit-!”

Bruno blinked at the moon shining brightly overhead, dimming the stars around it with a gentle refulgence.

That wasn’t right. He needed to do something before moonrise, in the dark of the night. He may have missed that window, but he’d be damned if he failed to execute a mission now. He moved to brace his elbows against the ground, and a hand came down gently on one of his shoulders. “Fuck sake, awake ten seconds and you’re already trying to get up again. Ease off, Hammer.”

Bruno relaxed, becoming aware of a deep bruising ache all over his body as he did so, and his eyes drifted over to the owner of the voice. “Tongs? The hell?” His voice was croaky, and a blinding pain made itself known behind his eyes. He groaned, closing his eyes again on Graves’ look of concern. “The hell, you say. The hell you doing setting off those goddamn explosives when you knew you were too goddamn close, I say. And you fucking know Pick’s gonna have your ass in a sling when he hears.” Bruno blinked slowly at the venom in Graves’ voice, belied by the careful way the man held the canteen to help Bruno drink as much as he could.

Water went down the wrong pipe and Bruno choked, coughing. The spasms sent staggering shards of pain through his chest and black swirled menacingly at the edges of his vision. Graves dropped the canteen. “No, no, goddammit Hammer! Hammerton - fuck, Hamilton! Fucking-!” The black surged and Bruno knew no more.

The next thing Bruno knew was red. And pain. But mostly red.

Bruno cracked his eyes and regretted it, the sun streaming down directly into his brain through the slits of his eyelids. He closed his eyes and groaned.

Instantly the motion, of which he’d vaguely been aware and which had been sending little jolts of pain through every few seconds, came to a complete halt and a shadow fell on his eyes. He squinted, and the heavily-backlit face of Graves came into view. “Hammer? You with me?” Graves was kneeling even as he spoke, and gave Bruno a small sip from the canteen before taking it away again. Bruno frowned at him but finally answered. “Yeah, I’m with you.”

Graves gave him another small sip from the canteen, then held up his hand. “How many fingers I got up?” Bruno squinted. “Two,” he grunted, and Graves nodded. “And who’s the president?” Bruno scowled. “Ford,” was his curt answer and Graves shrugged. “I didn’t vote for him either. Cubs’ last pennant?” Bruno squinted at him. “1908. Try asking better questions when you’re looking for brain damage.”

The half-smile on Graves’ lips disappeared like a snowball in June. “Okay, how ‘bout this one? What the hell were you goddamn thinking setting off those goddamn explosives while standing less than 15 fucking yards away you goddamn maniac??” Bruno pursed his lips but Graves didn’t waver. He capitulated with a short huff. “I was thinking about finishing the mission. If I hadn’t set them off then, the bomb disposal squad they had coming in would’ve taken them down.” And the squad Graves had been standing off with a grenade and a half-empty magazine would’ve overrun Graves’ position, he didn’t add, but Graves pursed his lips anyway.

“Fuck you, Hammer, I had 'em right where I wanted them. And now we both gotta explain to Pick the hell we were thinking.” He didn’t seem terribly put out, however, and handed Bruno the canteen before standing and stretching with a theatrical groan. “You good to walk or I gotta haul your fat ass some more?” Bruno gulped greedily at the canteen for a moment, before hauling himself laboriously to his feet and handing the canteen back.

“Watch your fucking language; I’m walking so I don’t gotta hear any more of your whining.”

Graves laughed and rolled up the tarp Bruno had been laying before the two turned and began the slow plod south towards the rest of their team and relative safety.

“Hammer! Down!”

Bruno ducked as a spray of automatic weapons fire crackled through the area where his head had been half a second ago. He waited, then popped up to fire a few more rounds into the thickening smoke as flames licked the edge of the room. One opponent went down in a spray of dark blood, and Graves popped out from behind an ornate wooden desk that might once have been an antique but was now maybe two steps away from being kindling. Hopefully the rest of their team was having better luck; the “destroy the factory” objective was going well, but the “get out alive” portion was starting to look dicey. Tunstall and Weber had gone to get the supply and route manifests and should have been well on their way outside by now.

Graves fired twice, taking down another Russian “consultant” before being forced back behind the rapidly dwindling desk. “You got any bright ideas?” He shouted at Bruno, and Bruno shrugged. “Maybe,” he half-shouted back before pivoting and tossing a grenade at the end of the room where the “consultants” were taking shelter. “ёбаный пиздец!” was followed by the hasty sounds of cover being taken and Bruno surged up and away towards the rear of the room even as the grenade exploded to the gentle patter of shrapnel and chunks of building.

Grabbing Graves on the way - who managed to find the time to curse Bruno’s parentage loudly - Bruno jumped through the picture windows out of the office and onto the factory floor.

He landed hard and rolled, while Graves fell ass over teakettle onto the pile of tarps Bruno had noticed on the way in. Bruno was back on his feet in an instant, but Graves simply lay there. Bruno kicked his ankle lightly, and Graves glared at him. “You know, when you are about to pull some real bullshit, it’s generally considered polite to let your teammates know ahead of time.” Graves’ conversational tone of voice was belied by the absolutely filthy glare he was leveling at Bruno. Bruno thought for a moment, then deadpanned. “Kowabunga.”

Graves snorted. “I dare you to say that to Pick’s face the next time he asks you what the hell you were thinking,” he said, and held out his hand for Bruno to haul him to his feet. “Fucking hilarious. How much time do we have?” The ceiling nearest the office they had just vacated chose that moment to collapse to the factory floor in a spray of sparks and bits of ceiling. Both men looked at it. “Not long,” Bruno opined, and Graves gave an ironic little bow. “After you, big guy.”

Bruno lead the way towards the factory’s northern exit - their route out called for them to cut through the town to the North and pick up Tunstall, Weber, and Hurley’s distraction team as well as some transportation - and Graves followed closely. Resistance was light until they reached the exit itself.

“Hammer!”

Bruno-half turned at his partner’s shout and the knife aimed at his spine scraped his lower back to sink in just above the hip bone, scraping his pelvis.

Bruno responded immediately, his shot a queer double-echo to Graves’. The assailant - a factory-worker by his clothes - sank back down behind the crates he’d sprung from, a disgusting ten pounds of mince standing in for his head. More shots rang out behind them, voices in Russian joining equally outraged voices in other languages Bruno didn’t have the spare attention to identify. “Shit,” Graves breathed, poking at the knife. Bruno slapped his hand away and fired another shot at their pursuers.

“Break it off if you can, but leave it in. Give me your spare.” Graves was no slouch in the firearms department, but of the two of them Bruno had better aim and Graves knew it. Handing him the requested gun without a murmur, Graves bent down while Bruno picked off their pursuers and studiously ignored the cursing and the jarring pain. It was until a white-hot pain exploded across his hip and he nearly dropped the gun on that side that he finally looked down to see a somewhat contrite-looking Graves hastily putting down a piece of rebar that glowed evilly at the tip.

“Ow,” Bruno said pointedly, and Graves shrugged. “What you get for throwing me out a fucking window. We clear to move?” Bruno considered for a moment, then shot the last remaining guard between the eyes. The ceiling over the factory floor proper collapsed with a roar and flame rushed toward them eagerly.

“We are now. Ladies first.”

It was a quiet, clear night.

Three men slept under the cover of heavy foliage while another regarded the world around him silently at a strategic distance from the others. Insects hummed under the eaves while nocturnal predators and prey went about their nightly world under the silent silvering of the full moon high above.

It was two more days to the first objective, then another four to the second, but they’d had decent luck so far with weather and patrols both and were now somewhat ahead of schedule. If their luck held, they might even get the extra time as a two-day pass into town for some R&R. The man on watch smirked to himself at the thought of what he’d do with a two-day pass, then shook his head. Mission first, fun later.

Looking up at the moon for a moment, he rose and went to wake the next shift.

“Hammer,” Amos muttered quietly. “Hammer, you bastard, wake up and smell the chemical agents. It’s my turn to sleep.” He reached down to poke the already-stirring larger man - never a good idea to prod him when he was more than half-asleep but funny as hell to do it when he was awake - and froze as a hiss split the night. Unless Hamilton had finally developed a nonverbal vocabulary outside of growls that reminded Amos of the brown bears he used to chase out of the garbage cans with a shotgun, there was something more than his partner in that bed roll.

“Don’t. Move.” He said, and he could feel Hamilton tense. Moving slowly, he reached into his pack and pulled out the heavy-duty flashlight from its pouch. With a click - and a wince, because it was fucking bright as hell and he’d just spent three hours staring out into the streetlight equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta - he turned the thing on and, just to fuck with him, flashed Hamilton in the face with it before slowly sliding it down the larger man’s still form like he was checking him out at the beach.

The light, of course, brought the other two nearby men awake and, once they found no visible threat, complaining. Weber was, anyway. “The hell you doin’ shinin’ a fuckin’ light out at this hour? You wanna bring every Commie from here to China down on our damn heads?” Weber’s voice was muzzy with sleep - he’d been the previous watch - but he kept his voice low. Amos ignored him and kept moving the light down Hamilton’s tense form.

About halfway down, he found it. Sitting just above his teammate’s ass, like some super freaky and dangerous tramp stamp, was a little black snake with white bars up and down its length. A little, pissed-off black snake Amos amended mentally as the thing hissed again, a noise all out of proportion with its size. Amos was about 96% sure everyone quit breathing for a hot second after the thing stopped, but as it seemed content to just sit where it was there was a collective exhalation that almost rivaled the light breeze.

“What does it look like?” Tunstall asked, voice low but even in that dangerous way he had. Amos moved the light a little. “Black snake, white bars, kinda small.”

“Get it off me,” Hamilton said, a weird tension in his voice, and Amos felt his eyebrows climbing for his hairline. “Do my ears deceive me? Is Sergeant Fucking Hammer afraid of…snakes?” Weber snickered at Amos’ remark, but Hamilton’s response was cut off by the thing shifting around; nobody breathed again until it had stilled for several long seconds. “No,” Hamilton muttered emphatically, clearly trying not to upset the danger worm any more than he already had. “I have a slight problem with the fact that one of the world’s most venomous snakes has decided to take up residence on my ass.”

“Maybe it’s an ass kind of snake. You’ve had every girl in the country staring at it, maybe the reptiles are trying to get a piece of that action,” Amos rebutted automatically, mouth moving on autopilot as he scanned the forest floor nearby to find the kind of stick he wanted. Wasn’t his first time convincing a damn snake that it wanted to be somewhere else, he just needed the right kind of stick or this night would be whole fucking lot worse.

“A comforting thought,” Hamilton replied dryly, and Amos grinned to himself. Whoever said his teammate was a humorless asshole….was right, most of the time. Hamilton’s Sahara-dry wit and excellent timing were buried deep beneath the surface, especially when anyone with a rank higher than lieutenant was around. Amos’ smile dimmed. Brass turned Hamilton into a right joyless bastard, a stickler for orders and rules and unquestioned authority that made Amos…uneasy. Brass were people, and people made mistakes…

He shook his head and picked up a stick that looked about what he wanted before turning back to Hamilton. “Alright, hold still,” he said needlessly, and he could feel the glare Hamilton sent his way like burning summer sunshine on his skin. “What are you doing?” Tunstall asked, the tension humming in his voice like a plucked guitar string. Amos took the tip of his tongue between his teeth and didn’t answer; much as he loved winding his teammates up, this trick required all the concentration he had to spare.

Moving slowly, he brought the forked end of the stick up to the snake’s head. Ever so gently, he eased the pronged end as close to under the thing’s head as he dared; no more hissing was a good sign, the tongue flicking in and out rapidly less so. Still, he just had to press the stick carefully, just like so, move it up a little, easy does it, and…

Amos twitched the stick violently, sending the small snake flying into the night and Hamilton was up in a flash, breathing heavily. “Don’t,” he said emphatically, reaching out and jerking the flashlight out of Amos’ hand, “ever do that again.” Amos poked him with the stick he was still holding. “Thank you, Tongs. I wouldn’t be alive without you, Tongs. My eternal gratitude, o manliest of men, for saving me from twelve inches of death. Any one of these responses would be appropriate and helpful, especially when I just saved your life.”

Weber snickered, and Tunstall coughed suspiciously. Amos patted himself on the back internally; it took a lot to get a reaction out of Tunstall.

Hamilton stared at him for a long moment before he clicked off the flashlight. “Find a different spot to sleep, we don’t know if it’ll come back or not.” Amos stared at Hamilton’s dark silhouette for a long moment before he moved to collect the bedroll. “Such a comforting thought will lull me straight to dreamland, I’m sure. You always know the thing to say to give me the best fucking sleep of my life.”

It didn’t take long for Amos - and the others, nobody really liked the thought of bunking with a reptile if they didn’t have to - to redo the sleeping arrangement to something less likely to let snakes come and go as they pleased. Yawning widely and pointedly, he climbed in and made himself comfortable.

“Tongs.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Amos smiled softly to himself. “Anytime.”

Bruno stuck out like a sore thumb.

It was hard to blend in when you were a foot taller and broader than everyone around you, but today Bruno wasn’t even trying. He simply waded through the sea of bobbing heads around him, his destination clear. He had a two-day pass, and some of the men from his old unit - before Jaxun had him earmarked for special assignments - had invited him to a particular bar they gave glowing praise. Bruno wasn’t, as a general rule, one to get drunk - excepting extenuating circumstances - but these were good guys and he wanted to see how they were doing.

And so he walked down a perfectly normal street in friendly territory - for a given value of friendly, anyway; he garnered a lot of suspicious looks as he walked. He ignored them, even with the way they sent uneasy prickles down his spine. He wasn’t in enemy territory, no-one was going to start shooting at him in the middle of the street. It was going to be a nice, easy night catching up with buddies over a few beers and pouring the sloppiest guys into a cab was the only challenge for this evening.

If Bruno told himself that enough times, he would make it so.

A snatch of Vietnamese drifted to him, and Bruno spun with his heart in his mouth. A few people near shied away at the sudden movement, but no threats manifested themselves. And yet Bruno couldn’t get his heart to slow from the rapid tattoo it was beating against his ribs; that had sounded familiar, almost, in a way that made his gut swoop and teeth clench. It wasn’t logical, and Bruno breathed deeply in through his nose and out through clenched teeth. This was ridiculous, what the hell-

A car backfired.

Bruno twitched.

He turned, and headed back the way he came. He was too close to something he didn’t like - he’d almost drawn a gun, back there, among all those innocent civilians. Instincts that had saved his life on more than one occasion now had him sweating like a sinner in church while his heart did a tango. Every noise was magnified, every breath a pant, and what he thought was a gentle brush past a man wearing a conservative blue suit nearly sent the fellow toppling to the ground. Bruno’s pace increased; he was just short of jogging, strides eating up the ground, as he headed back to the base.

He’d work out this adrenaline rush on the range and hang out some other time. Bruno refused to be a danger to himself and others; he’d get his head on straight, then he’d go out on the town.

Sometime.

“Wake up!”

Pain lanced through Bruno as he gasped for air. Unfortunately, being facedown in a mud puddle was not conducive to getting the oxygen his lungs were screaming for, and Bruno rolled onto his back choking and spluttering. Around him the rain fell in sheets on the rest of the squad and the craters in the ground where the explosions had gone off. Three forms lay terribly still under the downpour, but others were already up and moving between those who were visibly moving. He couldn’t say who had yelled at him, but now was certainly not the time to be resting.

Bruno coughed one more time, spitting out what he could of the mud, and rolled himself to his feet. A stitch of pain made itself known on his ribs every time he took too deep of a breath, but there wasn’t much to be done and he could walk it off. Wiping mud from his face, he picked his way over to the nearest groaning body.

Lieutenant Rodney Castor, fresh to the front and green as they got, whimpered as he held the remaining third of his left leg. Bruno wasted no time getting the tourniquet out of the basic medical kit and bending down to tie off the stump. The first touch had the LT screaming, but by the time Bruno had finished tightening it he’d passed into unconsciousness.

Bruno’s mouth set into a thin line as he went to check on the rest of the squad. He’d had a bad feeling about the game trail the kid had insisted they use to save time when the rain had started - it went in approximately the right direction and was considerably easier than making their way through the underbrush - but hadn’t objected when Castor’d pulled rank and insisted. The squad, consisting largely of FNGs and unused to the downpours of the region, had agreed enthusiastically with the LT’s plan and Bruno had done what he could and put one of the more experienced Cpls - Corporal Emmet Finely - at the front while he himself took the rear.

It hadn’t helped. Finely was one of the still forms, both legs and an arm missing. Bruno couldn’t say for sure what had happened, but judging from the smell hanging in the heavy rain he would guess Finely had missed the mines in the deluge - for all the mines had certainly not missed him.

It was almost twenty minutes before Bruno had restored some form of order, his ribs not letting him take the deep breath he needed to shout. In addition to Finely they’d lost PFCs Challonde and Fairview, and two more besides the LT were missing limbs. Of the walking wounded, the most serious was Cpl Edward Berge, who was missing an ear. Most of the rest were bruised, and Bruno wasn’t the only one walking carefully and taking shallow breaths.

The real problem was that they were still more than ten miles from their objective, and more than twice that from the nearest friendly outpost. Bruno crouched beneath the meager shelter offered by two hastily strung together branches and squinted at the maps he’d pulled from the LT’s pack.

Their target was a supply depot, and while they could possibly restock before blowing the place to kingdom come, none of them were anything more than field medics at best. Along the same train of thought, trying to get the injured to the friendly outpost - a field hospital - over the - he squinted - twenty seven miles of dense forest terrain was also unlikely to leave them long for the world. Especially the ones missing limbs.

“Sarge.”

Bruno looked up sharply into the ghost-white and mud-smeared face of PFC Gregor Daniels, who quailed under his dark look. “Yes, Daniels?” Bruno said, resisting the urge to snap when the man just shifted uncomfortably as the silence dragged on. Daniels gulped. “Well, sir, there’s this girl I’m sweet on…” He trailed off as Bruno’s glare sharpened incredulously. The kid wanted to talk about the birds and the bees now?

“She’s not here, Daniels; tell me why I should care.” Bruno managed to keep his voice even, and Daniels straightened. “Well, sir, she’s back at base, sir, but she told me once she had family out this way sir. Maybe they could help us, sir?”

Bruno stared for a long moment before gesturing to the maps. “Show me.” Daniels leaned over and poked the bend of a small creek less than three miles away as the crow flew. Bruno blew a sharp breath out through his nose and regretted it almost instantly as his ribs complained. It was a good spot, not too far out of their way, and while the amount of “help” available was an unknown quantity, if and only if necessary they could take what structures they found there by force with the remainder of their complement.

“Right. We need stretchers and volunteers to pull them. Leave the bodies for now. We’ll head to the farm and see what we find.” Daniels nodded frantically and scrambled away while Bruno himself went about organizing the teams and marching order. No one with broken ribs could carry or pull a stretcher for more than a half-hour at a time, with at least ten minutes of rest in between shifts; internal injuries after the fact were not on the agenda for the day. Anyone who didn’t have broken or cracked ribs could pull for longer, but needed at least half an hour between their turns.

By the time everyone had gotten sorted, the rain had slacked off considerably. Bruno took point, keeping a wary eye out for further mines, while the others ranged in a loose column behind him. When it came time for his shift at pulling a stretcher, he swapped places with Daniels and kept going.

It took them more than an hour to reach the waypoint; a small hut, a slightly larger shed, and the destroyed remnants of larger buildings in a loose square around a central well didn’t exactly inspire confidence but they were nearly out of options at this point. Bruno gestured to Daniels who moved up to flank him and they both walked over to the hut. Knocking had no effect, but Daniels’ shout produced movement from within and a wrinkled, mousy woman in a grey-blue dress opened the door to peer at them fearfully.

Bruno tried to be as sincere as he could as he made their case via Daniels - Bruno understood more than he spoke, which was an unfortunate circumstance he’d rectify later - but the woman still looked terrified. Daniels stepped forward and spoke to her too rapidly for Bruno to make out the words. She didn’t look too reassured, but finally relented and pushed the door open fully before heading back into the depths of the hut. Daniels turned to Bruno.

“She’ll let us stay here for a bit, sir. Not more than a few days, a week at most. But she’ll let us use what she has as long as some of us help in the fields and share resources.” Daniels had managed to lose his earlier uncertainty, Bruno noted with a faint sense of satisfaction, and while the deal wasn’t great it would have to do. He nodded sharply and headed back to bring the rest in.

With six down past walking, Bruno did what he could. Detailing Daniels and one other to uphold their end of the deal with the civilian in whose modest abode they were currently camped in was a no-brainer; after much consideration he sent Berge and PFC Mark Ericson to the field hospital to arrange for evac. That left him with Pfc Michael Babra, sporting bruises and broken fingers, to deal with their objective. Before first light, the two-man teams had slipped into the gloom of the jungle.

They had a job to do.

Bruno sighed and dropped his head in his hands.

Beside him on the bed, a slip of a Korean woman named Sip Yoon-Ji - at least, that was the name she’d given him last night at the bar - murmured sleepily and rolled over. He hadn’t specifically gone to the bar for company, but she’d come up to him bold as brass and offered a good, if not restful, night, and he’d agreed. The direct look in her eyes, the determined set of her jaw…

Well.

He had a type.

So he’d gone with her, and they’d had an excellent night. He made sure to give as good as he got, and she had appeared to enjoy herself immensely, going so far as to invite him to stay and actually sleep. Well, more like they’d finished and cleaned up and she turned into an octopus he couldn’t disengage without hurting her, so he’d stayed. He hadn’t even had any unpleasant dreams.

And yet.

When he’d first taken off his shirt, she’d been….taken aback, to put it mildly. Bruno looked down at himself, at the patchwork web of scar tissue and memories, missions stitched into his skin. A bayonet scar down his ribs - why the Commie bastard had had one, much less one affixed, he’d never know - ran into the shiny swathe of flesh leftover from an up close and personal encounter with a flamethrower.

Knives, bullets, explosions, vehicular collisions, falls, acid, fire, electricity - he’d been through it all, and lived. Most of the time whoever had used the item in question on him couldn’t say the same. They were a testament to all he’d survived, a mission report nobody but him ever knew the full extent of.

What didn’t kill him….he sighed, and reached down to pull his shirt on. What didn’t kill wore away at him. Year after year, chip after chip. He’d lived and learned, and yet the scars kept coming. Something in Yoon-Ji’s eyes had reminded him of the look in Lori’s eyes when he’d gone off to war, a glimmer of fear on a face not used to such emotions.

It had been fleeting, but it had almost been enough to make him leave. If she hadn’t jumped him - literally - he would have. As it stood, the night had been nice. Enjoyable.

Bruno finished doing up his shirt and tucked the tail in out of habit. Checking to make sure everything was in his wallet, he padded silently from the room. In the kitchen he topped up a pitcher of water, made sure the stove was stocked with wood, refilled the rice container from the large bag in the pantry, and picked up his boots on the way out. In the hallway he paused to put them on, then headed out for the room he’d rented further from the heart of the city.

It’d been good, but it wasn’t to last.

“Dammit all to hell.”

Graves’ statement was given in an almost conversational tone, and if Bruno hadn’t been hunkered down behind the same fallen chunk of concrete as the other man, he likely wouldn’t have heard it. As it stood, despite the hail of gunfire and bullets pouring into - and around, these guys were horrible shots - their cover, Bruno heard him perfectly. For the fourth time. In three minutes.

“Got anything more useful to say?” He asked dryly, taking a blind shot around the corner. To his faint surprise and satisfaction, his shot was rewarded with a cry of pain and an easing of some of the fire coming down on their position. Graves took the opportunity to pop off a few shots of his own, and seemed mildly put out when his shots failed to produce any audible consternation among the opposition. “Yeah, fuck those guys,” was his almost petulant response and Bruno rolled his eyes; apparently Weber’s attitude was contagious for all that he wasn’t here.

“Helpful. Anything else?”

A grenade rolled up beside their shelter and Graves kicked it back towards where the Chinese were taking shelter of their own. The explosion stopped the gunfire for a moment, but the floor trembled worryingly and the silence was punctured by the groans of overstressed architecture, and Graves did a lightning-quick peek over the piece of ceiling they were hiding behind. Dropping down, he looked over at Bruno with a frown. “Yeah. This place is missing a pretty significant amount of load-bearing pillars. Also, why does this shit always happen to us and not any of the others?”

“Because the others have all the luck? Because they’re smarter than we are? Because the universe hates them less? Take your pick.” Bruno murmured absently, frowning as he looked around, the beginnings of a plan started to take shape in his brain. “Are we on the ground floor?” He asked, and Graves shrugged. “Floor plan says yeah we are, but the number of guys still here after Boots’ team cleared both stories and the worrying shimmy to our seat say nah we’re not. Why?”

Bruno smiled thinly and pulled the last of the det cord from his pack and Graves paled.

“No way in hell am I doing that stupid shit again, Hammer. Not after last time.” Bruno frowned down at the smaller man. “If you’d taken my advice about the tarps, you wouldn’t have broken your ankle.” Bruno’s measured statement was dismissed with a wave. “Yeah, well, Chisel fell on the tarps and he broke his fucking wrist. Also, do you see any tarps around here? Because I sure as hell don’t. And I’ll be damned if I get put back in fucking crutches so soon after getting out of the damn things.”

Bruno shrugged. “It’s either drop now on our own terms or drop in two minutes with the rest of the ceiling coming down with us.” Graves squinted up at the ceiling - with its spreading cracks and dust coming free - and cursed fluently in Korean. Taking that as an affirmative, Bruno handed his gun to Graves and began spreading the cord. In one of the longest minutes of his life he made a semicircle with the cord and rigged a quick detonator to his last grenade. Graves provided what covering fire he could in their limited position, emptying the magazine in his gun just as Bruno finished laying out the explosive.

Bruno motioned him over, and Graves sighed heavily as he shuffled over, reloading his gun at the same time and handing Bruno’s back to him. The heft spoke of at least half a magazine left, and Bruno tucked it back into his holster; now of all times was not a good one to accidentally shoot a teammate, if there ever was a good time for that kind of idiocy. Throwing an arm over Graves’ back and yanking him in close, Bruno pressed the button and the world went quiet as the floor dropped out from underneath them.

Graves landed on the dirt floor of the tunnel underneath first with a surprised “oomph” that Bruno felt more than heard, and was almost immediately pinned by Bruno landing on him. At least without breath he couldn’t complain, not that Bruno could have heard him anyway through the ringing in his ears, and Bruno himself didn’t have the breath but do anything to brace against…..one, two, three, ow, four chunks of roof and ceiling that came down after them. At least Graves could wriggle himself free; Bruno was pinned by the chunks of plaster and wood - thankfully the concrete pieces had mostly dropped away and to the side or he’d be in a much bigger world of hurt.

As it stood, it took Graves almost ten minutes to shift enough rubble that Bruno himself could move. Finally free, he took a minute to get his bearings while Graves spoke at length about something, probably a complaint or a critique of Bruno’s plastique skills; it didn’t matter much as Bruno still couldn’t hear anything very well and Graves sounded underwater and very far away. Rather than waste brainpower trying to decipher what he was ranting about, Bruno made a short hand gesture and started down the tunnel to the left and away from the main part of the building; hopefully they could find a tunnel to the surface or making the rendezvous was going to be very difficult.

Graves complained every step of the way out.

Bruno was pretty sure this was what Hell felt like.

It had been more than thirty interminable hours since he’d moved into place. He hadn’t made the plan, and had in fact been silently against the plan the entire time, but orders were orders. The tiny, hidden blind in the canopy of a massive tree had a great view, which put it well up on the last six places he’d been imprisoned - but it was a surer jail than any solitary confinement he’d been placed in. His orders were to maintain and defend the blind, and use the binoculars, radio equipment, and some experimental stuff from the geeks in R&D concealed within it to co-ordinate a multi-pronged attack on the base below.

It was torture.

Bruno was about 87% certain that this was against the Geneva Convention, but Jaxun had been adamant that someone had to be up in the blind at all times, and when it came time to choose who would man which position Bruno had literally drawn the short straw. Tunstall and Weber were now in defensive positions less than thirty meters from the tree Bruno himself was holed up in.

When he’d talked to Graves about it - the guy was laid up with a broken ankle and had been benched for the mission - Graves had thought that it was Lexington, more than Jaxun, who was behind the orders; the guy was obsessed with the newest and shiniest tech.

It wasn’t the waiting, so much; Bruno was used to waiting. Waiting for the right moment to strike, waiting for enemies to pass, waiting for the perfect shot - Graves often said Bruno had the patience God gave oysters, to sit still for as long as he did. Usually in more unflattering terms, but then Graves was an asshole. Still, Bruno was fine with waiting; he was even fine with the radio co-ordination - he’d done it before, though not often. It was the part of his orders that explicitly forbade him from leaving the blind to back up the other teams that had him champing at the metaphorical bit.

In the event that everything went to shit, Bruno was ordered to pack up the equipment, fire the blind, and bug out to the rally point nearly twenty miles away.

Which was probably why they had a soldier in the blind and not a tech; equipment you could pick up and stuff in a bag to carry with you. When you tried to do that to a technician they got unbelievably whiny.

A burst of static interrupted his thoughts, and Bruno poked the machine in front of him like the tech monkeys had shown him how to back at the base. The static warbled, garbled, and then steadied into the message.

“Hammer, this is Chainsaw. Team in position, over.”

Bruno poked another button.

“Chainsaw, this is Hammer. Confirmed in position, awaiting confirmations others. Over.”

“Confirmed, Hammer. Awaiting your signal. Over and out.”

Bruno reached over and pushed another button, the static fading as he resettled himself. One down, four to go; the others were slated to be in place within the next thirty minutes, and the mission would commence once Bruno gave the final confirmation.

The radio crackled again.

“Hammer, this is Wrench. Team is set in position, over.”

“Wrench, this is Hammer. Confirming your position, awaiting confirmations others. Over.”

“Roger that, Hammer, we await your signal. Over and out.”

Two teams in position, three teams to go. Bruno itched for a sniper rifle, even though he was at the very extreme limits of range; instead he had his assault rifle, two pistols, and a surprising number of grenades. None of them had been used, the blind functioning as intended and leaving Bruno nearly invisible high above the ground.

He might have felt better if someone had tried something.

“Hammer, this is Shovel. We’re in position, over.”

“Shovel, this is Hammer. Position confirmed, awaiting confirmations from others. Over.”

“Copy that, Hammer. Just give the word. Over and out.”

More than half the teams were in position. Bruno puffed a slow breath out, forcibly slowing his heart rate. Now wasn’t the time.

“Hammer, this is Pliers. Team has reached initial objective, awaiting green light. Over.”

“Pliers, this is Hammer. Team confirmed, awaiting other confirmation for start. Over.”

“Acknowledged, Hammer. Over and out.”

Bruno clicked the equipment and shook his head. One more team to go, with less than five minutes on the thirty-minute window they had to give the signal. With the majority checked in the mission would go ahead whether or not the last team was in position, but Bruno disliked the thought of starting out with less than the plan called for, especially given his already-limited capacity to assist.

There was one minute left when another burst of static came through the equipment.

“Uh, Hammer, this is Pri- Drill. This is Drill. Had some trouble on our way in, lost one and two more lightly injured. Uh, Over.”

Bruno massaged the bridge of his nose gently. Wonderful. Hopefully the kid knew more about the mission than he did about radio protocol.

“Drill, this is Hammer. You are confirmed in position, wait one for final confirmation. Over.”

“Yes. Uh, roger that Hammer. Over. Huh? Oh, over and out.”

Bruno clicked off the radio and gave himself ten seconds to re-center and make a hasty note on the pad of paper in front of him. If the kid was going to be leading the squad, he should at least know the radio protocol - even if this equipment wasn’t exactly standard issue.

When that time ran out, he reached out and pushed a very specific series of buttons. The equipment warbled alarmingly before settling down to a more familiar static hiss, and Bruno gave it the evil eye before clicking on his mic. “All teams confirmed in position, this mission is a go. Over.”

“Final confirmation received. Moving out. Over.”

“Roger that; team is moving out. Over.”

“I copy; team proceeding to first objective. Over.”

“Acknowledged. Pliers en route. Over.”

“We’re heading out. Over.”

Praying he didn’t screw this up, Bruno reached over and clicked on the equipment he’d spent about three hours being taught to use by impatient men in white coats - an experience he didn’t care to repeat, as it was somehow simultaneously less work and more stressful than boot camp. At least in boot camp the instructions were clear, and if you didn’t hear something the first time by God you’d hear it at a much louder volume the second; the scientists seemed to delight in mumbling words and instructions and were impatiently indifferent teachers at best.

Still, their exertions and Bruno’s were rewarded as several small screens popped to life with blinking markers on them. Each team had a marker, and part of the objective was to plant the marker transponders in outbound shipments before blowing the stockpile. Apparently these were a new design, supposedly much harder to detect but that projected at much longer distances than their predecessors; both Jaxun and Lexington had been weirdly fascinated with the tech, but that was their business and Bruno didn’t need to understand how it worked, only what he was supposed to do with it.

The radios, too, were experimental - some kind of encryption to them that made them untraceable over shorter distances - and harder but not impossible over long ones - and the signals un-crack-able. Bruno held the very quiet opinion that people also said the Titanic was unsinkable, but worrying it was also not his job. Though he wouldn’t mind it too much if he was traced, it would give him an excuse to put boots on the ground.

“All teams, confirm target locations. Over.”

“Hammer, this is Chainsaw. First objective confirmed in large storage barn in the south-west quadrant; entry point has yellow stripes on the door, on north face of building. Over.”

“All teams, first objective in storage barn, south-west quadrant. Chainsaw confirmed for yellow-striped northern door. Over.”

“Shovel confirms. Over.”

“Wrench confirms, moving in. Over.”

“Pliers confirms, over.”

“Yes sir, moving in. Over.”

Bruno pinched his nose. Whoever had ended up in charge of Drill was going to be the death of him.

“Hammer, Wrench. Contact, hostile squad, eliminated quietly, no friendly casualties. Over.”

Bruno ruthlessly suppressed the impulse to fidget with his gun - it would do no good here. “Confirmed, Wrench. Continue as planned. Over.”

“Hammer, Pliers. First objective completed. Over.”

Bruno glanced at the small screens and saw one of the markers had ceased moving, while the other four still drew small squiggles on the screens. “Confirmed, Pliers. Proceed to second objective. Over.”

One by one the teams reported in success at the first objective; one by one the markers on the screens ceased their movement and when the last one - Drill, naturally - had stopped, Bruno leaned over and turned that machine off before beginning to stow it away. It would no longer be useful for the current mission, and whatever happened it would be more beneficial to have it stowed and ready to go than simply sitting there like a large metal-and-plastic brick. The geek squad had given Bruno a special harness for carrying the stuff - one “scientifically proven to reduce jostling and more evenly distribute weight as to prevent early onset exhaustion” - and it was into that Bruno put the device.

In the meanwhile, the teams had been giving running updates as to their status - entrances breached, enemies avoided or disposed of, and so on - when a burst of gunfire chattered loudly over the speakers.

“Hammer, Shovel! Hot contact, large enemy presence Northwest corridor by outer wall of warehouse! Sixteen hostiles, one casualty, currently engaging! Over!”

“All teams, mission is now hot. Engage at will, prioritize second objective over engagement. Over.”

A wave of acknowledgements followed, and Bruno settled down to listen and respond with a grim tension building in his shoulders.

First to stop acknowledging was Shovel, pinned in the north-west section by an increasing amount of enemy forces. They’d only partially achieved their objective by the time their channel went dead, and Bruno directed Wrench to expand their parameters to cover the gap; Jaxun wanted nothing left of any of the warehouses and what he wanted, he got.

Next was Pliers; they’d achieved their objective and were on their way out when something exploded. Several long seconds of screaming had been cut off by a second explosion that killed the line and, Bruno could only hope morbidly, whoever had been the one screaming.

Chainsaw and Wrench went together; the two squads had joined up in the overlap section that had once been part of Shovel’s parameters and had pushed to try and join up with Pliers. Whatever had exploded had also collapsed several sections of hallway, and it was up against one of those newly-constructed walls that both groups had been set upon by almost thirty hostiles. Pinned with only the bare minimum of cover offered by the angle of the hallway, they hadn’t lasted long. Their transmission lasted long enough that Bruno could hear discussions in Cantonese before a heavy CRACK cut the transmission off.

In the end, the only one left was Drill.

“Hammer, Drill, finished secondary objective, going to rally with other squads at point. Over.”

Bruno pried his fingers from where they’d been clutching his rifle and pressed the broadcast button.

“Negative, Drill. Proceed to exit ASAP. Over.”

There were several long seconds of silence.

“Ain’t nobody left but me is there, Hammer. Over.”

Bruno swallowed over a dry throat.

“Affirmative, Drill. Over.”

Several more seconds of silence seemed to take at once forever and no time at all.

“Stay with me on the frequency, Hammer? Over.”

Bruno nodded, though the motion couldn’t possibly carry over even this kind of cutting-edge equipment.

“Affirmative, Drill. Over.”

It didn’t take long.

Bruno revised his earlier opinion; Hell didn’t feel like this. Hell was this.

Damn it all.

Someone was screaming.

To be fair, a lot of people were screaming. The dingy concrete walls echoed sound like a bitch and there were at least four other occupied interrogation rooms that he’d seen on their route thus far; the cacophony was something they’d been using to their advantage because he’d never figured out how their larger teammate managed to move on cat’s feet, and apparently neither Tunstall nor Weber knew how Hamilton did it either.

The number of occupied cells had struck him as odd; normally the places they went had one, maybe two concrete rooms of dubious use. This place had more than three corridors of the things and counting. Whatever “splinter” group this was had a lot of highly specialized interrogation specialists for a group formed “at random.”

No, he wasn’t bitter about these assholes, why do you ask?

The tenor of this scream, however, was much more nuanced than the rest - though it could be because it was further away, he personally couldn’t tell. The hoarse notes contained overtones of pure rage, the bold flavor cutting through what sounded like several walls like a tangy California red. And, of course, he’d recognize the voice anywhere.

After all, Sergeant Bruno “Hammer” Hamilton had a surprisingly good baritone voice when he’d a lot of drink in him.

Amos Graves paused, listening hard, and Tunstall stopped as well. Weber took another few steps to the next junction and checked around the corner. The echoes and the generally lifeless decor made it hard to figure out which direction he needed to be going, but he eventually pointed left at the junction Weber was checking out and they were all rewarded by the screaming getting closer.

And it was starting to sound less like a scream and more like a bellow. Like some kind of pissed-off buffalo getting ready to gore some poor fool. And the swearing! Amos sniggered and set aside a few choice phrases, and Tunstall’s face was an absolute picture; he wasn’t sure where his errant teammate was getting his stuff, though in the back of his mind he was more than ready to lay blame at the feet of Kreepy Krieger. Guy was a menace, honestly.

Still, the words ended in a hoarse cry of pain and Amos’ slight smirk turned into a deep frown that was mirrored on the faces of his comrades. Hamilton was good; whatever they were doing to him in that interrogation room had to be either particularly bad or going on for awhile. He quickened his pace at the thought and Weber fell back to let him take point.

His concern was mostly for getting a teammate out of this damn place, but there was also a niggling little thought at the back of his mind that had serious concerns about the caliber of replacement they’d get if they had to replace Hamilton. At this point Amos was pretty sure Hamilton was basically the best in the game and replacing him would be like replacing a Firebird with a Pinto.

They were getting closer; the screams were more clear now, less muffled by walls, and the nasty hum of something electrical preceded every one of them.

Well, that was mildly alarming.

Amos was almost sprinting now, giving corners only the most cursory of checks and leaving knives embedded in the guards he encountered rather than take the time to yank them out. Knives were replaceable, partners were not. tunstall and Weber were hot on his heels, and while he could feel the kind of concerned gaze that spelled a dressing-down later from Tunstall for doing stupid shit, the man was at least willing to let it slide for now - which, really, said volumes about the kind of concern the guy was feeling.

He burst into the interrogation room and nearly slipped in the blood on the floor. Hamilton was tensed like a bowstring, tied to a chair while his spine arched in a surprisingly perfect U shape. There were electrodes on every major muscle group, all hooked up to an ominous machine Amos wasted no time putting two slugs into. There was a fizzling pop and a puff of smoke from the machine as all the dials blew out, and the two operators of the bastard thing turned around with shouts on their lips that died there as Amos pegged them too, each with his own neat headshot.

Holstering his gun before the bodies had even hit the floor, Amos was over beside Hammer in an instant as the larger man slumped in his restraints with Tunstall and Weber right there beside him. Yanking the mouth guard out - nice of them to make sure the guy didn’t bite his tongue off while they tortured him to death, Jesus - he started pulling the electrodes off; Tunstall and Weber helped as best they could, Tunstall leaning his not inconsiderable weight on Hamilton to keep the twitching to a minimum while Weber did what he could to start getting the electrodes on the other side off. Hamilton himself was panting and jerking, whatever the hell they’d done to him obviously lingering; a Hammer coming apart at the seams was not something Amos like to see any day but he especially didn’t like to see it when they had to sprint their way out of a high-security facility.

“You gonna be able to walk?” Tunstall inquired with a forced evenness that Hamilton seemed too out of it to call him on. “Well, I’m sure as hell not st-staying here, comfy as it was,” Hamilton responded dryly, and Amos shrugged. “I dunno, I think with a new coat of paint, some carpets, a few nice art prints and doilies, the place could be pretty cozy. What d'you think?”

Hamilton glared at him, the lines in his face deeper than usual, and Amos held up his hands in innocence while Weber punched him lightly on the shoulder. “C’mon Tongs, you know the only way to really decorate a space like this,” He pulled out a radio button with a clicker on one end and a fairly threateningly large button on the other. “Is to raze it down to the foundations and salt the Earth it rested upon. Care to do the honors?”

Hamilton slid a questioning glance at Tunstall, somehow taking in their surroundings along the way, and Amos grinned as he poked the prone man. “Incendiary charges on the far side of the building, with Boots’ squad on standby waiting for the fireworks show. We set them off and hurry out the back with all the other poor, frightened sods they’ve got penned up in here.”

Hamilton thought for a moment, then grabbed the trigger mechanism. “Sounds good to me.” He pressed the button.

“Look what the tide washed in. Ain’t this a little dry for you, squid?”

Bruno sighed internally. He’d come to the bar for a night off and a few quiet drinks after the last mission, but it looked like that idea was rapidly going down the drain. A five foot four kid in Army fatigues had come in with an obvious chip on his shoulder not half an hour ago and had tried to pick a fight with every guy in the room, Bruno included. Why he was looking to get his ass beat, Bruno couldn’t be sure, but neither Bruno nor the four other marines in the room had risen to his bait and he’d flung himself onto a bar stool and ordered several shots of whiskey.

The newly-arrived shoal of swabbies, however, didn’t look so sanguine about the guy’s mouth. Most of them appeared to be on the younger side, probably on their first cruise and out for good time on a night’s leave, and as a group appeared to be taken aback that they’d get challenged by one single dude before they’d even managed to get rowdy. Still, they weren’t about to ignore a comment like that.

“Excuse me, dog face? Are you barking at us? Because all I hear is yapping from some chihuahua who don’t know any better.” None of the swabbies were more than a Seaman in rank, but the one who’d spoken stood out by virtue of being the tallest man in the room except Bruno, if Bruno decided to stand up. It was, of course, exactly the wrong response to make as the army kid stood up with a dangerous light in his eyes; Bruno quietly finished his drink.

“I said, squids, that you’re drier than your momma’s snatch last night. Sitting pretty on a nice boat while some of us do the real heavy lifting in this war.” For all the guy wasn’t making much sense - three shots of whiskey in less than an hour was probably not aiding his coherence, but Bruno had his doubts as to how clever this guy was on a good day - the swabbies weren’t about to let that by them. “Excuse me?” said the spokesman, his buddies fanning out to flank him as tension snapped in the air like lightning looking for a target.

Bruno sighed and stood up.

“Kid, you got one chance to leave on your own two feet.” His statement damped the rising tension like a grounding wire. Most of the swabbies hadn’t seen him sitting there and none of them had apparently realized exactly how big Bruno was. The spokesman suddenly looked a lot less sure of himself, and fell back a half-step.

Army kid didn’t even flinch, meeting Bruno’s eyes directly in a challenge that would have been laughable in a guy twice this kid’s size. “Gonna make me, jarhead? Muscle Always Required, Intelligence Not Essential. My buddies taught me how to deal with your kind.” Bruno very much doubted that the kid had ever met his kind before; if he had, he would’ve taken the option to walk out. He sighed.

And punched the kid clean off his feet.

The blow was nothing fancy, no telegraphing, no dramatization, no nonsense. His fist, the kid’s face, and the guy was out like a light. The swabbies seemed taken aback, the bartender was giving Bruno a long-suffering look, and the four marines were giving him approving nods. Bruno returned the last silently, then bent to pick the kid up and slung him over his shoulder.

“Did he pay for his drinks?” Bruno asked the bartender, and the guy shook his head. Bruno counted out a few bills, then set them on the bar before turning for the door. “Hey man…thanks?” said one of the swabbies uncertainly and Bruno shrugged. “It was time for me to leave anyway. I’ll dump the kid off where he needs to be, you guys enjoy leave.”

The crowd of swabbies parted before him - he would swear there were more than before - like a school of fish before a shark and Bruno silently made his way out onto the street to start the long slog back to base.

“Get up.”

Bruno’s muscles tensed involuntarily, trying to obey the order given, but a wave of pain ripped through him and he subsided with a groan. “Don’t….Don’t think I can,” he grunted, trying to move his arms through what felt like sludge. Everything was…Strange. Distant. The air around him dragged like pudding, and his muscles felt like jell-o, while the noises that reached his ears seemed like they were underwater. Except for the voice.

“I wasn’t asking you to think, I’m telling you! On your feet soldier!” Footsteps crunched clear over the rocky ground, crisp where everything else wavered strangely. They stopped right beside his head even as Bruno made another valiant attempt to obey.

“Hurts,” he gritted out, his own voice more felt than heard through the cacophony around him. Someone was screaming? People were yelling, something heavy was moving, and shots rattled like popcorn in a can; all of it was far away. Bruno couldn’t reach where it was, though he felt like he should. The voice agreed.

“Walk it off, Hamilton. Dyin’ ain’t a part of the mission objectives.” Gravel crunched again clearly. “Get up, you’re needed!” Dirt and rocks scraped together, liked they’d been stamped on by a heavy boot.

Bruno squinted. The sky above was red, but not with dawn; a thick haze in the air reflected even more light, making shapes murky and indistinct at beyond more than a few feet. Large shapes moved cautiously in the smog, a distant rumbling in the earth marking their progress. Smaller, black shapes surrounded them in loose formations, walking through the hellscape carefully as their forms flickered uncertainly.

Bruno coughed wetly, and the coppery stink of blood filled his nose as he spat red on red, the dusty ground drinking in the glistening liquid greedily. The blood smell managed to overcome all the other scents competing for attention; the sulphur stink of explosives, the sandy smell of the dirt underneath his face, the choking stink of the vehicles, and…..a hint of cologne?

“Get up, Hamilton! Today ain’t the day!” Bruno’s eyes automatically sought the source of the voice. Standing there in, for some reason, full Service B uniform, was Gunnery Sergeant Major Williams. Unlike the rest of the scene he was clear, each crisp fold and crease in the uniform peculiarly sharp, every feature of his - displeased - face visible in high definition.

“Gunny,” Bruno wasn’t sure what to say to a man dead five years; Williams had died of a negligent discharge on the range he’d been training recruits on. The fact that he was here, with Bruno was…concerning. “Is it time, then?” Bruno asked heavily, both fearing and already half-accepting the answer.

Williams wasn’t impressed. “That shot do for your ears as well as your ribs? I just said today ain’t the day. You’re needed, Hamilton, now more than ever. So get on your feet! Ain’t time for a damn nap!” He swung his boot forward, a solid kick aimed at Bruno’s head.

Bruno opened his eyes just in time to see the knife heading for his chest.

Bringing up his rifle to block it was instinctual, the look of surprise on the soldier wielding it comical, and the moment of stunned inaction it caused just enough time to bring his rifle back around to bear and fire. The enemy soldier toppled, his chest ripped open in a spray of bullets and blood, and Bruno had a moment to look around.

The APCs, if they had ever really been there, were certainly gone now; there was a haze in the air made of smoke and other unsavory chemicals, but it didn’t obscure the vision. The air smelled somewhat of said dangerous chemicals, but more of dusty ground and petrichor. Clouds gathered ominously high overhead, but for now there was no rain.

The unmistakable sounds of a fight were coming from just up the road, though, and Bruno pushed himself to his feet with a groan. He spat more blood onto the ground, then grimaced as he traced the split in his lip with his tongue. It looked like the guy who’d come at him with a knife had deserted the larger fight to scavenge corpses, as there was no-one else in Bruno’s line of vision.

He oriented himself with the battle sounds and took a few steps before pausing. “Thanks,” he said, not looking around.

Behind him came a faint chuckle. “Anytime. Semper Fi, Hamilton.” The voice faded as it spoke until the very last word was nothing more than a whisper.

Bruno readied his gun and marched forward towards the fight.

The knife made an unpleasant sucking noise as he pulled it out of his side, followed by a flow of dark red blood.

Staff Sergeant Alexei Daniels, call-sign “Anvil” - Rex, to anyone who had the right to call him by his first name - grimaced in pain even as he shoved the pressure bandage into place and tied it off hurriedly. The North Korean who’d gotten a lucky swing in had gotten a new hole in his head in return, but that still left Rex with a deep hole where one wasn’t supposed to be and less than a day left to finish the op. Red was already starting to peek through the bandage even as he surveyed his handiwork, and he let his shirt fall with a grimace before heading back to the others.

It was a four-man squad on the inside this time; the usual suspects, of course. Lieutenant Jack Tunstall, call-sign “Pick”, Corporal Frederic Weber, call-sign “Chisel”, and Sergeant Bruno Hamilton, call-sign “Hammer.” Together the four of them made up one of Jaxun’s favorite sabotage teams, usually paired up with Staff Sergeant Michael Hurley’s - callsign “Boots” - distraction team, which tended to have a maximum of eight guys depending on who was in the hospital at any given time (currently a six-man team as PFCs Frances “Laces” Turner and Tomas “Taps” Hawk were down for a broken arm and a broken ankle, respectively).

Rex’d been dubious of Hamilton when Jaxun had first assigned them. Hamilton’d just been acquired by Jaxun for the unit, and it’d been their first run together. Rex had looked into his records as a matter of course, and found an excellent operative and a good man - and that’d worried him. This wasn’t the type of unit where you wanted good men; this was the kind of unit that wanted every bastard and scoundrel it could get its hands on. Men who’d use any means necessary to get the job done, who could leave behind impediments without batting an eye whether that impediment was a civilian or an injured comrade.

But Hamilton had proved himself to be a good and competent soldier, whatever his person feelings were, and he’d gotten on with the team like several warehouses, a bridge, two depots, and a mansion on fire. Hamilton didn’t need to leave people behind because he was good enough to get the job done no matter what, and Rex could respect the hell out of that kind of competence. If it wasn’t for his rigid adherence to authority and rank, Rex could see him making an excellent field officer; as it was, he was an asset to every team he was attached to.

Hamilton cocked an eyebrow at him as he came back, but Rex just shook his head. Wasn’t like any of them was a band-aid; first they’d finish the mission, then he’d worry about the new ventilation he’d acquired. Hamilton didn’t appear convinced, but let it go anyway.

“You ready, Anvil?” Tunstall’s voice was deep but neutral; Rex suspected he knew more than he was letting on, but nodded anyway. “Right. Let’s go.” Tunstall didn’t wait to see if they would follow, he simply turned and left while Weber fell naturally in at his left flank and Rex, after a momentary pause, took up the right flank.

Hamilton fell in behind, and Rex could feel the silent concern in the taller man’s gaze against the back of his head like walking away from the sun in the evening. He give him the hand signal for “knock it off” as subtly as he could; they had a job to do.

The first part of the plan went off without a hitch. Their target was a compound tucked deep into the jungle and half-underground to boot, where some kind of research was happening that Jaxun didn’t want happening and made their job to stop from happening. To make life more problematic, Lexington wanted as much of the research as they could take intact and whatever Jaxun’s pet spook wanted, he got.

Boots’ squad would be outside, waiting. They’d only start in on the perimeter defenses when the alarms started sounding; if they started the distraction early, there was too much of a chance that the place would start destroying the very research Lexington was so desperate to get his grubby little paws on.

They’d spent four days scouting the place, and after some discussion Tunstall and Weber would be the ones wielding the silenced pistols deemed necessary for the job. Their objective was to clear a path and carry whatever research ended up being found, with Hamilton and Rex being the ones with bags full of explosives and the duty of making sure they ended up in all the most inconvenient spots for the enemy. It had just been sheer bad luck that they’d happened upon an unexpected patrol on their way into the base, but the silenced pistols had done their work well - if not quite fast enough to suit Rex.

He suppressed a wince as his side twinged, a little warmth trickling down into his waistband to soak into his pants with the rest. The sensation of soaked cloth rubbing against his skin was irritating, the light-headedness worrying, and Hamilton’s constant “covert” glances frankly annoying. If they had any time, Rex would have stopped and at least re-done the damn bandage with something that wasn’t soaked - but right now, deep in the enemy encampment was not the time or place and Hamilton could shove his mother hen routine where the sun didn’t shine.

Feeling eyes on him again, Rex whipped around and gave Bruno a fierce glare. Caught, Hamilton brazened it out and gave Rex the slow up-and-down like he was a blond bombshell. Fortunately for Rex’s peace of mind, the injury was on the side of his body away from Hamilton and the younger man got nothing but a silent reprimand for his troubles.

At least it didn’t take long after that for Tunstall and Weber to be done ransacking the office they were in and they moved on. They did two more offices and a laboratory-come-machine-shop that had sinister, gleaming machines hooked to what looked like over-sized fuel cells before Tunstall gave them the nod; they’d gotten all they could carry, time to bring the place down.

Hamilton and Rex set to work with practiced efficiency, making sure nothing of the laboratory would be left standing afterwards before starting to work their way out to their designated exit. Which was naturally when all hell broke loose.

They hadn’t gone five steps beyond the laboratory before klaxons started to shriek and the sound of pounding feet echoed up the corridor. “What did you do?” Rex growled at Tunstall even as he fired his un-silenced Beretta into the first unfortunate soul to show himself down at the further end of the hallway.

“Don’t look at me; we cleared the room before we did anything. No alarms, no trackers.” Anyone who didn’t know Tunstall well would miss the tension in his voice, but Rex had worked with him for long enough to recognize the tension for what it was and backed off.

“Then they must have set a trap, knowing we were coming.” The statement was delivered in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, but Hamilton shivered. Apparently, he’d been around long enough to know that Rex was the most reasonable right before he blew his stack. Rex blinked away the red mist vying with the black spots at the edge of his vision and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got a job to do, let’s get to it.”

The four of them moved along hallways by fire and movement, Hamilton and Weber on one side with Tunstall and Rex on the other. Resistance mounted as they moved, and during one particularly long shootout Tunstall moved up to the same overturned metal table Rex was using for cover and dropped down beside him. “You’re bleeding,” Tunstall murmured in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the gunfire but not carry to the other side of the wide hallway they found themselves in. “And have been this entire time.”

Rex grimaced; Tunstall was a perceptive bastard. “Patrol bastard got me with a knife. I did what I could.” Running and shooting was making worse, he didn’t say. Blood was still oozing out, he didn’t say. He was short of breath with black edging his vision, and pretty much the only thing keeping him upright was adrenaline, he didn’t say.

He likely wasn’t going to make it back, he didn’t say.

Tunstall heard him anyway. “They’ve moved up ordinance disposal teams; I noticed a few in the last mob we dropped,” he said instead and Rex cursed under his breath. They had less time than he’d thought.

“What we’ve already got in place will take down most of the superstructure,” he said, and Tunstall nodded.

“Any way to test the remote detonators?” he asked. Rex shrugged, pulled out a small brick of plastique, typed a detonation frequency into the detonator different than the one he had been using, and tossed the brick. It landed with an audible thud between the two sides of the fire fight and Rex adjusted his detonator to the single frequency before slamming down on the button.

Nothing.

Tunstall cursed this time and shot the last remaining enemy before turning to the other half of their team. “We have a problem,” he said without preamble, and laid out the issue as cleanly and concisely as any summary Rex’d ever heard. “Which means we need to take out the jammer. Where would it be located?” Tunstall looked over at Rex; Rex had to think about it for a hot second - the blood loss was really starting to do a number on his head - before answering.

“Roof. Anything lower and the walls would start interfering across the complex,” Rex grunted, and Tunstall nodded. “Fine. Then we need to take it out. Let’s go.”

Getting to the roof was easier said than done, and by the time they got there Rex was almost staggering. His sock on the bad side was soaked in blood, and it was all he could do to keep up. Fortunately, being half-underground the roof wasn’t actually all that far up or Rex wouldn’t have made it at all.

Their exit put them slantways across the roof from their target, and the welcoming committee around it didn’t make anything easier. There were one or two air re-circulation units to provide some cover, but it took a long ten minutes for them to make it all the way to the antenna. And then they got there, they had another problem; how to destroy it.

Rigging it with timed explosives was all well and good, but any amount of time was time for the enemy to get a disposal team up here and remove it; they’d already had to repel one team who’d tried to come out the same door they had. Rex could feel Tunstall carefully not looking at him, and growled before grabbing the explosive out of Hamilton’s hands. “Get going,” he snarled as he set the timer and shoved the little bag into the main support on the antenna.

Weber saluted him but didn’t look surprised, and Tunstall merely nodded. Hamilton, though, looked like someone had just sucker-punched him, hands out like he was still holding the explosive Rex had grabbed out of them. “What?” he asked blankly, and Rex rolled his eyes before jerking his thumb at the retreating backs of Tunstall and Weber, heading for where the roof sloped down to less than ten feet off the ground.

“Go with them, Hamilton. I’ll make sure they don’t get the antenna. Mission first.” His words were firm, but when he straightened up he swayed on his feet. Hamilton’s eyes immediately went to the long trail of dark, wet cloth at Rex’s side and his eyes went flat.

“When,” he ground out, and Rex shook his head. “The patrol. It’s been too long and I can’t keep up. Go,” he said insistently, but Hamilton stayed where he was and looked at him stubbornly.

“Goddammit Hammer, get the fuck out of here and rendezvous with the other two, and that’s a goddamn order.” Rex disliked ordering Hamilton; the man knew his stuff, and didn’t need to have authority pushed in his face every time he showed initiative. But time was running out, measured in the steady beeps of the timer behind him, and just because it was the end of Rex’s line didn’t mean it needed to be the end of Hamilton’s.

The man paused for a second longer, the need to obey orders clearly warring with his desire to not obey them and possibly hoist Rex over his should and run for it, before snapping to attention and popping off a salute. “Staff Sergeant Daniels, it’s been an honor,” he said quietly, and Rex returned the salute stone-faced. “Likewise, Sergeant Bruno Hamilton.”

Hamilton turned and started to go, only pausing a moment when Rex called after him. “And Hamilton!” The man glanced back and Rex grinned fiercely.

“Call me Rex.”

There was something in the air.

Bruno coughed, the noise a hard, jagged sound that tore itself from his throat against his wishes. It cracked out into the sudden stillness around him and both Weber and Graves flinched at the noise. Tunstall looked like he was going to ask what was wrong before he coughed too, the noise jagged like a pane of broken glass. Both Graves and Weber joined in not a moment later, and the noise echoed off the nearby trees.

Bruno’s throat burned, like he’d just taken a breath of smoke and there was a strange, sharp chemical smell hanging in the air. He coughed again, and nearly missed Tunstall’s hand-signal to run like hell; he couldn’t manage more than a quick trot, the coughs tearing themselves from his chest throwing off his stride, and none of the others looked to be doing any better, though Graves had somehow managed to pull out in front.

Every breath tore at his throat and lungs, and Bruno breathed as shallowly as possible while he ran. There had been no warning; the mist had looked innocuous enough in the early morning light, and Tunstall had deemed the cover it provided enough advantage to offset the fact they’d be crossing open ground in the jungle. They were behind schedule, and none of them fancied walking back to the nearest base if their ride left without them.

It didn’t make any sense; chemical warfare had been banned several times over the years and that Agent Orange stuff had been removed from the Vietnam theater the year after he’d been shipped over. Whatever the hell was in that mist wasn’t something Bruno wanted to tangle with for very long; fortunately, it did peter out a few yards into he treeline and Bruno pulled a stop next to Graves, wheezing and coughing, with Tunstall and Weber somewhere off to his left. He looked back over the mist that glimmered innocently in the early morning sunlight, and realized the imperfections in the surface he’d taken to be hillocks were actually dead animals; whatever the stuff was, it wasn’t healthy.

All four of them spent the next few minutes getting their breath back, the surprisingly dry air crackling in their lungs as they wheezed. “The hell was that?” Weber croaked, putting voice to the thoughts in their collective heads. “My ex-girlfriend,” grunted Graves, and the other three took a moment to stare at him askance and he shrugged. “She had a thing for choking I didn’t appreciate, and I never want to see her again either.”

Tunstall rolled his eyes and pulled out his map. “Whatever the hell it is, it’s somebody else’s problem,” he said, voice scratchy as he notated the approximate location and hazard on the map before rolling it back up and shoving it in his pack. “We’ll pass it along and command can choose whether or not they wanna send a cleanup crew. Move out.”

Bruno pulled out his canteen as they started moving again, hoping the liquid would ease the knot in his chest. A few cautious sips did decrease the coughing somewhat, but not nearly so much as he had hoped. It felt like some kind of weight was sitting on his chest, and every time he took a deep breath the coughing threatened to return with a vengeance. He shared the canteen anyway, and both Tunstall and Graves gave him grateful nods while Weber just guzzled what was left.

It took them more than an hour before they found it. A road that was barely more than a dirt track with a truck sitting on it bearing the insignia of the 1st Marine Logistics division.

Their ride out.

The squad approached the truck warily, getting within ten yards of the thing before a head popped out of the back and yawned widely in his direction. “You’re a day laaaate,” yawned the fresh-faced corporal - Taggart, by his nametag - as he unfolded himself from the bed of the truck and stepped down onto the hard-packed earth. “What’s the pa-pa-paaaaassword?”

“Chartreuse,” Bruno grunted, and suppressed the impulse to wince. He sounded like he smoked twelve packs a day; what the hell had that shit done to him? Graves looked at him askance, but Weber was too busy coughing to add to the incredulity and Tunstall just flapped a hand at him.

Taggart didn’t seem to realize there was anything wrong and waved them lazily toward the truck. “One or two of you can ride up front with me if you want, or if you’d rather the bed’s probably still warm enough to sleep on though this road shakes you to shit. Dealer’s choice.” The man walked towards the front of the truck before any of them could answer and the four of them shared a look.

“Shotgun,” rasped Graves before anyone else could say anything, and headed for the front of the vehicle. Weber tried to object immediately, but couldn’t get out more than a furious squeak, which Graves ignored. Tunstall just watched him go and shrugged before leading the other two to the back of the truck.

Graves climbed into the cab beside Taggart, while the others piled into the bed and the man didn’t even wait for them to finish securing the canvas before he started the truck moving. Whatever he said was lost to the roar of the engine, and as the truck hit its first pothole Bruno resigned himself to a deeply unpleasant trip back to base.

It was going to be a long ride.

“Sir, Sergeant Hamilton is here to see you.”

Colonel Thaddeus “Thunder” Jaxun pushed his sheaf of papers to the side and took a deep breath. This was one meeting he hadn’t been looking forward to, but could not, in good conscience, avoid. “Send him in.”

———————————————————————————————————-

Sergeant Bruno Hamilton waited patiently as Jaxun’s assistant of the week - a Pfc. Ritter - went to announce his arrival to Jaxun. He hadn’t scheduled a meeting - he’d only just heard what happened, and had only waited long enough that he had the full story from Phantom. Krieger had looked entirely too delighted as he told Bruno that the squad to which Graves and Tunstall had been appended was a week overdue and considered officially MIA; Bruno, newly returned from his own mission, had resisted slugging the smug smirk off his face with difficulty and had marched off to see Jaxun immediately.

Ritter walked out of the inner office and gave Bruno the nod; Bruno nodded back before he crossed the outer office in a few swift strides and fetched up against the outer edge of Jaxun’s imposing desk. Jaxun looked up and stood, the wrinkles on his face deepening as he caught Bruno’s rigid posture.

Bruno snapped a salute, falling back on deeply ingrained habits to keep himself together at the deep pity lurking in Jaxun’s eyes. “Sir,” he said, holding the salute until Jaxun returned it.

It wasn’t wholly procedure, but Bruno forged ahead anyway. He had to know, had to hear it from the colonel himself. “Sir, I have been informed that Alpha squad 3-C is currently considered missing in action.” Requesting the status of another squad on assignment was technically a violation of mission security; Graves and Tunstall’s conditions were, strictly speaking, none of Bruno’s business while he wasn’t actively out on a mission with them. But Bruno had to know, dammit, and Jaxun was the best man to ask.

Jaxun sighed heavily and sat back down at his desk. “Yes, Hamilton, I’m afraid so. The whole of squad 3-C failed to make their rendezvous with the main arm of operations and was declared MIA as of 2200 last night.”

Bruno’s mind raced. “Sir, I request permission to lead a recovery mission. I -” He stopped, unable to continue that line of thought through the buzzing in his ears, and Jaxun looked at him with a weary sort of sadness.

“Permission denied, Hamilton.” Bruno opened his mouth to protest, but Jaxun held up a hand and he held his peace. “Hamilton, I don’t doubt your capabilities, but your talents are required here. Moreover, their last known location is overrun and we don’t have any intelligence where they might have been taken.” Jaxun stood again, and got as far as putting a hand on Bruno’s shoulder.

“Sir. Permission for three days of leave.” Bruno wasn’t about to give up now; he could do a lot in three days, especially with all the favors he had yet to cash in at the motor pool from a few poker nights early on in his tenure when the guys hadn’t yet learned that he had no tells and would bluff as stone-facedly with a royal flush in his hand as he would with nothing but a pair of sevens. If he could get transport and see if he could squeeze any more detail out of Phantom -

“Denied. I need you here, Hamilton.” This time Jaxun was looking him right in the eyes, as if he could sense the track of Bruno’s thoughts. Bruno wanted to shift uncomfortably under that piercing gaze so full of sympathy that it cut to the quick, something he wouldn’t normally do even under torture, but he suppressed the urge ruthlessly. Any faltering now would put paid to any ideas he had about getting together a rescue for his missing teammates and friends.

“Sir, permission to speak freely.” It wasn’t a request Bruno made often or lightly. But this was Amos Fucking Graves and Jack Goddamn Tunstall; the former the bane of Bruno’s peace of mind and the latter the man who had asked him to stand as godfather to his future children when he finally got back to the states (after which the former promised to name his first kid after him. Even, he’d laughed, if the kid was a girl).

That wasn’t the kind of loyalty and friendship you repaid by sitting on your ass.

“Granted.” Jaxun’s eyebrows had gone up; apparently Bruno, of all people, asking to speak freely was something of a surprise to him.

“Sergeant Amos Graves and Captain Jack Tunstall are valuable assets to this unit, sir, and not trying to retrieve them is not an efficient use of resources.” Bruno’s mind was racing; he hadn’t actually expected to be granted permission to speak freely, so he had to come up with his argument on the fly. “Moreover, I am confident that, given three days and adequate transportation, I can retrieve both men with minimum use of resources. The overall efficiency of the unit would decrease in their absence, and their skills are an asset that would be hard to replace.” Words weren’t exactly Bruno’s strong point; when there were arguments to be made, he preferred to let his fists do the talking.

But that wouldn’t fly here, and all he could do was say his piece. Jaxun looked at him sorrowfully for a few long moments afterwards. “Ah hell. Hamilton, that was a long-ass speech. And you’re right, they will be missed; hell, I’m missing them already. But the long and the short of it is I can’t spare you. I was going to wait a few hours before giving you these orders, but there’s a major offensive set to go off before the end of the week. Your squad is going to be deployed ahead of the rest to soften the enemy line.”

Jaxun drew him over to the only other chair in the room and pushed Bruno into it; he sat woodenly, mind blank. “There’s just no time Hamilton; without your team - without you - things will go badly, and I can’t justify sending you on a mission that’s a wild goose chase at best when a lot of lives are depending on you here.” He waited a few seconds as if expecting Bruno to say something, but Bruno’s mind refused to think of any. That Jaxun, a man who had once sent three squads through a minefield and gotten everyone out the other side safely, thought it was a wild goose chase…

“Tell you what, though,” Jaxun said suddenly, turning back to his desk to make a note. “I’ll see if Lexington can get any information, and when you get back, if I have any actionable intelligence, you’ll be the first to know.”

He turned back and regarded the despondent form of Bruno with sympathy. “Hamilton, I’m truly sorry it has to be this way. But it’s all we can do, for them. For now. Dismissed.”

Bruno walked out silently; he had nothing left to say.

Bruno looked up as Graves ran into the quiet room Bruno had chosen specifically so he wouldn’t be disturbed.

“What- ” he started to ask, but before he could even finish the question Graves was shoving a a box into his hands and running back out the door. Perplexed, he looked down at the box and nearly dropped it when he recognized Weber’s initials written so deeply on the cardboard they were almost carved through. It was the rare box of chocolates from Weber’s wife, which he had been lording over the others in the squad and generally been obnoxious about. So what the hell was Graves playing at?

Graves chose that moment to slip back into the room quietly, easing the door shut behind him like he was undoing a very fine wire on a very finicky bomb. Bruno held up the box with a raised eyebrow. A look of relief flickered over Graves’ face. “Oh good, I wasn’t sure if I gave him the slip before or after I ducked in here. I was lucky you were to guard it, I’ll just take that and put it somewhere safe,” so saying he made a grab for the box that Bruno moved out of the way at the very last second.

“Not so fast. What in the Sam Hill were you doing with Chisel’s chocolates? And what are you planning on doing with them next?” Bruno kept his face stern as he spoke, but inwardly he convulsed with laughter as Graves’ face pinched in consternation. Apparently he hadn’t thought Bruno would want to know these kinds of details before handing over the precious cargo.

“Well, see, he was doing that thing again - where he was parading around saying how fucking great the chocolate was and how much his wife looooooved him to send him such great damn chocolate and all that like he’s been saying for days and all that horseshit - and I’ve had it up to fucking here with his shit so I - ah! Dammit - grabbed the box and legged it. As for what happens next, well, I figure he owes me a bit of a tax for not stabbing him after his song and dance these last few days and then maybe he finds when I hang it halfway up the flagpole and maybe he doesn’t.” Graves kept his eyes on the box all throughout his speech, and made several unsuccessful grabs to try and reclaim his prize.

Keeping the smirk off his face with difficulty and ignoring the old by-now-familiar twinge at the thought of a wife waiting in the States for her soldier, Bruno pretended to think for a few minutes about the whole thing. “It seems like you might be on to something with that plan,” he said conversationally, pretending to tap the box on his chin like he was thinking very hard. “Except for the important fact that now I am in the possession of said box, and it is my moral duty to return stolen goods wherever I might find them.” Graves’ face was priceless, incredulity mixing swiftly with resignation to form a strange sort of half-grimace.

“C'mon Hammer, I know you’re as tired of Weber’s shit as I am,” it wasn’t quite a whine, but it got close and Bruno could feel the muscles twitching in his cheeks as he tried not to smile. Sensing victory, Graves pursued the point and impression like a panther on a wounded antelope. “‘My wife luuuuuuuvs me you should aaaaaaall have a wife that luuuuuuvs you.’ I don’t wannnnaaaaa hear moooore about the chocolate,” Graves was now full-on whining and Bruno couldn’t help the laugh the bubbled up from his chest at the younger man’s impression of the insufferably smug Weber.

“Fine, fine, you can have it back. If,” he held the box up warningly and Graves froze in mid-grab like a deer in the headlights, “you take latrine duty next three missions.” Bruno grinned smugly at Graves as the shorter man’s face worked through the five stages of grief in the span of maybe ten seconds.

“Fine,” he snapped and grabbed the box out of Bruno’s unresistant hand. “You know, the next time someone tells me you’re the nicest bastard in the squad I’m going to think of this moment and laugh myself sick at their expense.” With that pithy remark, Graves fled; presumably to try and hang the box on the flagpole before Weber caught up to him.

Bruno snorted and went back to cleaning the Beretta he had disassembled and laid out on the table; if Graves’ plan actually worked, he would be extremely surprised, and he looked forward to the terrible and creative punishment Weber would level.

“Yeah! Get him!”

Bruno grinned as Graves cheered raucously from the sidelines, and his opponent snorted. Bruno was the biggest guy in the unit, but Pvt Danny Traverty gave him a run for his money. At just a hair shy of an inch shorter and maybe ten, fifteen pounds lighter, Traverty had come over in the latest round of recruiting from the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing and had been assigned to one of the teams specializing in distraction and extraction. Said team had been very excited to have a big guy of their own, and - some boasting and taunting later - here they were.

Both Bruno and Traverty were stripped to the waist, hands wrapped more to prevent broken bones than to soften any blows. Bruno could hear Graves making audible bets, with a surprising number of enthusiastic takers given that Tunstall was lurking somewhere in the background, and he chuckled. If the betting got out of hand Tunstall would probably step in - he knew where the line was - but for now he seemed merely content to watch the goings-on.

PFC Francis “Laces” Turner - one of Hurley’s Shitkickers, and not in a cast for once which was unusual for him; Bruno’d never met a clumsier guy - gave the whistle, and the fight was on.

Traverty wasted no time in attack, driving straight for Bruno’s head with a right cross. Bruno dodged and counter-punched, which Traverty blocked. As they felt each other out, trading blow for blow, dodging some punches and blocking others, Bruno felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth; he hadn’t originally been keen on beating the shit out of some kid fresh from boot camp, but this guy didn’t seem quite as green as Bruno was expecting. Not that he was in Bruno’s league, of course; if this’d been a real fight, Bruno would have exploited the hell out of the guy’s tendency to put his blocks a bit too low and broken most of his ribs already.

But that wasn’t the purpose of this exercise, as far as Bruno was concerned. The other guys might’ve wanted to see which of the biggest guys on base was the better fighter, and Traverty was certainly putting in his best effort to lay Bruno out flat, but the way Bruno saw it this was an opportunity to learn for the new guy. It would be a disservice not to teach him a lesson now that he would otherwise learn later when a real enemy taught it to him.

The next time Traverty brought his arm up for a block - too low again, of course - instead of letting his blow glance away as he had earlier, Bruno bore down. Sure enough, the arm slipped and Bruno landed a solid blow to the guy’s collarbone. Traverty wheezed and fell back a step and Bruno shook his head. “You’ve been fighting short people for too long. Don’t let habit get in your way when you block or the next guy my size might not be as nice,” Bruno lectured, smirking as Traverty turned a dull red on his neck and Graves hooted with laughter.

The guy attacked again, strikes driving harder, punches more vicious, but - Bruno was pleased to see - his blocks in the correct position now instead of too low. Still, with the harder blows, Traverty was committing more of his weight forward instead of staying balanced, and if he just…

One blindingly quick move later and Traverty was on the floor, blinking up at the ceiling. Weber had joined Graves in cheering, but the mood on the other side of the room was beginning to turn surly. Bruno knew it was time to end the fight, before anyone got angrier than their common sense threshold. A quick glance at Tunstall netted him a slow nod and the beginnings of an amble towards Graves; the LT would make sure all bets were returned. Dropping his stance, he leaned down to offer Traverty a hand. “You did good, kid. A little more seasoning and we can try this again.” He kept his tone friendly, silently willing the kid to take the hand in the spirit it was offered.

No such luck. “I don’t need any help,” hissed Traverty, knocking Bruno’s hand away and shoving himself to his feet. Bruno raised his eyebrows and took a prudent step backward out of grabbing range.

“Fine. Good fight, kid. Let’s do this again sometime,” Bruno said, deliberately turning his back on the shorter man.

Graves’ warning shout was largely unnecessary as Bruno was already turning to meet the kid’s predictable-as-hell tackle, but the force drove him to the ground with a soft “oof!"

It devolved quickly from there, Traverty doing his best to wrestle Bruno into submission and Bruno taking exactly none of his shit. The pair of them rolled into the legs of someone else, and the whole thing snowballed into a free-for-all that only ended when Tunstall returned - having vanished at some point during the melee - with the MPs.

Some of the least dignified bruises Bruno’d ever gotten, and he ends up with as many demerits as his assailant. Go figure.

“Hey.”

Weber glanced up at Bruno’s approach, but returned his attention to the gathering darkness in front of him as the sun slowly sank behind the horizon. A red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

“Hey.” Weber’s voice was dull, as lifeless as the concrete he was sitting on. Bruno came closer, inclining his head to the seat next to Weber and sitting when Weber gave him a vague wave. The concrete was still warm from the heat of the day, combining with the damp heaviness in the air into an atmosphere as soporific as it was stifling.

They sat in silence for several long moments before Weber sighed. “Do you ever wonder,” he said, determinedly not looking in Bruno’s direction, “why a good person gets shafted, and you’re the asshole who got away?” Bruno’s blood ran cold, even with the lingering heat, and he cut a glance towards Weber. Weber looked younger, somehow, than Bruno had ever seen him, even though he’d been part of the unit longer than Bruno had. There was a tired sadness in the creases of his face, visible still despite the dullness that hung over him like a shroud.

Bruno looked back out over the base as the gloaming settled in, shadows disappearing briefly before being thrown into sharp relief as the lights came on, and thought. “Yeah,” he said heavily. “Some days I see some kid - or what’s left of him - and wonder how I made it this far, and he didn’t.” Weber still wasn’t looking at him, so Bruno tried to find a way to continue his thought - emotions weren’t his strong suit. “But there’s nothing I can do except my best to make sure that doesn’t happen to some other poor kid. My not being here won’t bring him back.”

It sounded feeble, even to his own ears, and Weber just sighed again, the noise like the deflation of a nearly-empty balloon. “Yeah.” They sat in silence for several more minutes before Weber spoke again. “Do you think they’ll find anything, Bruno? About Jack? Or Amos?”

Bruno exhaled slowly, and looked up at the sky that was just beginning to show the first glimmerings of stars. “Yeah Fred. Jaxun’s on the case; if anyone can find them, it’s him.”

“Nade!”

Bruno pulled back behind the corner he’d been shooting from at Weber’s shout, closing his eyes for a brief moment as the thrown explosive detonated with a bang and a shower of plaster dust. Leaning back around the corner for a quick look was enough to confirm that all the hostiles who’d been keeping them pinned were either completely down or disoriented enough to be out of the fight and a few quick rounds from Weber’s pistol was enough to put them down as well.

Bruno spared a quick glance for the other man; Weber had been uncharacteristically taciturn since they’d lost track of Tunstall and Graves nearly a month ago; their (hopefully) temporary replacements - one Cpl Sean “Shingle” McKinnon and one PFC John “Shade” Holland - were new to the unit and somewhat wrong-footed by Weber’s surly attitude. Bruno had made the effort to at least be civil to them, something Weber couldn’t seem to manage for all it wasn’t their fault that Tunstall and Graves weren’t there.

Still, whatever his personal feelings, Weber hadn’t let it affect his performance - which was more than Bruno could say for for some of the other men he’d seen similar shit happen to over the years. Gesturing for them to follow, Weber pushed down the hallway towards the next intersection which their intelligence suggested would take them directly to the stairs down into the lower levels.

Their objective in this particular facility was to retrieve a VIP, one Walter Roman - a civilian contractor - whose convoy had been ambushed a week earlier, suffering casualties in excess of 2/3rds of its complement and the man himself captured and brought - in a somewhat roundabout fashion - to the cells of the building they were in. An emphasis had been placed on speed over stealth, and without Tunstall’s tactical expertise and minute attention to detail, they’d gone in with a much rougher plan than usual.

Which in turn meant they went from covert to overt within five minutes of entering the building; if they hadn’t gotten a second team - under Sergeant Matthew “Apple” Tryon - to supplement Hurley’s team they likely would’ve been overrun by now. As it stood, Bruno was having doubts whether or not they’d find anyone left alive when they finally did reach the cellblock marked as the most probable location for Roman.

Still, they had to try and the stairwell was, by some miracle, clear of enemies when they finally reached it. They proceeded by fire and movement, Weber and McKinnon going first with Hollandand Bruno leapfrogging them down the three flights it took to reach bottom. On a count of three Weber breached the door and lead them into a long, featureless corridor whose off-white walls were only relieved by the iron doors inset into them at depressingly regular intervals. Fortunately the doors themselves each had view slots in them, so they didn’t have to open each one along the way.

In point of fact the first three proved empty, Weber checking them with a ruthless efficiency that was unleavened by his usual stream of complaints and lowbrow jokes. It worried Bruno in a way he couldn’t fully articulate, but he kept pace with his squadmate and the other two followed their lead in silence. Holland seemed untroubled, but McKinnon glanced back and forth between the two of them with a glint in his eyes that Bruno didn’t want to think about, and made comments at several points that fell into the heavy silence like deflated balloons, and by the second room had petered out completely.

The fourth room they hit paydirt.

Weber slammed the sliding port on the door open, peered into the room beyond…..and froze. For a long ten seconds he stared into the dimness beyond before scrambling at one of the many pouches attached to his belt. Bruno would have liked audible confirmation that they’d found the target, but let it go figuring that Weber wouldn’t breach a room without cause. Instead he turned toward the further end of the corridor while signalling McKinnon to cover the nearer in case the noise of the breaching explosive attracted unwanted attention.

The crack of the explosive blowing the lock echoed up and down the hallway, but nothing stirred at either end immediately. Bruno kept a wary eye out, though, until Holland’s voice echoed almost as loudly as the shot had.

“Holy shit.”

Bruno turned, frowning; Roman shouldn’t be in that bad a shape after only a week unless his captors had been stupid and bent more on doing damage than what ransom they could get for him. Holland was as pale as a sheet and Weber was nowhere to be seen. McKinnon was keeping his attention down his side of the hall in an admirable show of self-restraint; it took Bruno two tries to get Holland to switch places with Bruno himself so Bruno could see what all the noise was about. It sounded like someone in the cell was weeping?

He walked to the entrance and blinked his eyes to make them adjust to the dimmer light faster. It only took a few seconds for two gaunt and yet very familiar forms to become visible.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said on reflex.

“Good to see you too, Hammer,” said a badly injured and yet somehow, miraculously, still alive, Tunstall.

——————————————————————————————————-

Bruno stopped just outside the closed door, heedless of the medical personnel moving up and down the corridor, and ran his fingers through his hair. This would be the first time he’d seen Tunstall or Graves since they got back to base, and Tunstall had specifically requested his presence. Straightening, he knocked once on the door.

“Come in.” The voice was a little hoarse but the words themselves were clear enough and Bruno pushed the door open. The sight that greeted him was much, much better than the last time he’d gone through a door to find Tunstall. The man was propped up in bed, the blinds on the window open to let in the early afternoon sun, and in that clean light the bandages wrapped around the stump of his right arm shone a bright white. More bandages peeked through the collar of his shirt, and a few stray butterfly bandages were scattered across his face.

Tunstall waited patiently while Bruno looked him over, a sort of determinedly relaxed look on his face, only smiling crookedly at Bruno when the younger man looked him in the eye again. “I know, not winning any beauty pageants, but at least I’m alive for it.” There was a gallows edge to the lightness in his tone that hinted at deeper waters underneath the veneer, but Bruno wasn’t about to go stirring up anything he didn’t have to, not after his failure of a heart to heart with Weber - was it only a few weeks ago? It seemed like far longer.

“Glad to see you’re awake,” Bruno ventured, matching Tunstall in tone. Tunstall had fallen unconscious on their exfiltration from the prison facility and had only woken a few times on their way back to base. The fact that he was now awake and mostly upright seemed a long way to have come in the few short days since their arrival.

Tunstall dipped his head, a shadow falling over his face. “Graves still hasn’t woken up then,” he said quietly, and Bruno could only shake his head mutely. Graves had been unconscious when they’d gotten into the cell and hadn’t woken up once along the trip back; they’d forced what food and water they could down his throat and had hoped for the best. When they’d arrived back the medicos had rushed him to the hospital immediately, and after almost thirty hours of surgery had put him in a room with machines that beeped every hour of the day and night.

Bruno knew because he’d contrived to stay in that room for almost twenty four hours straight before a corpsman had realized that he hadn’t actually left overnight and had kicked him out. He’d made daily trips back since then, fitting it around his regular duties as best he could. Jaxun had been extremely lenient on the matter, but Bruno didn’t like to take advantage. Graves wasn’t likely to wake up soon; Bruno’s presence or absence was probably irrelevant.

But that didn’t stop him from going.

Tunstall must’ve read something of that on Bruno’s face because he shook his head with real regret. “I thought as much. It explains these, certainly.” He reached awkwardly across himself as he spoke, going for a sheaf of papers sitting on the table by the right side of the bed and shuffling them as best he could one-handed before holding them out to Bruno. Bruno took them, and began glancing through them, his blood getting cooler with each page he read.

The topmost sheet was an honorable medical discharge for one Captain Jack Tunstall, injured in the line of duty. It only made sense - Tunstall was right-handed, after all, or had been - but it still hit like a gut punch. The next several sheets were legalese about that and all the missions he’d gone on for Jaxun’s Alpha Team, but it was the fourth one that really made Bruno’s heart stutter. It was travel orders for sending Jack Tunstall and Amos Graves back to the States on the convoy heading to the international airport in four days.

Bruno looked up and held up the page and Tunstall made a helpless gesture with his one remaining hand. “We’re both going to need a hell of a lot of care, Hamilton. The kind of long-term stuff that just can’t be provided by a front-line hospital. They need these beds for men who have a decent shot at getting up and heading back out to rejoin the fight,” his voice was unbearably gentle and Bruno exhaled sharply through his nose.

“I know,” he said quietly. And he truly had known that neither man was ever likely to be fit for duty again. Graves wasn’t obviously missing any limbs, but there’d been injuries on his front and back that had been sewn up with surgical stitching even before they’d got there. What had actually been done to him Bruno didn’t know, and being left guessing was almost worse than knowing.

Still, he’d held on to one tiny, stupid shred of hope.

“It’s why I asked you to come,” said Tunstall quietly, interrupting Bruno’s thoughts, and Bruno raised an eyebrow at him. Tunstall sighed. “It’s Chisel - Fred.” He paused for a moment as if to collect his thoughts. “We actually came from the same unit, years ago, and were among the first Jaxun handpicked when he was forming Alpha Squad. We’ve been on the same team ever since.” His brow wrinkled. “I know him. When he found the orders…he didn’t react well.” Bruno’s eyebrows came together with an almost audible click and Tunstall shook his head. “Not like that. He doesn’t hold a grudge, but I know him. Doing something stupid to get sent home is right in his wheelhouse, but it’s a damned fine line between injured and dead.”

He looked Bruno square in the eye. “So I’m asking you to keep an eye on him. He knows how to do his damn job, but….he may not have his own best interests in mind. See what I’m saying?” Tunstall made a vague gesture that seemed designed to encompass the whole of Frederic “Chisel” Weber and Bruno nodded.

“Yeah. I see what you’re saying.” He’d seen it in the weeks before Tunstall and Graves had been recovered. That deadly, taciturn seriousness that was at once eminently practical and utterly reckless, the kind of actions that sacrificed personal safety for efficiency; he’d seen it in spades.

Tunstall nodded in his own turn and held out his hand. Bruno hesitated for a moment before reaching out and taking it for a firm shake. His only warning was a gleam of mischief in Tunstall’s eyes before the other man pulled him close and put what was left of his right arm around Bruno. The hug was as brief as it was unexpected, Tunstall releasing him as suddenly as he’d hugged him. He brought his left arm up in an awkward salute, and held Bruno’s gaze until Bruno returned it.

“Sergeant Hamilton, it’s been an honor.”

Bruno set the box of cans in the Jeep-esque vehicle and headed back inside the bunker.

Zenda had come to them as a group two days ago, and told them they would have to leave the place they’d been staying in for the past few…..weeks? (it was hard to tell days from nights in a place that didn’t seem to have a sky so much as it had a direction upward and a color above that never varied) would be going back to where it had come from, and they needed to move everything out or risk losing it. As bug-out orders went, it was nice that they had this much warning; it was not so nice in the fact that they had six pieces of large and heavy equipment to move as well as as much food as they could fit in whatever space was in the Jeep thing.

Bruno passed Aquamarine and Dr. Clarkson sitting on a recently-emptied shelf with their heads together talking quietly. He could only hope Aquamarine was getting the help necessitated by the nine weeks she’d spent in solitary.

Jesus.

It gave him a shivery feeling just thinking about it; solitary was never fun, and his stints had never been for longer than 72 hours. Nine weeks….it didn’t bear thinking about. Besides, Aquamarine had seemed some reasonable degree of stable when they were out on mission together. Hopefully that trend continued.

Seeing them together reminded him of the fourth member of their bug-out squad - Zenda had gone back to the city, and Andi with him, which worried Bruno but there was nothing to be done about it right this second - and he turned towards the wall that had the metapods lined up against it. There was some sort of strange-looking sled hooked to the Jeep outside that they were supposed to load them up on, though how they were supposed to get them that far Bruno wasn’t sure. He could lift a lot more weight now, true, but he wasn’t sure it was that much more weight.

Walking over he found Thomas half-concealed behind the furthest, sitting and staring at it like it held the secrets of the universe and would impart them if he just stared hard enough. Given his state of - for lack of a better term - being when Bruno had first met him, coupled with his current state and the things he’d said back in Hawaii….Bruno had heard similar things in ‘Nam, and after, and he remembered exactly how that had ended for far too many of them.

Bruno wasn’t the guy you went to to talk about feelings; he was the guy you went to to determine how much ordinance you needed to bring down a bridge or had a building you didn’t want to be there any more. He got more out of shooting practice with Andi - kid could hit every shot but her form and disregard for weapon safety would have his old Gunny spinning in his grave - than he had out of the few awkward, stilted talks he’d tried with her.

But Thomas didn’t look like the kind of person who’d enjoy taking potshots at - on Zenda’s insistence - empty cans out behind the bunker, so talking it was. Hopefully this turned out better than the last time he’d tried having a heart-to-heart with someone who had a long way to fall.

“Hey,” he said as he came to a stop a few feet away from where Thomas sat, and the man started like he hadn’t heard anyone approaching at all. “Bruno? Have you loaded all the food then? Except perhaps the bread; if we could contrive to leave the canned bread here I don’t think anyone would miss it terribly.” Thomas ran at the mouth like he’d explode if he held any words back, yet he almost always avoided any talk about himself if he could at all avoid it.

Bruno had met a few guys like that, way back, who’d talked as much as they possibly could so you wouldn’t notice when their hands shook and their breath came short. Guys like that, it was always easiest to try and fill in the picture by when they changed the subject - though Bruno’d never been sure what to do with that picture once he had it.

“Most of the food is loaded, we’ve just got to figure out how to move these things,” he tapped on the pod for emphasis and Thomas nodded, mouth already open to expound on his ideas on the topic no doubt, but Bruno cut him off. “Have you talked to Dr. Clarkson yet?” It wasn’t what you’d call a circumspect kind of approach, but then Bruno wasn’t what you’d call a circumspect kind of guy. See the mission, do the mission, move on to the next mission.

Thomas didn’t seem to appreciate it. He smiled and half-laughed like Bruno’d said something funny, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes and something glittered in the back of his gaze that concerned Bruno. “Oh no, she’s been far too busy. It’s quite rude to interrupt someone mid-conversation, you know, and we’ve had to pack and move everything in such a hurry that there really hasn’t been time to chat.” Thomas paused for breath and Bruno opened his mouth to interject, but Thomas steamrolled on. “In fact, speaking of rudeness, it was quite rude of Zenda to order us to move and then not stay to help. After all, he and I spent a good deal of time setting up this bunker in the first place and when we move we will, inevitably, have to rearrange everything when he gets to wherever he’s sending us. He’s quite fussy about where his equipment goes, and I do mean that in every sense of the word.”

Bruno blinked, and Thomas flapped a hand at him. “Never mind. As I said, there is simply too much to do for me to take up any of Dr. Clarkson’s time when it may be more beneficially spent doing other things. Speaking of, have you tried lifting one of these pods? I seem to recall you didn’t have much trouble with those cuffs a few days ago, and while these seem quite heavy they are, in fact, largely hollow. I believe you should be able to lift them one at a time to transport them out to the antigrav sled Zenda provided us; where he got it from, I shudder to think, but it should perform adequately for our purposes.”

He gestured at the pod in front of him, and Bruno eyed it dubiously, before looking back at Thomas. “She’d make time for you, if you asked. You’re a valuable part of this team, and I’m pretty sure she’d call you a friend if anyone inquired. Think about it."

Without waiting for a reply - though Thomas seemed to have been struck temporarily dumb at Bruno’s response - Bruno bent and heaved on the base of the pod. It was heavy, nearly more than he could lift let alone carry, and balancing it was awkward as hell. Still, Bruno’d hauled some heavy and awkward loads in his life, and he set off across the bunker to deposit the pod on the sled.

He could only hope Thomas would listen to sense, and talk to someone more qualified to help than Bruno was. Before the man did something he and everyone else would regret.

…the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

———————————————————————————————

The silence had been the worst part. The tired, defeated silence that had weighed over the holding areas like a funeral pall - that, that was the part Doris had hated most of all.

She’d had friends, a loving husband, three lovely children, a house in the suburbs kept to the latest standards, the perfect life as prescribed by The Party to which she was a longstanding member. Her days had been filled with the chatter of her neighbors, the piping voices of children, and the pleasant baritone of her husband’s voice. Hollywood Star Playhouse and Hopalong Cassidy on the radio in the afternoons, and the Ed Sullivan show in the evenings on the TV set that was the envy of the neighborhood.

She’d been on her way to a Party meeting when she’d been taken, the awful shades swallowing her screams even as they tore her away from everything she knew and loved. That silence had stayed, even when the shades themselves dumped her with some shady-looking men in greasy shirts. Oh she’d made plenty of noise, but the men had ignored her. They’d sold her in the bowels of this horrendous city, and even the negotiations had been a quiet susurrus.

She’d tried making friends with some of the others before her first match, but most had simply looked at her dumbly - with a scattered few who sneered at her attempts or given her deeply sympathetic looks. She hadn’t known, then, why they acted so, but had determinedly filled up the silence with the kind of polite small talk that had been drilled into her since she was a little girl.

And then she’d won her first fight.

It hadn’t been easy; for all she’d bonded as well as she’d married - and she’d married quite well, thank you very much - Doris wasn’t a fighter. Hadn’t been a fighter. But she liked living more than she hated fighting, and when the chips went down so did her opponent. She’d walked out of the makeshift arena in a daze, blood drying on her clothes and under her fingernails, and other pilots had shied away - save one, who had simply met her gaze and nodded sadly. His match had been next, and she’d watched him be flayed alive with a kind of dull numbness.

She’d stopped talking to the other pilots after that. Waiting to get pushed into a meat grinder wasn’t exactly the time or place to discuss the latest gelatin recipes or what the well-dressed man was wearing these days.

And then, something had……changed.

It started with the symbol. In her little shoe box of a cell, on the corners of walls in the pilot holding areas, somehow woven into the mats of the training area her owner used - overnight the symbol flowered. Hex is Hope. And it had spread, carved into doors and furniture by the nervous, sprayed large across walls and fences by the foolish, stitched into hems and collars by the cautious - now it was everywhere. Hex is Hope.

And then, at some point, the stories had started.

Doris lived for the stories, drinking them in greedily like she had done so long ago to the latest neighborhood gossip, and passing them along to anyone who would listen. Doris had forgotten how much she loved to talk to people who would listen. It was never a sure thing, who was going to be at which tournaments - and how their owners felt about them having universal translators - but Doris managed to gather a tenuous gossip circle that she honestly would have been ashamed to claim if she had been home, but was precious beyond measure in this miserable place.

And so they talked, arena monitors frequently having to prod them to get them out the gate at the last second. Gael, Mortimus, Phanex, Tigure, Ishi, P'f’t'gh, Rhombus Trapezoid Circle, Motes of Sunbeam Dust - and Doris at the head of the group, regaling them with the tales she’d heard from others and chattering away at how the pilots had done this or that, and how they could have done things differently, and what they were wearing and all manner of juicy things.

For the first time, in a very long time, Doris was living.

———————————————————————————————

Hristiana glanced around furtively as she undid a roll of cloth from around her waist.

If her owners found it, she would be very, very dead - but more than that, it was private. It was hers alone, and while it felt a little silly in the face of all that Collyseum represented, she loved it.

Her people were a proud warrior race, and combat - especially single combat - was considered to be the highest form of devotion one could show to the gods who demanded blood, sweat, and tears in exchange for good harvests, easy births, and few diseases. Every year hundreds of young men, women, envions, and orvays fought to the death on the warm sands and watered the thirsty ground with their blood. Hristiana herself had won several bouts during those festivals, and had been chosen for the honor of the Deep Knowledge, to hold and pass on to the next generations, when she had been taken.

It had been something of a shock, when she had been entered into her first tournament, the sheer lack of proper respect and reverence for the proceedings. No gongs were rung, no gods named, honored, or invoked, no songs sung, no declarations were spoken. Instead, a loud buzzer had sounded and two looked-like-men had engaged in tearing each other apart like animals. Hristiana had been horrified, and had tried to start the proper rituals before her own fight was called, that she might not die disrespectful to her gods.

But her opponent hadn’t known any more about fighting than he seemed to have knowledge of how fights should be conducted, and Hristiana had been trained to fight since she could hold a training weapon over her head. The fight had been over quickly, and she had gone on to win several more before it finally sank in that these fights were different, and she was a very long way from home.

At first she had tried to go through all the proper rituals before each fight, making small flags with the gods’ symbols out of scraps of cloth, saving libation from her meals, and going through as much litany as she could before her name was called and she was put into the arena. Eventually her indulgence in ritual dwindled to just the litanies and finally, as the gods remained silent, nothing at all.

And then something had changed.

Hristiana looked down at the roll of cloth as she laid it out, the symbol at the top embroidered painstakingly to mirror the one burned into walls, written into floors, and made in the shadows cast by the hanging lights. By itself, the symbol did very little beyond break through the miasma of grief and despair that had anchored itself to every wall and strut of this cursed place. But the words that had followed it, the stories writ large into the dry air of this world……There was a power to those.

Hristiana took a deep breath.

“O Hex Destiny, from whom all hopes flow, look upon this soul and grant peace in this dark time. Elliana, Mistress of Light, shine upon the way forward. Johnny Appleseed, bring softness to the road and guide my heart where it needs to go. Jack Kershaw, lend your strength to my arms, that I may survive this fight…”

Hristiana continued speaking carefully, making sure to get the tenses exactly right even as her fingers traced the symbols embroidered in the fabric. It was more out of respect than fear of retribution, but it was important. The words mattered.

The gods she’d known all her life were left behind; they could neither hear nor avail her at this far-flung locale. But here, now, in this dread place, new exemplars had arisen. New hope had sprung from barren sands. And all around her, voices unused for decades spoke stories of those who fought the darkness and prevailed.

Hex is Hope.

———————————————————————————————

Daveon wasn’t sure the lady was real.

To be fair, seeing that-which-wasn’t had been a problem of his long before he’d been dragged to this dry, overheated hellhole, but it was much worse here. He’d almost been killed in his first match here because he couldn’t tell which opponent was really gunning for him and which was just a trick of his eyes; it’d been sheer dumb luck that had had him falling on his duff as his real opponent went sailing over his head and the not-there ones grabbed each other to fight it out.

Daveon had never figured out if it was shades of the past he saw, or reflections of the future - or even just hallucinations produced of his own deranged mind. Not that it made any material difference to him right now; as long as the collar was around his neck, he couldn’t do anything about what he saw anyway. And anyway most of the time the hallucinations did what everyone else did; sit around and hang their heads as if the weight of the world rested on them.

But the lady was different. For one thing, she didn’t have a collar on; collars were cheap and effective, and the preferred method of controlling slaves at the tournaments Daveon competed in. For another, she was going around touching people. Well, putting her hand near them, anyway; they never seemed to react to her presence and she’d sigh and move on.

Daveon couldn’t help but stare. She was probably the most fascinating thing that’d ever happened in this sorry excuse for a pilot readying room, and he was bored out of his mind. She wasn’t beautiful - not enough eyes for a start, just the one pair - but she was interesting. Of course, interesting got you killed around here but Daveon had reached the end of that rope long ago.

He stiffened as she caught his eyes, and a smile slowly blossomed on her face as she made her way over to him. Planting herself firmly in front of Daveon, she regarded him for several long seconds before holding out her hand. Daveon reached for it cautiously, but wasn’t surprised when his hand went right though. Not real, then.

“Monday.”

The voice was as unexpected as her appearance had been, and Daveon felt his eyeridges climbing toward the top of his head. Still, it would be rude not to reply and he was still bored.

“Daveon.”

She smiled. “Daveon. It’s a good name.”

“Only one I have.”

it was a stupid thing to say, and Daveon kicked himself mentally. Still, Monday didn’t seem to mind as she settled next to him on the bench he’d been lounging on. He politely moved his tail out of the way, though she didn’t seem to need the space.

“Would you like to hear a story?”

Her voice was soft, yet even with the crowd cheering away at some poor idiot’s demise he heard her perfectly. He looked at the ceiling for a long moment - some enterprising person had managed to crudely carve Hex is Hope up there, huh - before mentally shrugging and turning back to her.

“Sure. Haven’t heard anything good in a while.”

Too long a while. She seemed to hear what he didn’t say and she smiled a soft, nearly sad smile.

“Well, once upon a time in a Metaverse far, far away, there were five beautiful girls whose chosen mission was to defend the universe from evil in all its many, creeping forms…”

Emma Tomlinson unlocked the front door with her key and entered the house quietly as the school bus pulled away from the curb outside.

Her mother had given her the key at the start of the school year, declaring that since she’d graduated kindergarten with flying colors, she was old enough and responsible enough to have a key of her own. Emma privately suspected the real reason her mother had gotten her the key was so she could take the bus home instead of having to be picked up and dropped off all the time. On nice days like today it wasn’t so bad, but on the hot days it was pretty miserable. Still, it was better than walking - the one time Emma had tried that, she’d stopped to rest halfway home and had ended up nodding off. The resulting scolding from when she’d finally arrived back at the house late enough in the afternoon that Daddy was home had not been worth it, and she hadn’t tried again.

Voices from the living room interrupted her train of thought, and a quick peek confirmed that her mother was in what looked like another serious, boring meeting. She was dressed up nice, anyway, and sitting straight-backed on her armchair with a laptop balanced across her knees, her tablet in one hand and her phone shining from where it rested on the arm of the chair.

“I’m telling you, we spent 38,000 last year for twelve licenses to a sandbox environment we never used. Not one login, the whole year! We need to amend the contract to…”

Emma tuned her out and walked into the kitchen, putting her school backpack down on one of the chairs. There wasn’t much in it today, just her drawings book and her pencil case. There’d been a test today, and then they’d gone over it in long, boring detail, so Emma hadn’t bothered to bring any of her other books. Which was good, because it left plenty of room for snacks.

Walking over to the fridge, it took some tugging to get it open but Emma managed it without too much fuss. Her mother didn’t even pause in her statements at the noise of the door opening, and Emma heaved an internal sigh of relief as she reached in and pulled out the plastic bag with today’s snack inside. She couldn’t help the big smile that pulled at the corners of her mouth; since she didn’t have homework today, she could go see her good friend Growly! Growly loved snacks.

Putting the bag in her backpack, Emma slid it back onto her shoulders and padded quietly into her mom’s line of sight. Her mom hated to be interrupted during Important Meetings, but she disliked it more when Emma slipped off without telling her. This was the best compromise Emma could come up with, and while it took a few minutes her mother eventually did notice her standing and waiting.

“Excuse me for a moment, please? My kid wants something.”

Her mother waited a few seconds before pressing a button on the laptop and turning her attention fully on Emma.

“What’s up kiddo?”

Emma shuffled her feet, nervous, but she knew better than to waste her mother’s time while other people were waiting.

“Can I go see Growly today?”

Her mother blinked. “You’re still seeing him? Emma, aren’t you a little….old to be having an imaginary friend?”

Emma stomped her foot. “He’s my friend! He’s got pretty eyes and the best stories!” She could feel her lower lip quivering; just because her mom never saw Growly didn’t make him any less real! Not that she could be bothered to come and look, anyway, with her Important Business Meetings. She never had time for Emma anymore.

Her mother held up her hands in surrender. “Fine, fine. Have you got any homework?” At Emma’s vigorous head shake, she shrugged and turned her attention back to her computer screen. “Yeah, fine. Just make sure you get home before Daddy does, okay?”

“Okay!” Emma was out the door in a flash, before her mother could realize that Daddy was away on a business trip and wouldn’t be home for days. Emma figured as long as she got back home before sunset, it would be fine.

As she left, she could hear her mother resume her call behind her. “Sorry for the delay. What? Oh, to go visit her imaginary friend Growly. I know she’s a little old for it, but kids will be kids…”

Emma practically flew down the sidewalk as she ran towards the small park a few blocks down from her house, only stopping to look both ways at each street like Julio the Gardener had taught her. It wasn’t the prettiest park, but that was okay. Emma loved it there anyway. It was quiet most days, and Growly was there!

Growly was her new best friend. He listened to her patiently when she talked about whatever was in her head and never told her to be quiet or to please take the noise somewhere else. He was soft and nice to hug, and didn’t mind if she squeezed with all her might. If someone was mean to her at school, he’d hold her until the tears stopped and then tell her the most wonderful stories. Growly was the best.

Emma didn’t slow down until she’d reached the line of trees that marked the start of the walking trails along the creek, where she had to slow down or risk tripping on an exposed root. Plus the walk gave her time to get her breath back, not that it was the easiest path to get to Growly. Down a hill, jump across a little stream-let that had carved a deep niche out of the ground, up a hill, down another hill to the creek proper, then across the creek on some smooth stepping-stones that were fun to play on as long as you didn’t mind getting a little wet.

Finally she reached the long, muddy bank where the creek nearly touched the practice fields and the trees were big and old. One really big one had had the dirt half-washed away from its roots and now formed a cozy little space where Growly lived.

Emma walked up to the tree with a spring in her step. “Growly!” she called; it was always polite to make sure the person you were here to see was actually in. Growly was, most times, but she still used her manners.

Two glowing orbs appeared in the darkness under the tree, followed by two more, followed by a third set. They shone with an eerie light, but Emma liked them. They reminded her of the fancy earrings her mother wore when she went out with Daddy for a night and left Emma with the babysitter, who never minded how late she stayed up or what she had for dinner. They were red and blue and green and all the colors in between, and changed constantly. Emma could look at them for hours and not get bored, and Growly often let her.

She grinned at her best friend and shrugged her backpack off her shoulders. Reaching in, she pulled out the plastic bag and opened it to let Growly see the raw, bloody steak inside.

“See Growly, I brought you your favorite! It’s kinda cold, though, sorry. I know you don’t like that.”

Growly didn’t seem to mind, though, as a paw covered in emerald green fur and tipped with seven long, brightly polished black claws emerged from the shadows beneath the tree and delicately snagged the steak. The steak looked kind of silly and small as Growly pulled it back beneath the tree, and Emma spent a brief moment wondering if she could find bigger steaks before dismissing the idea. Any heavier and she couldn’t run all the way here and she liked Growly too much to give up any precious minutes.

Settling herself down on the special chair Growly had made just for her out of sticks and leaves, Emma pulled out her drawing book and her pencil box, and began painstakingly drawing the tree and the roots and all of it. She could hear Growly making his funny happy noise as he munched on the steak, and she grinned to herself. He was so silly!

“So, today in class we had a math test…”

Murem Sivaowl Ryggaus ki Capisten, third in line to the Seat of Capisten, was not having the best of days. Or the best of weeks, for that matter.

It had started, somewhat predictably, with his younger sibling Saphah Lelruye Ryggaus ki Capisten - fourth in line to the Seat of Capisten. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d done that Saphah disapproved of, but that disapproval had been violently conveyed by the no less than four assassins that had accosted him on his way back from the Place of Warm Waters.

Barely escaping with his life from the ambush, and leaving two of the killers mortally wounded in his wake, he had decided to pay a visit to his good friend Honyurha Kosres ki Capisten, nine hundred and thirty-fourth in line to the Seat of Capisten. Honyurha had been working for years on something she called a “Translational Instantaneous Movement Engine,” and had benefited a great deal from Murem’s patronage. It’d taken a while to convince her, but finally she’d agreed to let Murem use the device to escape the machinations of Saphah - a mistake, as it had turned out.

The ride had been absolutely awful, and the sudden cessation of it even worse. The T.I.M.E. machine had shattered on impact, and spilled Murem out into one of the most bizarre places he’d ever seen - whereupon he threw up the sthsssh he’d eaten for his break of day meal. It made an interesting puce stain on the yellow plants around him, and only when his innards had ceased pulsing did he have the wherewithal to look around.

His first thought was that he must be dead, and that Honyurha had been right in saying that the device wasn’t ready for live subjects. Still, he dismissed the thought nearly immediately for as much as no one returned to say what the far side of life looked like, surely it was not so strange as this.

A yellow sun beamed down from a bright blue sky - much brighter and more powerful than the old red giant that hung in the skies of home - while around him tall yellow vegetation waved in the slight breeze, bowing before the taller green and brown plants that completely encircled the area. Faint noises drifted through the air - strange chattering, piercing whistles, bizarre cackling, and a bewildering variety more nuanced sounds that had him pressing both sets of sound-directing appendages flat against his skull. The smells, too, were as unfamiliar as the sky and twice as disorienting.

It’d almost been enough to send him catatonic when a flicker of true color flashed in his thirdsight. He turned toward it with a glad cry that died aborning when he got a good look at what had actually attracted his attention.

It stood on only two appendages - how it balanced he could only imagine, but balance it did as it came through the line of tall green-and-brown vegetation - and used two more for gripping, with the only other visible protrusion from its trunk a head with only one set of eyes - how could it see?? - a mouth, two sound-directing flaps, and a large, fleshy protuberance that seemed to be partially protecting its breathing slits.

All in all, a more ramshackle animal than Murem had ever seen, yet it flashed in his thirdsight with the true colors of sentience. It had a mind complex enough to shine, a veritable barrage of colors that had him slitting his third set of eyes in wonder and pain. Not even the young of Murem’s kind shone so brightly - in public anyway. Kits were not shown to public society until they had at least a modicum of control over themselves, though Murem had heard from his older relatives that newborns shone more brightly than any sun.

Still, it was extremely clear that Murem was very far from home, and as the saying went “any cavern is warm when the sky cries.”

It sounded better when spoken.

“Help! I’m lost and I don’t know where I am!” Murem shouted as loudly as he could. The strange being stopped, turned its head to the side slightly, and cupped its forward appendages around its mouth and made a very loud sound indeed. Murem flinched away, making the plants around him rustle. What in the bleak red sky had that been? The true colors visible had modulated a bit, but the noise was completely unnecessary!

It was coming closer now, easily traceable by the noises it continued to make, and Murem could take it no longer. Turning, he fled ignominiously away from the strange creature - creatures, there were more emerging from the vegetation, and all making enough racket to wake the damned - as fast as his running limbs would take him, fighting and manipulating limbs tucked close to his sides and sensory brush pinned back to reduce his profile and wind resistance. This had the happy side effect of reducing the amount of disruptive movement in the plants around him too, and he made it to the shade of the green plants safely.

Still, he didn’t dare slow down until he had put a great deal of distance between himself and his landing place, the claws on his paws digging into the strangely dark soil with every bound, and he eventually came to a stop next to a stream of remarkably clear liquid. A bit of careful testing established that while it was carrying a frankly bewildering amount of trace contaminants, the main component was sufficient to quench his thirst and the contaminants were not going to kill him immediately.

He lay down carefully on the bank with a sigh. Whatever this place was, it was an unholy distance away from his home. Just what had Honyurha been building? He’d been under the impression that her machine had been designed to move people between two geographic locations, not throw them across entire worlds! At least, that had been his understanding of it. There had been a few moments when her explanation had caused him to nod along until he’d nodded off, a fact about which she had given him an endless amount of grief. He hoped Saphah hadn’t done anything egregious to her….

A light prickle of burning pain brought his thoughts back to the present, and he looked down to his paws before being dumbstruck by horror. His fur - usually a beautiful gold - had darkened to a horrible spring green. Like some common fieldworker! Apparently this sun, with its much stronger rays, had done in minutes what his native sun would have taken months to do. Murem was mortified; not only was he now so far from home he barely knew which way was up, now he also had the complexion of some common peasant! Cruryth Ponqirun Ryggaus ki Capisten, Seat of Capisten - and Murem’s progenitor - would turn him away with a blow if he ever appeared with his coat in such a state.

So distracted was he by the deplorable state of his coat that he didn’t even notice the shadow growing longer.

“Kitty!”

Murem started, accidentally vocalizing in his surprise, and the object of his startlement made a high-pitched noise even as he rounded on it.

He stared down at the small alien in front of him, eyes whirling as his hearts pounded. Much smaller than the one he had seen previously, it was like looking at a sun with his thirdsight, true colors shining to rival that of the star above. Additionally, this one spoke much more clearly than the one he had encountered before.

“Growly kitty.”

Granted, it persisted in vocalizing, but its thoughts spoke to him clearly - projected out in such a fashion that even deaf old Qrarqieth Remkir ki Capisten, three thousand forty seventh in line to the Seat of Capisten, who had cleaned the Seat of Capisten for more years than Murem had been alive, would probably have been able to understand it well.

“I am not Growly, I am Murem Sivaowl Ryggaus ki Capisten, third in line to the Seat of Capisten,” he responded with as much dignity as he could muster, and the little alien made the high-pitched noise again. A sound of happiness, he realized, as he watched her true colors ripple and play about her.

“Murm She-owl Roars Key Hatstand,” she replied obediently, and Murem sighed.

“Growly will work,” he replied in defeat, and she brought her forward two appendages together sharply several times, the brilliant color of delight lighting the clearing.

“Growly! I’m Emma! Now we’re best friends!” She declared, and apparently overcome by her emotion she leaped toward him and clasped her limbs around his neck. His fur ruffled in response, and with no little difficulty he pinned his combat limbs back before he accidentally skewered her. This was, from what he could tell in a very light inspection of her mind, a sign of affection.

He brought his manipulating limbs up carefully and returned the gesture for a moment - which caused her to squeeze all the tighter; if his throat muscles hadn’t been as strong as they were he’d be much more concerned - before pulling her gently away. She giggled again - apparently the phalanges on his manipulating limbs were tickling her, and he adjusted his grip.

“I’m new around here, do you know some place I could stay out of the sun?” He asked her carefully and clearly; the longer he was in her presence, the easier it was to understand her thoughts and speak back to her in the same fashion, but he’d rather be safe than be sorry.

She frowned for a moment in concentration, her true colors dimming with something Murem couldn’t name but that pained him more than he’d thought possible for an acquaintanceship of nothing but a handful of minutes.

“Well, my mother doesn’t like animals, and Daddy says we have to abide by her decisions for now, and you’re a person but she doesn’t like fur or soft things, so you can’t come home with me. Um,”

The clouds across her expression - and the dimness of her true colors - lifted like a rising sun and she dazzled him for a brief moment.

“I know a place! It’s not far and really cool! Follow me!”

Not waiting for his response, she turned and marched off into the woods. Casting one final glance over his shoulder to the direction in which the remnants of the T.I.M.E. machine lay, he shook his head and padded after her. If that wasn’t the way back, this way forward as as good as any.

He could only hope he’d find a way home soon.

The time is now.

Garrett crushed a security guard’s skull with the leg of the bench he’d wrenched apart when he’d felt the nanites in his blood boil away. Today was the Grand Tourney, sure, but that didn’t stop lesser fights from going on to assuage those who couldn’t afford seats in the big house. He’d been in a waiting area when all the lights went out, the floor juddered wildly, and every leash held by an owner broke in an instant. He’d shared a few stunned seconds of silence with the rest of the pilots in the area he was in, then by some unspoken agreement they’d all turned as one upon the guards.

Garrett had shared out the broken pieces of bench with three other pilots, two grim-faced women and a man with crystalline growths erupting from his skin in odd and inconvenient places. He silently blessed his avatar’s resistance to projectiles as a guard opened up on him with a weapon that spat bullets like raindrops; the facet hadn’t been much use in the ring - anyone with projectile powers tended to be in higher brackets than Garrett typically competed in - but right now it was coming in very handy.

He sent a silent pulse of gratitude to his avatar, whose name he’d never had the chance to know, and treasured the glow of warmth in response. After all the stories he’d heard about the other pilots, the ones who managed to put some good back into the world, he’d been trying to reach out to his avatar more often; the grey numbness hadn’t even allowed him to consider the possibility of such a thing, but now things were different.

He was different.

He was free.

Garrett kicked a guard’s legs out from under her and broke her neck in a swift blow - a kindness, in its own way, when many of these guards would have taken hours to kill a pilot and laughed while they did so. But Garrett was tired of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and however much he might resent these guards and wish them all the pain in the world, he wanted to go home more.

Home to his green, rolling hills. Home to his family, his mother, his father, his brothers, even that one cousin who complained constantly at family gatherings and whom everyone avoided if they could or drank heavily while being nattered at if they couldn’t. Home to the farm, to the cows and the dogs and the pigs and the chickens. Home to the hot sun on the fields, to the cold rain in the winters, to the light breezes of spring.

He’d give up all his revenge to see home again.

“Hex is hope!”

He couldn’t tell who had started the cry, but now a thousand throats picked it up as a banner winked and flashed somewhere ahead of him.

“Hex is hope!”

“Hex is hope!”

“Rrawrl kfshht Rwwrl!”

Garrett winced away from the yowling - he didn’t have a universal translator, and apparently the big yellow eight-limbed cat-thing didn’t either - and ran on, his own voice lifted to join the others in the battle cry.

The security forces didn’t have a chance as thousands of pilots slammed into them, years of pain and bitterness coming to a boil as freedom took Collyseum by storm. Garrett watched a petite, blonde-haired woman who looked no older than twenty casually gut a man with her bare hands. Mechs were crushed, tanks thrown into other tanks, buildings crumbled under vengeful hands, and at the head of everything the flag still flew - though Garrett couldn’t see who was holding it.

Garrett fought with desperation, hope a blazing fire in his chest as countless objects snapped and broke under his hands. He broke necks, arms, legs, turrets, guns, walls - whatever he could get his hands on, he knew precisely the best way to leverage it into snapping. He could feel his avatar strongly, a warm core pulsing in his chest like a second heartbeat, and he screamed in mingled joy and defiance as the tides turned around him.

And then, something snapped.

Garrett couldn’t say for sure what truly happened. There was a shiver in the air, as if disturbed by some vast shockwave for a timeless moment, and then everything resumed as projectiles flew overhead. Garrett squinted up at them dizzily; they almost looked like - people?

He shook his head and turned back to the fight, such as it was. Whatever had shaken the air had broken the morale of their opponent’s resolve, and the security teams were scattering now - for all the good it would do them. If there was anything being a slave in this awful place had taught him, it was that there was no place to run.

And, at the rate some of the other pilots were going - had that guy fused himself to a tank? - there wouldn’t be any place left to hide either.

Garrett cheered with the rest and turned to the nearest structure even vaguely still standing and took a swing. His strength was nothing to write home about - barely more than adequate to survive the lower tiers - but his durability was aces. It took a few punches, but he managed to make a very satisfactory hole in the wall - only for the entire structure to go two seconds later as a pilot that looked like some weird combination of human and cow plowed through the last of the structurally significant columns.

Garrett shrugged and moved on. Collyseum was a big place, but there were a lot of extraordinarily angry pilots whose abilities were very specifically chosen for destruction. In the weird half-light that never varied, he couldn’t be sure how long it took for the last of it to fall but by the end he was sore and exhausted and elated. The winds had picked up as time had passed and were now blowing strongly, the mother of all sandstorms looming on the horizon, and all Garrett could do was sit silently on his seat of two vaguely chair-shaped pieces of rubble and watch it come as the wind whipped sand into his face.

It came closer, and closer, swallowing the filth and rubble and exhausted pilots as it came and when it finally reached him-

The bright white light of the place between took hold of him, mind and body and soul.

Next he knew, before him lay green fields, the sun high overhead such a change from the dead skies of Collyseum that he had to cover his eyes as they watered. The smell of green, growing things filled the air around him, wet and ripe with the promise of spring and just a hint of the summer heat to come.

Garrett felt his legs give out from under him as he wept, his feelings too great for his heart to contain. He was home. He was safe.

A noise drew his attention to the bushes behind him, and he twisted to see his brother, Daniel, stepping out of them with an expression on his face like he’d seen a ghost and much more grey hair than Garrett remembered.

It didn’t matter in the slightest.

He launched himself at his brother and wrapped him up in the biggest, warmest hug he could.

“I’m home,” he sobbed. His brother returned the hug with a fierceness that only made Garrett cry harder, but he still managed to say what needed saying through his tears.

“Hex is hope.”

————————————————————————————————-

Danica shoved another pilot down as security guards wielding lightning-spitters opened up on their position. The impacts from the guns hurt her, but they would have killed the other pilot - a small humanoid with green fur, a short rack of antlers, and very large eyes. She gritted her teeth as the barrage continued, and the other pilot looked up at her in surprise before winking and vanishing in a haze of green mist.

The firing stopped abruptly.

Danica winced and rubbed her chest as she nodded to the smaller pilot, their antlers now covered in gore and a ferocious look in their eyes, and they nodded back before vanishing again. Danica began to move up, towards the shining banner held aloft by someone she didn’t recognize forward and to her left, keeping those she could out of harm’s way.

For all that she’d progressed in the ranks on a tide of blood and pain, Danica was very tired of killing. The last person she’d killed was her former master, and she’d taken great pleasure in pulling his insides out and hanging him off the side of the building with them as a warning to the other vultures.

After that he’d contented herself with taking blows and breaking bones and buildings; most of the security guards whose limbs she’d broken might have been finished off by other pilots, but their blood was not on her hands.

At least a few other pilots had seemed to sense that, and had started to follow her - ducking behind her when the bullets flew and darting out when the shooting paused to rend flesh and bones and metal and stone. Danica let them, the four or five she had following her now like little giltlings followed their mothers around the ponds of home more than welcome to keep themselves safe behind her.

As she made her way forward her entourage grew, and gradually above the scream of the dying and the sound of weapons fire, a new shout could be heard.

“Hex is hope!”

The words lit a fire inside Danica, and she raised her voice to join the outcry.

“Hex is hope!”

Her companions picked up the cry.

“Hex is hope! Hex is hope! HEX IS HOPE!”

They surged forward in a raging tide, freedom ringing in their voices and veins, and Danica pushed hard to stay at the front of the pack.

A mech appeared in front of her. She tore one of its legs off without slowing down.

A tank rolled up to stop them. She put her head down and her arms forward and tore through its armor like tissue paper.

A battalion of soldiers popped up from behind cover. She kicked a piece of the tank and held it in front of her and hers like a shield.

Never slowing, never stopping, the rush was inevitable. Inexorable. The pilots had been beaten down, but they were not dead. And now they were free.

“Hex is hope! HEX IS HOPE!”

Danica’s voice was raw, but she didn’t care. A thousand other throats rang with the call, a thousand other voices lifted hers to join them. The banner flew tall and proud at their head, though she couldn’t see the man who’d held it when they first started their charge. Now it was being held by someone else, someone taller and broader - with a long, whip-like tail? - than the first man, but she couldn’t see much more than that through the explosions and debris both organic and not.

And then, something happened.

She couldn’t say what, for sure. It was like a bell had been struck, or a huge door thrown open so violently it rebounded off the wall. The air shivered for an instant, and then all was still.

Suddenly things started flying overhead - the sky had been all but empty until this point, the scant handful of pilots with the power of flight dominating the skies nearly unopposed. But now it was full of flying things - people? - that arced high over the crumbling walls of Collyseum and out over the wasteland. Danica watched them go for a long moment, but when none of them even paused above the city she put them out of her mind. Whatever, whoever they were, they were headed out and away from this wretched place, and would play no part in the coming struggle.

Whatever hope their opponents had held burned out in an instant, and they fled in droves. Most dropped their guns as the ran. Some even abandoned their vehicles in order to run faster, but it did not matter overmuch for some of Danica’s compatriots were very fast indeed.

She let them go; she was very, very tired of killing.

Some of the pilots around her had turned their anger on the buildings, and Danica joined them with a will. Pillars shattered under her fists, load-bearing walls were deprived of integrity with kicks, and windows smashed for the sheer hell of it. When one building came crashing down, she moved on to the next without pause. Then the next. Then the next.

She couldn’t truly say how many buildings she brought down, in the end. Many. It didn’t matter. What did matter was the sandstorm rising outside the city limits, as tall as the sky itself and twice as deadly. The flight of things out of Collyseum had stopped some time ago, and the sandstorm had started brewing instead.

Danica slumped to the ground, head bowed. There was nothing to fight and nowhere to run, and she could see many of the other pilots seemed to agree. Most simply watched the oncoming storm, though a few had somehow found the energy to try and flee the inexorable. One even seemed to have found the energy to beckon the storm, dance before it like some crazed weather-worshiper.

As the sands swallowed the virulent remains of a city that had once breathed cruelty and pain, Danica closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable. Closer and closer the sand roared, until -

The bright white light of the In Between caught her and threw her far, far away.

She hit the ground with a thud, raising a small dust cloud around her. The firm ground underneath her palms was a deep brown, almost black - nothing like the shifting red sands of ARENA. Trembling, she raised her eyes and saw-

A blackened husk of a building. Fields scorched to the earth, the thorny vines of the undergrowth crumbled to ashy heaps where they had fallen. Upright skeletons of trees standing out of the ground like rotten teeth.

“No.”

Despair hit her like the tank had earlier, to much greater effect. She staggered a few steps forward and fell to her knees right in front of where the door would have been. Should have been.

Her mind was blank as she reached out to bush the sooty surface, recoiling as a portion of the doorframe crumbled to ashy dust under her hand. This was home, a safe harbor. This was dreams of yellow fields and playing with her daughters. This was her hope.

Burned.

Gone.

She bowed her head, unable to bear the weight of grief, and something caught her eye. There, in the soft ashes of what had been her home, was a footprint. A very familiar footprint. A bare foot, one with six toes clearly outlined.

Tripsy, they used to call her youngest, because she had used to trip on the extra toe on her left foot.

She surged to her feet, hope blazing anew. Home was her daughters; the rest could be built and built again. She looked, and saw smudged, ashy tracks leading west. She turned to follow them, breathing a prayer as she did so.

“Hex is hope.”

————————————————————————————————-

Kzzkvns dived, snatching up two armed bipeds that bore the stink of cruelty before rising away. They made noises that vibrated its carapace, and in a fit of vindictive annoyance it tore their heads off and let the blood rain down among their companions. It had never been fitted with a translator, its owner too lazy to obtain the intracranial device that would have been required, and it did not understand the noises that the others made.

But it understood freedom. It understood the meaning of the sudden cessation of manufactured despair and the clean-fresh Hex scent flooding its pit. It knew when the time to rise and defend its hive-mates had come, no matter what those hive-mates looked like or spoke. For the first time in a very long time, it flew towards the fight with clear antennae and eyes capable of truly seeing.

It dived again, this time pulling hive-mates marked with danger-fear-Hex scents to the relative safety of the open skies. Very few others had joined it; the skies were an empty place, the power of flight uncommon, and the drones that would normally swarm in great clouds curiously absent. The hive-mates made noises and squirmed, so it deposited them gently behind a large piece of debris and took to the sky again.

Now was the time for action. There, at the forefront of it all, stood a biped hive-mate with a strange leaf on a stick; even from this distance, Kzzkvns could smell the message on the leaf.

Hex is Hope.

Straining its message-glands, Kzzkvns echoed it in a cloud of scent thick enough to be nearly visible.

Hex is hope.

The vibrations from below grew louder, and Kzzkvns dived toward the hated enemies with renewed frenzy. Its hardened keratin claws sheered through steel like it was a gossamer cocoon and rent the octopodal beings within, splattering strange, yellow ichor for almost thirty yards to each side. Its powerful back limbs sent bipeds into walls and each other, breaking their fragile inner structures and leaving them crumpled on the ground like dead leaves. Its wing covers, hardened and sharpened by years of deepest darkness, sheered through limbs and other soft, unprotected flesh and splattered it in a rainbow of blood.

It took off, wings sore from long disuse, and dived again and again to destroy the enemies of the hive. Fragile calcium structures broke under the brush of its claws, and machinery shredded. In the line of its advance above, its hive-mates surged below and gained ground at a ferocious pace. Violence was not be sought, but the Hive was inviolate.

And then the air shivered.

Kzzkvns nearly fell from the sky as for a weightless, timeless moment the air did not support its weight. Its wings, exhausted and trembling, failed and it fell - only to be caught by something wholly unfamiliar that still managed to smell strongly of the Hex. Vibrations rattled its exoskeleton as whatever had grabbed it made some form of noise and set it down gently behind the stumpy remains of a wall. Its wings fluttered feebly, and the other pilot plopped half of what smelled like a security guard in front of Kzzkvns before moving away to make rubble of another building.

Kzzkvns was not hungry - its wings were weak from disuse, not lack of will - but it consumed the meat in front of it methodically and it did feel slightly better afterward. Gathering itself, it leaped to rejoin the fray.

It was a long time later that the sky stood empty, the creations that had sought to divide it from the land brought low by the power and rage of those it had caged. Kzzkvns rested on a wide piece of rubble, wings spread in the vain hope of some extra warmth to ease them, and felt the winds tug at them. The sands had risen in the desert, whipped into a frenzy by one of its hive-mates - or so it seemed - and it was content. This Hive should not have existed, steeped in misery and propped up on the backs of the workers, and now it did not. The howling sands would see the last traces of it gone, and if it took Kzzkvns also, it would be well.

As the wind-driven sand poured across the city slowly, it had enough time to fold its wings away and stand to meet the reckoning, and…

….and a bright white something that smelled so much of everything it was nothing pulled it far away from the dead land.

When it landed, the ground was warm and forgiving, taking the imprint of its form even as it struggled to its feet. Around it, life buzzed. A thousand message scents, deepening confusion and alarm and the spicy spike of warrior-drones getting closer. The air was warm and full of life; the familiar shine of the True Hive of home drained all the fight it had left.

As the warriors drew up in a circle around it, it told them the most important thing it knew to say.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Cysud Warmheart wasn’t an optimist. After century upon century built into millennia of being trapped in an endless cycle of kill or be killed, he couldn’t afford to be. But he wasn’t such a pessimist as to stay in his cell when the door sprang open and the control webbing - implanted into his chest and neck by his first owner and never subsequently replaced, for all his hide had grown up painfully around it - dissolved.

His first steps out of his cell had been met with no resistance, even after he experimentally put his fist through a wall (or two), but a floor closer to the exit and suddenly four guards round the corner at a dead run. Cysud knew the one in front intimately; the man liked to take particular pleasure in the use of his shock prod whenever he felt Cysud wasn’t moving fast enough to suit. All four men were running hot, likely a combination of activity and anger, and Cysud grinned to himself.

His own innate strength and durability had been enough for the pits, once he’d learned to keep himself on a level where nothing flashier was required, but he was a pilot. He had bonded an avatar, though he’d been careful to minimize the bond over the years - it wasn’t the avatar’s fault, any of what happened, and they did not deserve to suffer Cysud’s feelings in this hellhole. It was the one piece of kindness he could give, since to surrender the bond would be to be forced into another by his owner.

But here and now, with the growing roar outside and a swelling feeling in his chest - it had been so long, was this what hope felt like? - he reached for the bond and clasped it as tightly as he clasped the front two security guards. Opening his mouth, he inhaled deeply. To his eyes the effect was obvious and immediate; from stress-worked yellow to chilly green and fading fast, the thermal energy came off them in long ribbons and fell into Cysud.

He could feel the warmth in his chest, the bond still somewhat thready from long neglect getting stronger as his internal temperature rose. When he had finished his intake, the front two guards were still and silent, mere black silhouettes to his vision. Nearly completely devoid of thermal energy, they shattered easily as he clenched his hands. Their squadmates yelled imprecations and threats even as they backed away, but Cysud didn’t care.

He was so close to freedom, he could taste it.

Distance didn’t save the other two guards even as he stoked his own internal flames hotter, and he didn’t bother with shattering them as he ran past. He ran out the front gates of the compound, shattering them in the process, and into a war zone; apparently he wasn’t the only one ready to grasp a chance when it presented itself, and others were beginning to emerge from their places of holding and engage the security forces and the very buildings of the city around them.

“Hex is hope!”

Cysud’s head snapped around; he hadn’t been able to make the phrase go away in his cell, and all efforts of his former masters to do so - up to and including removing the offending piece of wall and replacing it - had been in vain. To hear it here, now - that was something worth looking to.

He didn’t recognize the man screaming; his heat signature was peculiarly mottled, as if some parts of him were much cooler than the others, but the banner in his hand blazed as brightly as the sun that didn’t hang over Collyseum: Hex is Hope.

Cysud coughed to bring his translator online - it was an older model, but he couldn’t request a replacement or repair because to do so would be to reveal he had one in the first place - and joined his basso profundo voice to the smaller man’s.

“Hex is hope!”

The shout echoed through the buildings around them, loud enough to carry over the gunfire that was beginning to pick up, and other voices began to rise and join his.

“Hex is hope!”

“Hex is hope!”

The man waved the banner hard, and those slaves that had been freed began to make their way towards him, Cysud among their number. The man turned and ran, keeping up his shout even as he headed for the main security hub, and Cysud grimaced; if he was going to die, trying to take apart that monstrous edifice would be an excellent way to do so. Still, it was a destination, and they’d gotten this far.

He kept up his own shouts as he followed, voice echoing like rolls of thunder even as more and more voices joined it. As their numbers swelled, their opponents’ desperation became more palpable. Tanks crashed through lesser buildings and mechs leaped from the shorter rooftops to join the fray; Cysud enjoyed getting his claws into them and releasing a measured portion of his stored thermal energy to cook the bastards inside. Some of the more technologically-minded pilots had taken to scooping the resultant charred mess out of the cockpits and take the machines for their own, turning them on still-loyal forces or the surrounding buildings. Cysud did not care; there were always more foot soldiers for him to take from, and while he was beginning to ache on the inside from all the thermionic cycling he refused to stop now.

At some point he’d lost sight of the strange man - though not the banner - and when the air rang with the sound of a gong too low to be heard, Cysud’s instinctive look towards the direction the noise had come from revealed that the man was gone and someone new held the banner - someone who, in the brief instant Cysud looked his way, took four rounds from a gun to his midsection in a spray of body-hot yellow that was cooling even as it spattered the ground. Cysud took a step forward, intending to do something about the issue, but the rattling clank of a mech distracted him and he had to backpedal hurriedly as one landed in the place where he’d just been standing.

He gritted his teeth and grabbed as close to the cockpit as he could reach. When the cursed thing stopped firing, he looked again but the banner had been carried further away and he was no longer in range to do much of anything about what he’d seen. With a fatalistic shrug, he turned and sprang towards a group he knew to be low-rent slavers from the 700s worlds. He had neither the time nor the energy to spare a thought for anything over his head, and his world narrowed to the next moment. Survive this, move to the next. Destroy that, get out of the way of the rubble.

And so it went for several hours, a day, several days - with every clock in the place smashed, buried, or both, time was measured in ragged breaths and thunderous heartbeats, in the space between the first tremble to the building’s fall. Cysud couldn’t say how long it had been before there was simply nothing left. Not a building stood, not an oppressor lived, and the pilots - almost as one - settled to rest where they stood. One patch of rubble was as good as another.

“It’s not enough.”

Cysud tipped his head towards the short - compared to him, anyway - humanoid who had fetched up beside him on the rubble. He’d never had much luck in telling one humanoid from another; they all looked about the same, and he’d held onto the face-blindness for dear life in the fights. Made living easier if the faces all blurred together through the centuries.

“What do you mean?”

His throat was sore from all the shouting earlier, and his voice came out more like a growl than he’d intended. Still, the other didn’t seem to pay him any mind.

“We’ve pulled the city down, but the structures extended under the sands quite a ways. The last of the scum that filled this place have hidden in there too, I can just feel it. We’ll have to fill it in, crush it.”

Cysud couldn’t say he particularly minded the sound of that, though he had to wonder how this guy planned to do anything about it. His concerns must’ve been written across his face, because the guy smiled.

“I can do it.”

Cysud made a disbelieving noise in the back of his throat, and the other guy raised an eyebrow.

“What about the ones who’re resting on top of the things you want to crush?”

His tone was mild, but his gaze was direct. The other guy shrugged.

“They’ll be moved; I heard they were starting to send some of us home, too. It’ll work.”

Cysud opened his mouth to argue further, but the guy was already moving forward and lifting his arms to the empty skies. Flickers of warmth played around his fingers as the thermal energy in the air around him began to flicker and twist oddly. Streams of heated air rose off him, and his internal temperature spiked to a working-hard yellow-white.

As an insane howling filled his ears and the air currents around him writhed like snakes in a mating frenzy, Cysud closed his eyes.

A flash of brilliant color, a white so hot it wasn’t a temperature so much as a pressure, a feeling of movement, and Cysud was somewhere else.

Before him stretched a vista he hadn’t seen in more years than he’d lived there, a view at once alien to his eyes and dear to his heart. Where once the ground had been softened by vegetation, now there was bare rock reflecting heat from the sun high overhead. And yet, the land was the same - the slopes, the ravines, the shape of the mountains behind him. It was all just as he remembered it, save for that nothing large or familiar was living there now.

He dug one hand into the pale caliche dust beneath him; unlike the sands of ARENA, the dust was soft and full of life - he could see the pinpricks of innumerable beetles scrambling over his fingers uselessly. He spent a long while simply staring, getting new handfuls whenever all the beetles had managed to escape his current one. It was quiet, here. For the first time in a long time, Cysud was truly alone. No-one was watching him, no machines chattered endless vigilance in the corners of his cell, no smug, overly-pleased-with-themselves owners ready to drop by to see the “beast” they’d acquired.

Standing, he stretched out limbs that hadn’t seen use in decades. His wings, though large, were thin and delicate enough that they were more a hindrance than a help in a fight. He’d gotten so used to keeping them close that now, as they extended, he had to stop every few moments to massage a new knot out of the tense muscles.

When he finally had them extended he resumed his earlier stillness, letting the breeze play across them even as the sun warmed and relaxed them. He waited patiently, first for the trembling to subside, then for the tingling to cease. When he was finally satisfied, he walked over to the edge of the cliff he stood on and dropped like a stone. Adjusting the angle of his wings, they billowed and suddenly he was soaring on a thermal, up, up, up beyond the edge of the cliff and into the warm skies beyond. Reaching within himself to tap his last reserve of overflow thermal energy, he began tracing a symbol with superheated air in the sky for all his kin to see - wherever they may be.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Hessia howled as she buried her claws in the skull of a man in light armor foolish enough to get within arm’s reach. He dropped, only to be replaced by something inside a suit of power armor; Hessia dodged as the armor brought guns to bear, then launched herself at it as it tried to re-orient. Like most armored things, it could not bring its arms around to bear as she nimbly clawed her way to its back and while it seemed to have extra armor plating there, she had her leisure to bring her hindclaws up for a series of disemboweling strikes that eventually hit flesh. The power armor dropped, sparking and spewing blood, and Hessia leaped away towards the forefront of the battle.

When her door had sprung open with a hideous rumble, Hessia had wasted no time in getting out of her cell - only to find herself right in the middle of an entire contingent of hired guns. She was fast, and strong, but it had still taken her a bit of while to deal with the bastards and by the time she’d gotten out to street level the battle had been well underway. She’d joined in with a will and had made excellent progress so far in her own, humble, opinion.

The rattle of bullets around her made her flinch back into cover, but it had been the last reflexive pull on the trigger by a man whose head was nowhere to be seen and stopped as quickly as it had begun. Hessia took the opportunity to advance several dozen yards, right into a cluster of slavers huddled together in the perceived shelter of a destroyed tank. Why they were bothering to duck and cover, Hessia didn’t know; most of the projectile weaponry was in the hands of this place’s enforcers and while a she had seen a few pilots pick up guns to turn them on their former owners, the overwhelming majority seemed content to close the distance and do similarly to what she was doing.

Namely, painting the place with the blood of their tormentors.

Hessia landed on the first one with a sickening crunch, and another two were grabbed and lifted away by some furiously buzzing insect pilot; she could See the bond pulsing at the heart of the bug, which was the only reason she didn’t take a swing for it. Her own bond, less than a week old, pulsed and throbbed beneath her breastbone as the raging emotions stoked the fired inside into an inferno. Opening her mouth, she shrieked at the last four and they collapsed to the ground with blood dripping from their ears.

That had never happened before, and she sent a fierce wave of gratitude to the one who sat beside her heart. They responded with a roil of emotions too complex to process now but that spurred her into motion once again. As she moved, she heard the battle cries begin to rise above the din of the main conflict.

“Hex is hope!”

“HEX IS HOPE!”

Hessia didn’t hesitate, and added her own howls to the din.

“Hex is Hoooope!”

Leaping with renewed vigor, Hessia managed to get in behind a mech that was standing off three other pilots. A single shriek of her newfound ability brought all the gears in one of the arms to a grinding halt, freeing up one of the other pilots to let them leap forward and pull the offending arm completely off, and starting beating the mech with it.

Hessia’s claws ached, having been used on steel a great deal already today, and she turned to go in search of softer targets. Of which there were a surprising few; the path ahead had been forged and reforged by other pilots ahead of her, and she rushed to catch up to the front. As she did, her eyes caught on a banner held up high at the very front of the fighting, and-

The world turned.

A soundless, breathless, frozen moment rippled and Hessia had just enough time to see something explode out of the Grand Arena and begin rushing towards the edge - many somethings - moving fast - light -

And then they were gone, beyond her sight, and the enemy ranks fluttered and broke, fleeing like prey before coursers. Howling in delight, Hessia forgot her weariness and bounded after them while other pilots took advantage of the sudden cessation of a great deal of incoming fire to turn their attention to the buildings around them. Roaring, they began battering down the edifices of the mighty and corrupt even as Hessia herself caught up to the rearmost of those attempting to flee and set into them with possibly more glee than was warranted.

Hessia was uncannily good at finding those who would hide from the pilots, and as the hours wore on and more building fell she ferreted out nest after festering nest of slavers and security guards. Those who would feast on the misery of the innocent could not hide from her, and again and again her claws came down.

By the time the last building fell, Hessia was tired unto death. She’d torn one of her claws off disemboweling a particularly well-armored bodyguard, and her paw throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Beyond the edge of the rubble, far and away in a direction Hessia’s internal compass said was East but could just as easily have been the North or South, a great storm was bearing down on the city. The winds had risen as the pilots had laid down building after building, freeing the trapped breezes from their cage as surely as they themselves had been freed.

And, just like them, the winds were blowing into a tempest.

Hessia huffed out a breath that blew away a little puff of sand from the rubble she was laying on, but didn’t move as the towering wall of sand drew nearer. She was tired; if this was to be the end, there wasn’t any point in spending energy she didn’t have trying to avoid it. And this way she got to watch the remains of the hated city vanish into the storm as if they had never been. As the front grew closer, she closed her eyes to protect them from the blowing sand, and -

The brightness of the Travel folded her in its wings.

When it cleared, all was green. Hessia blinked, gulping great puffs of pollen-heavy air as she looked around. The place itself was unfamiliar, but the plants, the noises, the smells - home. She had come home at last. Just before the time of pouring rains would clear the air of the pollen that saturated it now, if her nose was any judge.

A brilliant exultation thrilled in her veins. She was home, she was strong, she was free! The new second heart in her chest danced a merry rhythm to her joy, and she laughed as she began frolicking about as she hadn’t since she was a cub despite the ache in her limbs, rubbing up against the fragrant leaves of a nearby frwln plant and reveling in the disappearance of the hot, dead stink of that other place. The pollen twinkled as it reflected the light of the sun above, as if the very forest rejoiced in her return, and she couldn’t hold it in any longer even though her throat was sore.

She tilted her head back and howled her words to the very heavens themselves.

“Hex is hope!”

————————————————————————————————-

Doris grimaced as she pulled the intestines out of a great brute of a man. They smelled awful and the man was screaming in a terribly unbecoming fashion, so she stuffed them into his mouth before pushing him over and turning on his comrades. Gore was splattered up and down her front, and it looked like she was wearing strangely mottled red gloves, and she’d never cared less about how unfashionable she looked in her entire life. Her collar was off, her blood was up, and it was time that these fucking bastards learned who they were dealing with.

The man’s comrades, looking distinctly pale beneath their helmets and riot gear, brandished their weapons in what they probably thought was a threatening fashion, shouting for her to go back to her owner’s place of residence and obey. She gave them her best Party smile.

“Why boys, don’t you know?”

She closed the distance in less time than it took to blink, shoving her hand through layers of padding and up under the ribs of the guy in front.

“I don’t answer to anyone anymore.”

With that, she clenched her fist and yanked, pulling the guy’s heart and what looked like perhaps a bit of lung out of his chest and flinging the mess at the next guy as cover for her movement. They convulsively opened fire, but she was already not where they were aiming. In quick succession the innards of the three other security people became their outards and Doris moved on, waving cheerfully to P'f’t'gh as it sent a wave of slavers stumbling away with one stomp of its mighty hooves. P'f’t'gh waved back before charging after the slavers and Doris felt her Party smile turn into a real grin.

P'f’t'gh had always been a fun one.

Doris trotted on, heading tidily for what appeared to be the heart of the battle. Someone had gotten a large piece of cloth from somewhere and had sewed the symbol and words onto it that echoed between the building now as a war cry as it had echoed in the small rooms and throbbing underbelly of Collyseum.

“Hex is hope!”

One voice rang under all the others, rolling like thunder, and Doris raised her eyebrows in surprise. Of all the fuddy-duddies she might have expected to take part in this fracas, bitter old Cysud wasn’t one of them. He’d repeatedly stepped away from any retelling of the stories, and had regarded the mysterious symbol with skepticism at best. When Doris had finally gotten tired of his attitude and asked why he was such a wet blanket, he’d looked at her with those creepy empty eyesockets of his and told her to ask him again in a few centuries.

If he was here now, the times really had to be a-changing. She couldn’t see him from where she was, but Doris’ smile threatened to split her face in two anyway as she raised her own voice as best she could to join the general outcry.

“Hex is hope!”

More security forces boiled out of wherever they normally lurked and joined the fray, mechs and tanks crowded into streets covered in rubble, some individuals in power armor trying to make progress ahead of squads wearing helmets and tactical gear, and a curious absence of anything unmanned - which was especially suspicious this close to that awful main security hub. Still, Doris was not about to question providence; her tricks didn’t work on the smooth surfacing of the armor, and she left the various mechanical devices to those better suited to dealing with them.

For herself, she jolted into high gear as she approached the unarmored guards. Her hands pushed through cloth and plating, sending guts and bone flying high into the air as she simply didn’t stop moving. Ten enemies in ten seconds, seventeen in fifteen, twenty in twenty four; they dropped as flies under her blows, alien gore and viscera mixing oddly with the rich, red blood of humanity into a sticky purple effluvia that coated most of her front. Doris didn’t care; purple brought out the blue in her eyes, after all, and was a most becoming color for her.

She was just taking the head off another bruiser when the whole of reality shook. The ground stayed still, not a single hair fell out of place, and yet a vibration passed through everything that Doris felt more than she heard. She cocked her head in vain to try and find the source when something - actually, many somethings now that she looked properly - went whizzing by overhead. Doris leaned back and shaded her eyes uselessly - the light didn’t have any one source, after all, so shading her eyes did very little to bring the strange objects into focus - and watched them as they went. It didn’t seem to take long for the “rain” to pass, and by the time they had every last bastard who’d grown fat off the misery generated here in Collyseum was beating feet for the edges of the city.

Doris tsk’d, shaking her head before leaping into a dead sprint after them. Not a single one of those miserable commies was going to make it out alive, not if she had any say in the matter! Such pests were best killed before they could breed in the woodwork to try again later; she’d told the Woodwards as much when Leticia had found a cockroach in her kitchen, and they’d wisely followed her advice. It was time for Doris to do nothing less.

The first man’s spine shattered in her grip like the time she’d accidentally held her wineglass too tightly at the Robinson’s dinner party several years ago, and just as she had then she simply let go of the pieces and shook out her hand to make sure nothing had gotten stuck where it shouldn’t. The next three men found it very difficult indeed to breath without significant portions of their lungs, and the one in the lead went down silently in a spray of blood as Doris pulled his trachea out.

She surveyed her handiwork for a moment, quietly pleased with herself, before heading off to find more pests. Other pilots had taken to destroying buildings, leaving the road completely strewn with rubble that required a bit of negotiating around, but Doris let the mess slide just this once. As much as she abhorred a mess, she disliked this place more. In fact, the only thing she disliked more than this place was when her dear, sweet husband left the toilet seat up after he was done. That little piece of inconsideration really got her goat, and if it was up when she returned home she’d have some Words for the dear, silly man.

Doris ran out of targets before the other teams of pilots ran out of buildings - Tigure was taking particular delight in putting holes in load bearing walls, the sweet dear, and Rhombus Trapezoid Circle was doing absolutely delightful things with its mono-filament edge - so she settled herself on the rubble of what had once been the central security hub and watched as the buildings fell one after the other. She enjoyed the wind in her hair as it picked up with each booming crash that signaled the end of another building; the rising storm on the horizon was ominous, to be sure, but she could do even less about that than she could do about the buildings so she settled back and picked idly at the drying blood on her hands.

Worse than picking off nail polish, really, and doing so gave her arms the odd patchwork effect, but underneath the crusted blood her skin was as soft as any other product had made it, and Doris was well enough content with that.

The hours unfurled slowly, the buildings continuing to fall, and all the while the sandstorm grew closer and closer. It struck the edge of the destroyed city just as the last building went, and Doris could process visual information quickly enough to watch almost in slow motion as it dumped tons upon tons of sand over the rubble, effectively erasing it - and the pilots that had been resting on it - from view. It drew near, and Doris closed her eyes.

As it touched her skin, she was suddenly whisked away by a white light, not painful to look at despite its intensity, and carrying her with the dreadful inexorability of the tide.

Doris did not stagger when the white left her as quickly as it had come. She held her head high, proudly defiant of whatever was coming next, ready to take all comers.

Or so she thought.

She didn’t recognize the place at first. Blackened ground stretched as far as the eye could see, interrupted by low, crumbling walls and viciously twisted bushes, while little bits and pieces of sun-bleached plastics poked through the surface of the ground like curious fish. Rusting hulks rested on rubble-strewn roads, wrecked wretched in the watery sunshine. The nearest one still had flecks of badly-faded blue paint on the body, and the color flickered a dim memory in the back of her head.

When it refused to come, she set off resolutely towards the most complete building she could see. It was made of haphazard parts and held together with what looked like dried mud, but it was a building and that meant someone had at some point been here to build it. Therefore even if the builder was long gone, they might have left something useful behind.

As she walked that nagging sense of familiarity grew. A broken doll here, another rusting hulk in a strange shade of maroon - Hetty had gotten a pretty red car when all the neighbors had blue, hadn’t she? And refused to switch it out even when the ladies shunned her? - and a set of broken chairs set in front of tumbledown walls, all these and more combined to form an almost complete memory of something - what, she couldn’t remember, and it frustrated her.

It wasn’t until she stood in front of the ramshackle building - empty, she could see now - that it clicked. In front of the building was a mailbox in the shape of a smiling pig, whose snout you had to pull to open the box.

It had been the delight of Edna’s children, and she had always refused to remove it even under pressure from the neighborhood.

Doris looked around, aghast. There was Hetty’s car, parked in the driveway next to some short walls that might have been a building once. There, the Smith’s ornate wrought-iron fence gate hung mostly off its hinges, the ornamental spikes along the top long since rusted off. Here, leaning up against one of the makeshift walls, the Battson’s old rifle that had hung above the fireplace.

There, on a re-purposed piece of siding, the darkened outlines of a man and two children.

Doris fell to her knees, legs simply unable to support her any longer. This was….home.

What was left of it.

A frenzied scream tore itself free of her throat, and she scrabbled madly at the hem of her shirt where Phanex had sewed the words and symbol that had kept them all going. It was the work of a moment to tear it free and throw it away before she collapsed sobbing.

As it fell, the words themselves flashed in the wan sunlight.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Hristiana screamed as she held her makeshift sword - a wrapping of cloth torn from the bottom of her shirt set about the base of a particularly large shard of glass - aloft, the blood of her enemies dripping from the end.

“Hex Destiny! Bringer of hope! Guide my sword! Vega, Princess of War, let us lay our enemies low! King Theodore, First of his Name, give us heart to protect those who need protecting! Sister Opal, lend your strength to our arms! To death! TO DEATH!”

The pilots who had gathered themselves to her roared, arms raised. They had come singly, gravitating toward her as she had slain guard after guard, and she had taken charge of them as any true warrior of her caste would do. They did not owe her fealty, but she accepted the responsibility of leading them and protecting them to her very last breath.

She had organized them loosely into squads, each with at least one member resistant to the long-distance weapons wielded by their foes. One squad consisted entirely of those with speed beyond belief, another of those possessed of strength beyond even her own that she had set to lobbing pieces of debris at their enemies. She herself lead a squad of those with fighting skills, though she kept one of the faster speedsters with her to relay messages to the other squads during combat.

There hadn’t been a truly clear goal when they had started out, but now - far ahead of them - a banner flew proud and high above the smoke and dust of pitched battle. The symbols on it echoed the one she had tied around her neck as a sort of tabard, and the shouting from ahead made the message even clearer.

“Hex is hope!”

Some of her people had picked it up now, voices joining the general clamor, and Hristiana joined her voice to theirs.

“Hex is hope!”

They surged forward as one, spirits reignited in the fire of battle, and Hristiana plunged her blade into the unprotected neck of a distinctly alien biped dressed in the armor of the hated enemy. It squawked in desperation, sound already gurgling around the vermilion blood gushing from the wound, and went down hard. To her left the team of throwers had ceased throwing for a few minutes and were intent on tearing apart a mech that had dropped down too close for comfort.

With a nod she sent her speedy messenger to a more mixed group to go and defend them from the ground troops attempting a flanking maneuver. As he zoomed off, he returned her attention to the battle just in time to intercept a truncheon that buzzed in a menacing fashion with her sword, then headbutt the man wielding it. He fell away stunned, and Hristiana gutted him before dodging a swing from one of his compatriots and gutting her too.

The steady stream of them seemed endless, but Hristiana knew with a grim certainty that this place could not support a standing army of enough non pilots to truly inconvenience all the pilots gathered here through the long, dark years.

Of course, that didn’t mean everyone was going to survive this. A cut-off scream and an explosion of noise had her looking around to find one of her squads decimated, parts of them scattered about in a way that suggest something had exploded upward out of the ground. Hristiana whistled shrilly over the battle noises and gestured for her speedster. He rushed over.

“What is it, sir?”

Even his voice vibrated, a buzzing overtone that was difficult on the ears but made it exceedingly easy to pick his voice out of the general din of the melee around them.

“Tell everyone to watch where they step; our enemies have laid a harsh road for us.”

She gestured to the gory mess that had once been their comrades, and he paled to an almost curdled color before nodding and setting off. Hristiana turned, intending to raise her sword once more, but before she could, something…happened.

The very world trembled, the foundations of reality shaken by something ineffable, and Hristiana nearly collapsed to her knees. She staggered a single step before forcing her knees to lock and looking up. There, high in the sky above them, were….things. Many things. She could not get a clear view before they disappeared from sight, but the sight filled her with an inexplicable hope.

It appeared to do the opposite for their foes; many threw down their weapons and fled before the harvest of rage that their years of cruelty had sown, while others simply keeled over where they stood. Hristiana set her faster squads to harry the scrum of slime out into the wastes, where the wilds would surely deal with them, while pulling the rest of her squads in and redistributing them.

Now each squad was centered around a particularly strong or sturdy individual, with a screen of less strong fighters assigned to guard them while they pulled the buildings down. Other pilots were already doing so without direction, and Hristiana felt the rightness of her actions in her bones. This place should never have been; so should it not be now, nor in the future.

It took what felt like mere hours to clear the city to its roots, a few of the more energetic pilots persisting in going around and kicking down the broken-off stumps of walls even after the majority had stopped to rest and consider the state of the place. Rubble made gentle hills and small bowls, and by and large nothing was left standing much taller than anything else. Hristiana settle her squads into one of the larger bowls, the piled sides doing more to lessen the wind that had started howling as more of the buildings had fallen, and watched for a moment as a figure beckoned to the storm before turning back to her own.

The speedsters were nearly comatose in their exhaustion, and the heavy lifters weren’t much better. Hristiana made the rounds with a precious can of water she’d rescued from one of the buildings before it had been destroyed, giving each of her people a mouthful and a few words of encouragement even as the storm darkened the sky in its approach. By the time she had run out of water it was very close indeed, and she made her way to the highest rock in the bowl and lifted her bloodstained sword to the sky.

“Hex is hope,” she said solemnly, and the storm swallowed her.

She felt as a leaf in a high wind, trembling even as she was tossed about on the vagaries of a white so bright it erased everything else; the storm had thrown her clear of that awful reality, and now she rode the vagaries of the Winds Between.

And then it stopped.

Hristiana blinked, the world around her coming onto focus at first bit by bit, and then all at once. She was standing in the middle of the challenge sands, the people of her home standing in the rings of ritual tiers and looking down upon her silently. High overhead, twin suns beat down upon the soft sands and a little ways off an envion stood over the corpse of lis defeated opponent. The envion lisself was as still and silent as the crowd, frozen in shock at the sight before them.

Hristiana took it all in in one swift glance, and knew what she had to do. Raising her makeshift blade, bathed in dried, varicolored blood to the heavens, she let her head fall back and opened her soul to the gods. Warm power flowed through her, illuminating all the shadows and pains upon her soul and judging her deeds, and she surrendered it with a rising joy. She was home and whatever the gods chose, her bones would rest with her people.

The power changed, triumphant approbation lancing through her for a single, shocking instant before retreating. She kept herself standing through force of will, even as her head spun like a top, and her faith was rewarded. Her shoulders grew heavy as her makeshift tabard became a true, flowing battle-standard, the makeshift embroidery becoming work finer than any mortal could hope to accomplish. The hilt of the blade she held slammed against her fingers as it expanded under the gods’ power into a halberd of divine beauty.

Inlaid into the shaft itself in silver were the names of all the new saints, and their stories written below in battle-glyphs. At the very base of the blade and continuing along the edge were the words Hristiana gave to her people even as she raised her holy weapon high and they fell on their faces to worship.

“Hex is hope.”

————————————————————————————————-

Daveon wasn’t sure how he’d managed to be one of the first ones out on the street after the collars had fallen off, but he wasn’t about to question it. Literally anything was better than the dingy, wooden holding area of the ring he’d just busted out of and he wasn’t going back. The brisk shaking it’d gotten at the hands of a weird earthquake hadn’t really done anything to improve the place.

Of course, he didn’t really have any idea where he should actually go, either. This part of town was shitty enough that the Big Man in his Big Tower didn’t even bother sending patrols. It was the part of town where they sent the corpses - or what was left of them - and where people didn’t think too hard about the actual contents of their meal. In short, it was a shithole at the end of the line in and about which nobody cared.

“Hex is hope!”

Daveon turned, startled, to see a guy carrying a banner jogging down the road towards the nicer parts of town. The banner clearly said the same thing the guy just had, and he had a manic gleam in his eye. Now, Daveon wasn’t what anyone would call the brightest penny in the pot, but he’d figured out a few days ago that anything that had that particular symbol on it was real and not his imagination. Plus, the guy had actually met his eyes, something none of his hallucinations never did - though neither of them said anything to each other.

Lacking any better direction, and reasonably certain this wasn’t an illusion of some sort, he began trotting after the guy. The guy who was actually moving at a pretty decent clip, but Daveon was taller than him and had a longer stride so he managed to keep up with a minimum of effort. As they went, other pilots began joining them; some were already dripping blood onto the pavement, others looked as lost as Daveon felt.

But no matter how many of them gathered up, none of them seemed to want to walk between Daveon and flag guy.

As they went, the guy’s shouts began to get louder, and others started joining in.

“Hex is hope!”

“Hex is hope!”

Daveon didn’t shout along, mainly because his voice tended more towards the sibilant and his shouts were quiet at best. Not something the crowd appreciated, not something that was really helpful here. But he kept pace with flag guy anyway, whose weird arm gleamed in the lights as they reached the more prosperous parts of town. A big, fancy building gleamed in front of them - much bigger and fancier than anything Daveon had ever encountered before - and flag guy marched determinedly toward it.

Which was, of course, when security came boiling out of the woodwork.

Daveon flinched away from the first rifle volley, but flag guy didn’t falter an inch, keeping his strides long and even and his voice as raised as his flag. Other pilots leaped forward into the fray and blood splattered like some kind of weird, organic fireworks. Daveon winced - he wasn’t really one much for violence - but hurried forward to take up his self-appointed position behind flag guy.

The other pilots who’d gathered up around them did an excellent job of putting the security forces down ahead of their advance; Daveon only had to use his bullwhip of a tail to discourage approach a few times, but their march through town was otherwise uninterrupted. He couldn’t be so sanguine about their direction, though. Ahead of them, rising like a monument to the bloated greed and villainy that had built this place was the Grand Arena. Even a nobody like Daveon knew it was hot there right now, with the Grand Tournament going on, but the guy was heading straight for it. And, directly in their path to it, the enormous hub of Collyseum; Central Security Station 1.

Of course, the closer they got to the rotten heart of this rotten city, the fiercer their opposition became. Daveon was having to fight constantly now, using a combination of tail and talons to keep the security people from attacking flag guy as he walked. All they were doing was walking, but Daveon knew, somewhere deep down in his soul where the weak light of his bonded avatar rested, that the flag couldn’t fall or it all would start to unravel like a badly-wound skein.

Of course, Daveon was a pretty small fish as far as pilots went, and despite his best efforts, security bastards started getting through his defense to flag guy himself. Who promptly proved that Daveon was probably superfluous by switching the flag from his right hand to his left and punching a guy’s head clean off with his now-clear right hand. Whatever tech was in that metal arm, it had some serious juice going for it.

Daveon shrugged to himself mentally and kept on with his self-appointed task. Sure, flag guy could probably take most of these shitheads by himself, but they only had to get lucky once. Better to minimize the chances something bad would happen then try and deal with it when something did.

An indeterminate amount of time - probably no more than ten minutes, if Daveon was honest with himself - later, and the army of pilots had done a real number on the security forces both inside and around the hub. Some of them had even started going to town on the building itself but Daveon himself wasn’t among them, too busy keeping step with flag guy to kick a few walls in.

And then, just as Daveon was turning to face a new threat, flag guy vanished.

Daveon blinked, stunned for half a second before lunging forward and grabbing the slowly-tipping banner as it headed for the ground. It was the work of a moment to right it and hold it like he’d seen flag guy doing, and the work of instinct to raise it high about his head and screech the rallying cry.

“Hex is hope!”

The chant had never stopped, but now it redoubled in strength and Daveon felt a surge of something in his chest that had him raising the banner above his head and marching forward. The rest of the pilots followed his lead, ranging in front of him to keep the flag safe and exact revenge upon those who had trodden them down time after time. Daveon did his best to hold both the banner and his ground, walking forward whenever he could when -

The world faltered and Daveon missed a step.

Four shots rang out, peculiarly loud.

The sky filled with stars.

At least, that’s what they looked like to Daveon’s limited senses; they arced across the sky high, high above the burning rubble that was beginning to replace the face of Collyseum and out of sight over the edge of the walls. He watched them go, then shook his head before raising the banner once more.

“Hex is hope!”

The cry galvanized the pilots and many raised their fists - or species equivalent - into the air and joined their voices with his.

“Hex is hope!”

Daveon was pretty sure that it was the stars, more than the shouting, that drove the slavers to try and flee en masse, but either way it meant he didn’t have to fight them. Which was good, because he was a little short of breath. He couldn’t really seem to catch it either, his lungs getting more and more uneven as the hours upon hours of death - of the slavers - and destruction - of the city - wore on. Still, he stubbornly refused to let the banner fall.

After the dust had settled and the winds picked up, people got to talking. Not to Daveon, of course, even though he held the banner; people rarely paid attention to Daveon, but that was fine. The banner was all that mattered, and they gathered to it. The winds picked up a bit, but he refused to let the banner fly free of his hands.

He refused to release it, even as the sandstorm overtook him.

He didn’t let go, even as a brilliant white light erased his senses.

As the world came back into focus, the pain he’d been resolutely ignoring slammed Daveon in the ribs and the end of the banner sank into the soft ground as he leaned on it with a wheeze. Looking around was enough to show him an entirely unfamiliar landscape. It couldn’t be his home - the mud was the wrong color, for one, and there was only one sun instead of the usual three, for another - but it didn’t seem like a bad place. He was alone on a high cliff overlooking a clear aqua ocean, and the plants beneath his feet were both gentle to the touch and a brilliant green. There were soft noises of small animals on the breeze, and Daveon could feel the gentle peace of the place seeping into his bones. He coughed, the brilliant purple of his blood making an odd sheen on the greenery, and sank to his knees as the last of his strength faded.

A shadow fell across his face and he looked up to the being that had certainly not been there seconds previously. It was silhouetted against the sun, and Daveon couldn’t really make out any of the features beneath the hat it wore save for a blazing red eye. Neither spoke for a long moment, but the figure was the first to break the silence.

“Thank you, for what you did back there. For not letting the banner fall. That would have been - sub-optimal.”

Daveon’s lungs felt like they were on fire and darkness edged his vision, so he merely shrugged in response before waving his hand weakly at the ocean. The figure didn’t seem to be disappointed by his lack of speech.

“I’m afraid to say your metaverse is gone. This is the closest you can get, metaversally speaking.”

The man hesitated.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

There were a number of things Daveon wanted to say. It’s okay, this isn’t a bad place to die. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Tell Monday, thank you for the stories. Give the pilots my love. I’ll be home soon.

What actually came out of his mouth, gurgling around the blood in his nose and throat, was

“Hex is hope.”

The darkness rushed in.

He closed his eyes.

Emma lay in bed with her covers pulled up over her head and tried desperately to keep from crying.

She didn’t like it when her mother and her Daddy fought; it made her want to curl up and hide, even when she was already supposed to be asleep, like now. But she hadn’t been able to sleep right away and she could hear the shouting coming up through the vents even when she covered her head with her pillow. Her Daddy was angry about Julio? And her mother was screaming back about business trips? But Julio was nice to her, and it wasn’t Daddy’s fault his job sent him away so often!

Emma wanted to go down there and shout at them both to stop it! but she’d been tucked into bed and was supposed to be asleep and she didn’t want to make things worse by not being asleep when she was supposed to be. It wasn’t until she heard glass break downstairs that she just couldn’t take it any more.

She shuffled over to the window and pushed it open, not caring if she set off the alarm like her mother warned her about. The screen was gone a moment later, and Emma climbed out onto the roof. It took a moment to orient herself - everything looked so different at night! - but the moon was big in the sky and showed her the tree beside the house pretty clearly, and Emma managed to get into its branches with a minimum of fuss and muss.

Then she was down to the ground and off like a shot, heading for the one place she knew she wouldn’t get yelled at or scared.

The littlest park on the corner.

She ran as fast as she could in her pajamas, and didn’t stop for the roads like Julio the Gardener told her to do. Fortunately, it was late enough at night that no-one was driving, and Emma made it to the park in record time. She didn’t slow down when she hit the trees, too tired and hurting on the inside to care, and as soon as she got under the foliage the moonlight cut out abruptly. It was very dark under the trees but she kept on moving blindly, stumbling over roots and through bushes, tears running down her face making it even harder to see, until finally she tripped and fell.

Bruised, both knees skinned, in a dark forest, alone, and really really upset, Emma wailed.

Rustling of some nearby bushes brought her whipping around and for one awful second some big monster loomed out of the darkness. It was big and tall and had a weird crown, and for a terrified instant Emma recalled the tales of the monsters who lived in the woods and came out at night to eat children. She caught her breath to scream, and -

“Emma. What is wrong? Why are you out of your den this late?”

The warm, wonderfully familiar voice that spoke between her ears rang out and she saw the six glowing orbs that he had for eyes. It was Growly!

Emma leaped forward and clung to his neck, sobbing in a mixture of relief and upset. “Mom and Daddy were fighting, an’ I was s'posed to be asleep but they were loud an’ then I heard glass an’, an’ then I came here an’ it was dark an’ then I tripped, an’ an’ an’ -” Words failed her, and she buried her face in the wonderfully soft fur of his ruff.

She could feel him shift around her, big heavy walking paws pulling her closer before smaller hand-paws joined them and cradled her gently. She hiccuped, and he began to sing in his enchanting voice.

Sing soft
Above the flashing wave
Sleep soft
In the sandy cave
Dream soft
Seek the pretty colors
Feel soft
Drink the joy of others
Rest you sweetly now
You are safe
Here in this bough

As he sang, her tears slowly ran out of her and by the end she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.

“Emma. They will be looking for you,”

His voice was gentle and not angry, and Emma loved him a little more.

“Mom won’t wake up until noon and Daddy always spends the night somewhere else when they fight,” she told him with a pang that had her wriggling closer to his wonderfully soft and furry chest. She could feel his breathing against her cheek, and the weird ba-da-da-dump of his heartbeat thudded softly in time to his breathing.

“Then I think a night in my den would most benefit you.”

Growly didn’t end his words like a question, but Emma nodded anyway and prepared herself to be put down to walk to where he lived. To her surprise, he instead shifted his hand-paws and one of his big walking paws to keep her against his chest. Like Daddy used to do before she got too big, and the thought had her burying her face in his fur.

Growly said nothing and instead began walking in a bumpy three-limbed gait. Rocks and branches that would have tripped her seem to just magically not be where his feet landed, and the rocking motion had her nearly asleep by the time they reach the big tree. Growly paused for a long moment as they got there, his fur silvered in the moonlight that came through the branches, and Emma wanted to ask him what’s wrong but he moved before she could.

Sidling up to his den, she can feel his grip on her shift in the instant before he laid down and scootched up into the safety of the tree’s roots. Emma’d never been under the roots before - her mother didn’t like it if she came home with dirty clothes, no matter how interesting the place she’d gotten dirty had been - but with Growly there it felt warm. Safe. He hummed the lullaby again in between her ears as he moved and settled, and she couldn’t help the smile on her face as she finally drifted off.

Murem regarded Emma with concern. He’d heard her long before he’d seen her, and she hadn’t heard him the first several times he’d called. It was only the bright spike of fear when she’d seen him that had let him contact her, and that would be more concerning if she hadn’t been broadcasting images of native predators into his head strongly in that instant. He sighed and set his internal wake-up to just before the planet’s primary star rose over the horizon; he was already so hopelessly burned that he could never present himself to the Seat of Capisten again, but he’d prefer not to have to deal with worried kit’s guardians or the persistent itching caused by excess solar radiation if he didn’t have to.

Twisting a little, he managed to lay his head over Emma’s lower half and went to sleep.

Something was tickling her nose, and she batted it away. It came back, and she batted it away again. It came back for a third time, and was this time accompanied by words.

“Emma. It’s time to wake up.”

She made a protesting noise and buried her face in the wonderfully warm and soft fur beneath her. It was the best sleep she’d ever gotten, and she didn’t want to wake up yet!

She could feel his chuckle beneath her cheek and his amusement lit a warm glow in her heart as it echoed between her ears.

“Very well, but you will need to get up on my back when I tell you to; I cannot make the journey on three legs.”

Emma responded with a very sleepy yes and held on stubbornly as she felt him start shifting underneath her. Maybe a little dirt fell on her as he moved, but she didn’t care. She did care that the morning air outside the den was much, much cooler than the morning air inside the den, and at her noise of protest she felt Growly chuckle again.

He didn’t say anything though, just started lifting her with his hand-paws up onto this back. She accepted the change in position ungraciously, then stretched out along his back to keep as much of herself in contact with his body heat as she could. He held on to her with his hand-paws, and with a speed that had a breeze blowing through her hair he began heading up out of the park.

His paws faltered when they hit the sidewalk, but Emma had walked this way so many times now she felt like she could probably do it in her sleep and she closed her eyes to think hard about the way back. Growly’s pace resumed, each bound eating up space it would have taken her a few minutes even running at her full speed to cover.

Sooner than she thought possible, they were at her house; she’d left her window open last night in her hurry, and it took Growly a single bound to get up next to it. He was really too big to fit through, though, and Emma had to slide off his back to go inside.

She missed the warmth of his body as soon as she’d gotten off, with an almost physical ache behind her heart, but his words helped.

“If you are ever in distress again, do not hesitate to seek me. I will keep you safe against the whole world if need be. I look forward to our next meeting.”

Emma had crawled through the window into her room as he spoke, and at her nod he turned and bounded away as the first rays of dawn broke over the horizon.

She looked down at her pajamas. Not only were they dirty, but they were covered in green fur; if her mother found them she’d be mad. Emma pulled the pajamas off and stuffed them under her bed before struggling into a new pair and climbing into said bed. She held Growly’s voice tight to her heart and closed her eyes to get a little more sleep before anyone came looking for her.

She loved Growly.