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.

Cysud grunted as he heaved another load of sand into place.

He was a Class III of no particular talent, and so he had only been to Arena once when he was very young - but that still put him up on nearly every other pilot still alive. His species was very long-lived, and it was just after his first travel that he’d been taken to Arena to witness…something. He’d been very young, and had spent most of the time in the sheltering cover of his eggfriend’s forebearer’s wing. But he remembered the standing stones, and the soft sands, and the tiers of viewing stands. He remembered the high place where the arbitrator had stood, and he remembered the stairs beneath his feet.

Which had brought him to the here and now, working with other pilots who had lived. He exhaled a thin tendril of thermionic energy, raising the temperature of the sand until it shone in his eyes and formed glass. Grunting in satisfaction as it held the shape he wanted, he turned to the pilot beside him and gestured for another load to shore up the weak point in the pillar they were raising. The other pilot - Catoblepas - obliged, and Cysud sucked in a deep breath that lowered the ambient temperature by several degrees - much to the audible relief of the other members of his crew and the ones working to either side of him.

As he worked, the memory of his return to Arena swam to the surface of his mind.

It’d taken him possibly too long to admit to himself that his people no longer lived in the canyon the light had dumped him in, fresh out of Arena. His sky-drawings had gone without reaction, and it had taken several days of investigation to find the worn-away remains of the story carved into the stone near the Cave of Many Places.

They told a tale of a cataclysm, of a great shaking of the ground after strange streaks in the sky, and how the water had dried up. His people had moved on, in hopes of finding the land where the water had fled to, but in which direction that was Cysud couldn’t say. Time had worn the runes thin, and even reading that much of the story had been difficult. Where his people had chosen to go had been entirely erased, beyond his ability to even feel the runes with his fingers.

The Cave itself had seemed strangely shrunken from his memories of it, before the sight of his diamond-mesh-patterned chest had reminded him of how much he had grown. He stood tall enough now that he had to duck to make his way through the entrance, though the smooth stone of the alcoves inside seemed as timeless as they’d ever had. He’d run his hand over the stone and felt the thrumming of the place, but he couldn’t bring himself to let it take him. Cysud had changed a great deal since he’d last voluntarily gone out into the Metaverse, and deep in his heart he was afraid of finding out how much his bond had hurt his avatar. If he hadn’t need the ability to cool himself in the blasting heat of the day, he would have relinquished his bond then and there.

But he still needed it, needed it to keep himself safe until he reached his people. With a silent apology to his avatar, he had held on to his bond and started flying into the West. When he reached his people, he would let it go with a willing heart.

Of course, that presupposed he could find them. As days turned into weeks turned into months of flying for the daylight hours and eating whatever he could scavenge at night - if there was one thing he’d learned in Arena, it was that food came in many forms and how to eat even the most unappetizing of meals - his hope grew smaller. Wherever his people had gone, they were very far away - if any of them had survived at all. He’d found no runes since leaving the canyon, nor signs of dwellings, and his hope was fading.

And then, one day, someone had arrived.

It wasn’t one of his people; the heat signature was far too small and mottled to ever make that mistake. Yet there was passing familiarity to it - and besides, it had appeared out of nowhere. That warranted a second look if nothing else did. The conversation that had followed was etched deep in Cysud’s memory.

“You’re needed.”

“Where?”

“Back on Arena. The slate’s been wiped clean, and it’s time for it to start working like it used to again.”

“I’m done with Arena. Why do they need my help anyway?”

“You remember what it used to be like.”

“I went there once while I was barely big enough to leave the nest, and that was only because the Cave had worked for me. It’s been a long time.”

“And yet you remember it.”

A pause.

“Yes, I remember it. I remember what it looked like before the City rose. So what?”

“So they need your help to put it back.”

“You should know how it’s supposed to be. You help them.”

“So you do recognize me.”

“Even to my eyes, you’re alight with the vested power of Metaverse Enforcement. Plus the hat is pretty recognizable.”

“Then you know why I can’t help.”

Another pause.

“Say I did help. Would you do something for me?”

A snort. “Depends on what that something is.”

“Nothing illegal. I want you to promise that I’ll come back to my people here when I finish there.”

A look. “I can’t promise that.”

“Then I’m not going. I’ll stay here and find my people or die trying.”

“Wait. I can’t promise that because I’m not allowed there and you know it. But! I will arrange for your safe passage back when it’s all said and done.”

“Back to this world, back to my people?”

“You have my word that I’ll arrange it. Back to this world, back to your species here.”

A very long pause.

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

A handshake that dissolves into the white-hot everything of travelling between worlds.

Cysud shook his head as he looked around. Besides Catoblepas, his team consisted of two smaller bipeds named Nekulturny and Mids, a very tall hexapod who had said to call him Skitters, and a legless reptilian named Kadiss. They were assigned to work on the pillars that ringed the designated combat area, which Cysud could only be grateful for. He didn’t envy the poor sods whose job it was to extract the ruined pieces of city from beneath the sands of the ring to make it safe to fight in once again.

A whistle came from the East, and all the teams began setting down whatever materials they’d been carrying - whether it was detritus of the city or the makings of the place anew - and heading towards the whistle. Arena wasn’t meant for long-term use, so they were still having to bring in food and water to keep the pilots going - but the shipments were tapering off as more and more of the work was completed. Soon enough Arena would stand as Cysud and a scarce handful of others remembered it, and those who’d volunteered to help rebuild it could depart.

Cysud’s eyes strayed over to the work table, where their leaders stood in conference. Legends, one and all; The Brony, Andi Jaymes, Clarence Jaxun. Cysud had resisted listening to their stories before Collyseum had fallen, and had spoken to them without knowing who they truly were when he’d first been returned to this half-land. Now, after weeks in the company of other survivors, he’d heard their stories.

It was difficult, truly, to think that such young pilots had accomplished so much good. Cysud couldn’t ever remember having been that young, though he supposed he must have been at one point. He rubbed the cross-hatched marks on his chest meditatively. He couldn’t truly say that he had ever done the Metaverse much good himself, but these people had. He knew, too, of the loss they had suffered to come this far; the half-finished memorial at the head of all the construction was merely a testament to the knowledge they all shared.

He wasn’t alone in wishing he could do more them, either, but nobody had yet come up with a good idea how. Many ideas were floated and rejected - out of their hearing, of course - and nothing had been settled yet. Cysud privately thought the best that could be done for them would be to send them home and finish the work in their honor while they rested, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he gathered with the others for food. Mealtimes were communal, now, the air filled with the quiet sound of talking as those with universal translators spoke for and to those that didn’t. Stories were swapped, experiences compared, friends made, and the future imagined between each word and breath.

Cysud finished his meal and leaned back to soak it in, one common theme cropping up again and again in the conversations going on around him.

Hex is hope.

Emma Tomlinson was scared.

All the lights in the house were off and wouldn’t turn back on, the fridge had stopped humming, the TV wouldn’t turn on, and neither her mother nor her Daddy were home. Her mother had said she was just going down the road to get some stuff from the store; when she did that she always took a really long time and came back with pretty-colored bottles she wouldn’t let Emma touch, except this time it was even longer than usual and Emma didn’t like it. Her Daddy was at work and wouldn’t be home for another hour or two, and Emma was scared now.

Mind made up, she ran to her room and grabbed her backpack. She put in a spare set of clothes so her mother wouldn’t complain when she came home dirty, then ran downstairs and grabbed a bottle of water and some cheese sticks from the fridge. She considered bringing something for Growly, but she didn’t really have enough room left in her backpack after she’d put the other stuff in there and it wasn’t her usual day to go visit him so there weren’t any of his snacks in the fridge.

She hoisted the backpack onto her shoulders and slipped out the front door, making sure to lock it up just like her mother taught her. The little number keys beside the door were dark and didn’t beep, but she put the code in anyway, just in case. Turning, she took one step off the porch and was arrested by a dog barking. She blinked and glanced around; one of her neighbors was walking their dog, a small terrier that barked at everything and bit you if you tried to pet it. Emma didn’t like that dog - or that neighbor, though she wouldn’t say so because that was Not A Polite Thing To Do, Young Lady - so she turned and hurried off towards Growly’s house.

As she walked she saw more and more people starting to walk too. Most of the adults looked worried, but the kids seemed to be either happy to be outside or sulky because they had to go outside with very few in between. Emma avoided them all; the kids were boring and the adults would try and keep her from meeting with Growly and with all the strangeness of the day she really wanted the comfort of Growly’s fur.

It was odder still that nobody was driving their cars. Emma still checked both ways before crossing the street, but even though some cars were in the middle they weren’t moving. The ones in the middle looked broken, in fact; glass sprinkled the road around them with bigger chunks still hanging down outside the frames. Emma didn’t stop to look closer, even though the glass sparkled so prettily under the afternoon sun. Her mother had always been very definite that broken glass was A Mess, and Emma didn’t want to get messy before she even got to Growly’s house. Showing up to another person’s house all messy was just bad manners, after all.

On reaching the park, she wobbled for a moment at the outskirts; the park was busier than she’d ever seen it, a number of parents apparently having decided to exercise their kids to make them stop whining. The kids themselves were playing noisily on the playground equipment and running around on the grass while the adults were huddled together and talking with worried faces. Something about the knots of worried adults made Emma’s stomach clench unpleasantly - where were her parents? She didn’t know, and hurried towards the trees so she didn’t have to think about it.

The treeline was quieter, the noise of the other kids playing muted somewhat by the vegetation, and she hurried a little as she walked down the familiar path. The park was different when it was noisy, but compared to what was happening with everything else it wasn’t so bad; Emma almost wished she could join the other children, but they all had parents watching them and her parents weren’t around. Her parents were never around, but now it was scary and she wanted Growly. Growly was very smart and always knew what to say and do, like when she’d asked him about the Bad Man on the television.

Fortunately she didn’t encounter anyone else on her way - though she saw flashes of adults walking other trails - and she had arrived at Growly’s house in pretty short order.

“Growly!”

Emma didn’t quite shout - her mother hated it when she shouted - but she did raise her voice and six opalline eyes blinked a greeting from the shadows. “Emma,” he responded gravely between her ears, and the overwhelming surge of relief nearly brought tears to her eyes. She was safe with Growly; he would know what to!

“Emma, what is wrong? It is not our usual time of meeting.” Emma could feel the concern in his voice wrap around her like a blanket, and felt a little silly for her overreaction to the day’s events. Still, she couldn’t help but feel better as he moved to the edge of the shadows and the outline of his funny mustache became visible against the deeper shadows of the root system.

“I don’t understand, Growly, but the television won’t go on, and the icebox won’t hum, and my phone won’t go on, and mother and Daddy aren’t home, and everybody’s out walking and no cars are driving and it just feels wrong. Like you tried to show me about the colors except it’s just bad and kinda yellow?” Emma let it all out in a rush and immediately felt a weight lift off her chest, a weight lightened further by the fact that Growly didn’t dismiss everything as her imagination. Instead he seemed lost in thought, mustache bristling bushier than she’d ever seen it.

“May I see your phone?” The question came into her mind neutrally, no derision or scorn….but nothing happier either and Emma blinked with a sudden sense of foreboding. “Sure,” she said and pulled her pack off so she could zip open one of the outer pouches. “Mother gave it to me to use in emergencies only and makes me charge it every third night, but I tried to call her and it didn’t work. I charged it up like she showed me, I swear,” she added hurriedly, afraid he’d think she messed up and let it run out of charge.

“I believe you took excellent care of it; you are not a careless kit. I wish to see it for another reason; it may have a story of its own to tell.” Emma beamed at Growly’s words; he knew she could take care of her things! That made her Responsible and a good child. Fishing the phone out of its pocket, she made sure to hold it under the shadow of the overhang above them. Growly took it in one of his funny hand-paws and inspected it closely. First he felt along the case with his hand-paws, then he sniffed it - brushing it through is mustache as he did so - before finally-

“Ew!” She exclaimed as his wide purple tongue ran gently over the device from top to bottom. She could feel his amusement between her eyes, but he didn’t respond; instead, he held the phone up to be inspected visually before huffing a great sigh that set his mustache a-fluttering. His amusement faded, but nothing replaced it in her mind and she blinked. “Growly? What’s wrong?”

Growly set the phone gently on the packed dirt floor and gazed at it for a long moment before looking at her with all six of his eyes. “Emma. You say your caretakers have not returned home?” His tone was neutral and she couldn’t feel anything from it in her head. It was strange, and she didn’t like it, but she did her best to clamp down on her unease. “Yes; mother went to the store hours and hours ago and didn’t come back, and Daddy’s at work.”

“And there is no one else you would seek shelter from?” Again, his tone was neutral and his words particularly colorless. Emma blinked, lost, as she tried to think; the only person she could really think of was Growly. Did he not want to help her? Her eyes filled with tears as her lip began to wobble, the events of the day suddenly looming large and scary again. “N-no! B-but you s-said come to you if things got b-bad an’, an’” overwrought, she could feel tears start running down her face and she closed her eyes to dash them away. With mother and Daddy disappeared, and Growly - Growly - where else was she supposed to go?

Big paws landed on her shoulders unexpectedly and pulled her close to a furry barrel of a chest, smaller hand-paws running warm lines up and down her back. “Oh, I did not mean to frighten you, Emma. By law I am required to ensure all other caretakers have given up their claims to a kit before I may take it as my own. Such are the Laws of Capisten; so they are ordained, so shall they be enforced.” His voice was warm between her ears, the last part echoing weirdly like a bunch of other voices were saying it at the same time in the same way. It had the sound of finality to it, an almost binding force, and more tears squeezed themselves out of her eyes as her head felt unbearably full of it.

“I, Murem Sivaowl Ryggaus ki Capisten, third in line to the Seat of Capisten in absentia, do so claim Emma; until she may choose her own path, let her be Emma Josri Ryggaus ki Capisten, fourteenth in line to the Seat of Capisten in absentia. In accordance with the Laws of Capisten, let my words be binding.” Again, the last sentence had a really weird echo, like many voices were saying at once along with Growly. As he finished speaking, warmth crashed through Emma like a wave; she was safe, and secure in Growly’s paws and in the den he’d made livable, and he’d never willingly let her come to harm and she knew it down to her bones.

When he spoke again it was in a quieter voice, a certain thread of exhaustion running through it. “I had not expected the honor of kits, but I will do my best. I do not think it safe to stay here overlong; there is nothing to be found for food that was not brought in by others, and they will not be bringing anything again for an unknown time. Rest now Emma, and I will take us somewhere safer when the primary star has gone below the horizon. Sleep,” the last word was a command Emma, exhausted by the day so far, was happy to obey and, snuggling closer to Growly - whose warmth she could feel all the time between her ears now, even when he wasn’t speaking - she fell asleep.

Swims Many Shoals did not feel well.

He wasn’t sick, exactly. No disease preyed upon his health, no bad food rotted in his belly - but a shadow loomed over his heart nevertheless at the thought of what he had to do. Of what the duty was of him and all his siblings.

It’s not every day you were obligated to kill your mother, after all.

Of course, it wasn’t just that Hunts Swift Prey was their mother. She had also been the leader of the Greater Spinwise Current Frenzy for many years. Her nuanced understanding of group dynamics and uncanny acumen in dealing with those not a part of the frenzy had made her the best leader in several generations, and the changes she had wrought had let the frenzy grow to the largest it had been in living memory thanks to pioneering food storage techniques and new and improved catching strategies.

Swims Many Shoals and all her progeny had profited greatly from her leadership, and so they had ignored the strangeness at first. Hunts Swift Prey was getting on in years, a little shortness of temper was to be expected. A certain amount of rudeness, both to them and their allies could be traced to the same source. Maybe the moodiness was due to a bad meal. The punishments were a little more aggressive, but nothing too far beyond acceptable limits.

And then she’d devoured her litter.

It wasn’t unheard of, when times were lean and the frenzy was getting too large. But they’d never had more food, the new method of preservation Hunts Swift Prey had negotiated for from the Kesshcarron - a type of bottom-dweller - had allowed them to lay in enough food to last three seasons before hunting again, even if they added another dozen to their number. There had been no reason to devour a litter, and when Swims Many Shoals had pressed her for a reason she had sent him away bleeding from a gash in his shoulder and without a response. Closes Many Wounds had tutted over the depth of the gash, but said nothing about where Swims Many Shoals had acquired it.

For all the knotty problems such an action entailed Hunts Swift Prey was their most respected and beloved leader, and had been for many years, and they trusted her enough to accept the complete lack of explanation she provided. They’d kept a closer watch on her afterwards though, Swims Many Shoals and Closes Many Wounds, which made her even more quarrelsome and a number of their brethren had acquired new scars from a correcting nip that was harder than warranted.

Some days were better than others, but on the whole time wore away their beloved leader. Lights turned to seasons, and Swims Many Shoals - being one of the few fast enough to dodge the quick, often petulant strikes of Hunts Swift Prey as well as being one of her favorite children - had gotten perhaps the best view of her deterioration.

So when she ate a second litter, he couldn’t say he was surprised.

Indeed, the consensus was more resignation than horror. As the leader of the frenzy and the only one allowed to breed, a certain amount of behavior was excusable - but this was not. She had killed the future of the frenzy three times over; first by becoming increasingly hostile to allies, then by attacking members of the frenzy unprovoked, and finally by killing the future generations.

The frenzy couldn’t survive such a betrayal. They had gathered and spoken for a long time before reaching a consensus; they would kill the mad husk that had been Hunts Swift Prey, and then they would disperse. None of them particularly wished to take Hunts Swift Prey’s place, though killing her would allow any of the females license to do so, and the waters around them had soured with bad memories and a taste of madness. So they would leave; those with desirable skills would pair up with those whose skills were less so to ensure all would find new frenzies, and they would leave the waters they had lived in all their lives to find new homes free of the taint of what Hunts Swift Prey had done.

But first they had to kill her, and that was not an easy task.

Swims Many Shoals had been elected to bring her to the ambush. He’d objected, but been overruled on the reasonable grounds that whoever did it was going to be the closest to her when the attack started and therefore in the most danger. As the swiftest, he was the most likely to live. Unstated was the fact that, even in the throes of whatever madness had taken her mind, she had shown a reluctance to attack him that no other member of the frenzy shared.

Which had led him to the here and now, swimming a respectful distance away from his mother as he subtly guided her to her doom. It was necessary, a litter eater could not be allowed to live, yet it still rested uneasily with him. For everything she had done - to him, to the frenzy - she was still his mother. Hunts Swift Prey seemed oblivious to his disquiet, however, where before she would have seen and sussed out the reason why before they had swum half a klick - that, more than anything was a sign to Swims Many Shoals that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t his mother anymore.

When the frenzy struck, she was caught completely unawares.

Reads The Currents was the first to land a hit, coming up from below and behind a dead coral outcropping. Her teeth gashed open Hunts Swift Prey’s side and blood spread in the water like a great storm cloud. Hunts Swift Prey’s retaliation had been immediate - but, as predicted, not towards Swims Many Shoals, and Reads The Currents had already ducked out of range.

Then the rest of the frenzy descended.

It was a short, ugly fight. Hunts Swift Prey was their finest fighter, but she was no match for seven generations of her adult progeny. Three of them perished at her claws; Dances In Air died choking when a powerful strike sliced open her gills, Breaker Of Shells died when a lucky lash broke his neck, and Fights The Tide - her second in command and father of the frenzy - was laid open from neck to waist, sinking as his swim bladders ruptured.

Three of their own dead and drifting in the current when Hunts Swift Prey finally stopped thrashing. The water was thick with blood and offal, the latter mostly from Fights The Tide, but the normal hunger such things normally evoked was curiously absent. Their species was not an introspective one; they had no funeral traditions, the bodies of the fallen were usually eaten and the bones left to drift, but something about the thought of doing that this time was… unsettling.

Wrong.

Swims Many Shoals was the first to move, swimming forward slowly toward the mortal remains of their collective mother and greatest leader. A few of his siblings made aborted movements to get in his way, but ceased when he began to clean the body up as best he could. Closes Many Wounds, one of the few who had abstained from the attack itself, joined him as he brushed the torn skin smooth and closed the glassy eyes.

There wasn’t much that could be done, but the two of them did what they could while the others hung silently in the water and watched. When they had finished, Closes Many Wounds drew back while Swims Many Shoals gently pulled the corpse over to the dead coral outcrop. He couldn’t say why he was drawn to the spot, but dead to the dead seemed somehow fitting. He tucked the mortal remains of Hunts Swift Prey gently into a crevice between two folds of the coral and placed rocks around and on her to keep her from floating away.

When he could do nothing else for the one who had given them so much, he drew back and let his arms fall to his sides. His siblings departed two by two, without fanfare, without words. But the deaths had left the numbers uneven, so in the end Swims Many Shoals was left alone with the grisly monument.

It wasn’t a good place to be; with the Greater Spinwise Current frenzy’s dissolution the territory - and the name - were ripe for the taking. Another frenzy would come to claim it as their own, for it was rich enough to sustain five litters even without the tips and tricks Hunts Swift Prey had bartered for over the years. Any new frenzy who did would, of course, kill any of the previous occupants they found in the territory, as was their right; it did no good, after all, to let drains on valuable resources continue living when they provided nothing in return for what they took.

And it wasn’t as though Swims Many Shoals had no options. He was strong and fast and knew a great deal about the changes Hunts Swift Prey had made during her leadership; another frenzy would welcome him gladly as breeding stock and a contender for subordinate leadership positions. He could swim as far and as fast as he liked and he could have a good life wherever he ended up..

But he didn’t want to leave.

He hadn’t been second in command, but he had been one of the closest to his mother in the frenzy, a confidant and beloved child… before. If only he had seen what was happening, if only he had recognized the moodiness wasn’t some passing thing, if only he had done something sooner.

If only, if only, if only

The guilt ate at his insides like acid as he hung in place, unable to tear his eyes away from the makeshift grave. Finally, he could bear it no longer. Drawn as if by gravity, he swam over to a nearby spot on the dead coral stalk and wound his arms through whatever holes he could find and settled down to wait. He would not give up and abandon her in death as he had in life; starving to death was a slow way to go but, in the end, he’d see his mother again.

————————————————————————————————-

In a dusty wasteland where the plants are bitter and stunted and the sun shines red through the clouds, a hunched figure stalks the days and nights. It might have been a pretty blonde woman in a shapeless shirt and pants, tied at the waist. It might have been a lovely woman, the toast of her neighborhood, with blonde hair and a bright future in the Party. It might have been a gladiator, scraping gossip like lifeblood from a place riddled with despair.

It might have been all of those things, once upon a time, but it isn’t anymore.

Now it is death.

It kills everything it finds - friendly, unfriendly, mutated, unchanged, barely sentient and hyper-intelligent. Everything. No exceptions.

Of course, it has to find them first.

Hiding from it is difficult but not impossible. The trick is to stay, in whatever hiding spot you’ve chosen; if you run, it WILL catch you.

And that’s just what they’re counting on.

They’re a motley bunch, drawn together for a variety of reasons but united in one purpose: Kill the beast. Some were in it for the money - bounties from across the wasteland. Others joined for vengeance, for loss and grief; still others sought the glory, the prestige of putting down a legend. In the end, it didn’t matter why they were here, only that they were here.

They’d drawn sticks to see who was bait, and the poor bastard was sweating it out at the mouth of the canyon they’d set the ambush in. His job was to get the thing’s attention and draw it as far into the canyon as he could - after all, the thing seemed to prefer moving prey. The rest of them waited at the lip of the canyon, armed with whatever they had in the way of guns. They had to wait until all of them had a clear shot, or this’d be the death of them all.

They had one shot.

A yelp, followed by four running steps was all the warning they got before the screaming started, and all the killers tightened their grips on whatever weapon they had. The screaming stopped, replaced by an ugly, wet crunching. It went on for an improbably long time, but the silence when that stopped was profound.

The thing appeared in the mouth of the canyon, but they held their fire. It walked slowly some way into the canyon, and they held their fire. It made its way further into the canyon, and paused in the center.

They fired.

The thing was fast, but not faster than a bullet.

Ten bullets.

A hundred bullets.

When it fell, it didn’t look like anything anymore.

It starts with a shift in the grass, an instability in the cliff itself.

On a cliff overlooking an ocean, there is a pole.

It has a crossbar, to which a few, moldy scraps of fabric still cling, but there’s not much left of whatever was there. A flag, one that meant much to many. Not that you can tell anymore; time and tide wait for no one and inexorable entropy’s eaten away nearly all that it was.

The pole itself is unremarkable; it is some kind of metal, but not one you’d find in this land. Not that its foreign composition has saved it from the salt in the wind. It’s mottled up an down with corrosion, and some pieces have fallen away entirely. One day the ocean will have it all.

It continues with a groan, a rumble, a subsonic vibration that sends local wildlife scattering in fear.

There’s something at the base of the pole, where it is shrouded by a veritable riot of small plants. Most of them are flowering, sweet scents lingering in the air and blossoms obscuring the base of the pole. There’s a definite shape to the greenery, but it’s not until the vine are moved aside that said shape becomes as clear as the bleached-white bones that are revealed in that fashion.

The whole skeleton rests intact, the vines having grown up and around and through the bones which themselves interlock a surprising amount. A grinning skull with sharp teeth and half a dozen empty eyesockets rests on the ground in front of the flag, just in front of a spinal column that traces a line nearly two meters in length from skull to what are very clearly pelvic bones, with another three meters describing a gentle arc of a tail.

The shoulders and ribs - two of which are broken - rest against the base of the pole, and one bony arm is tied to it by small tendrils of vines seeking the sunlight. The claws, anchored to the bone of the last joint in each finger, shine dully in the sunlight, polished smooth by the salt-laden sea air.

It rises to a roar, a howl, a spray of dust rising towards the heavens.

Indeed, the skeleton in its entirety is remarkably smooth. No scavengers have disturbed this corpse, nor the pole to which it clutches, nor the banner that flies from the pole. Perhaps it is because the skeleton does not belong there, perhaps it was out of respect for its passing.

No matter why, no matter how, time and tide wait for no one.

It ends with a cascade of stone and bone and soil and metal, as the cliff slides gently into the embrace of the sea.

The temple was coming together nicely.

As Hristiana strode through the cacophony of the builders, the glimmering helm-crown of Archpriestess flashing on her brow, she couldn’t help the genuine smile of pleasure the progress made had brought to her lips. Though it had taken a disproportionate amount of time for the priesthood to reach a consensus about the location for her temple, once a site had been decided upon the gods themselves had handed down a design for a temple such as the world had never seen, and had given an unprecedented amount of aid to hasten the progress of bringing it about.

The main doors - each to one side of a wide, empty outer stretch of wall whose purpose had only recently become clear - opened into a grand hall lined with eight statues; Bruno Hamilton faced Andi Jaymes, Jenika Clarkson faced Thomas Wells, Wyatt Maxwell faced Rosie Harvin, and Crash Jaxun stood across from Brony Robbins at the head of the hall. Behind each statue was a series of carved alcoves, each one dedicated to a trusted partner of the pilot in front of them. Spreading out from the hall were two lesser wings, each containing the pilot-statues and avatar-alcoves of the rest of the Exemplars Hristiana had returned with.

Even though most of the alcoves were empty - a number of them were even unfinished, rough stone absorbing light where the polished rock would reflect it back to the viewer - and the plinths for the interior statues stood empty, a number of priests, priestesses, priestlis, and praestors - all of them either fresh from the Learning or the lowest of the low from other, better-established temples - were already worshiping at the places marked out for each. There were no prayers developed yet, but a constant mantra fell from every lip as the assembled clergy opened their souls to the gods; Hex is Hope. The refrain burbled through the vast, echoing hall, sounding not unlike the wash of ocean upon the shore. More prayers would be created or be granted to them by the gods as the temple established itself, of that Hristiana had no doubt, and the sound would change.

But for now, she reveled in the tide.

Each of the supplicants prayed now for knowledge; Hristiana had given all that she knew to the gods, all the stories and the pain and the suffering and the battles - and, in the end, the triumph. The gods had declared her worthy of the position Archpriestess, but they had needed to take the knowledge from her so they could impress it upon other souls and she had given it gladly. The gods would judge each of those who prayed to them, giving to those who passed their judgement knowledge of the Exemplar they prayed about and granting them standing in the temple.

Hristiana was, herself, Archpriestess of the whole temple; normally each Exemplar would have two High Attendants who would deal with the day-to-day matters of the Exemplar and those wishing to pray to them, with however many regular priesthood the temple had the wherewithal to support. With the sudden influx of more than two score Exemplars into one temple, each one just as worthy as the last and all with virtues many would aspire to, the structure had not yet made itself clear. That would be Hristiana’s job, to determine what would best suit the needs of her new temple and either implement the necessary changes or acquire the required materials.

Something that, as the youngest Archpriestess in several centuries and the only one to have ever acquired the rank before acquiring the Deep Knowledge, she was currently having difficulties with. Hristiana couldn’t help the frown that tugged at her lips as she looked around at the half-finished building. More than five years since her return, and all the statues that should be on display were still resting less than half-done on pedestals in the district reserved for sculptors and stonemasons.

All except one.

Hristiana’s smile grew smaller, though no less sincere, as she walked through the front doors to the open area in front of the temple. There, shining brilliantly in the late evening sun, was the statue that had taken up residence in front of the blank stretch of wall between the two front doors. Solid gold, as near as the alchemists could tell, and coated in the crystal of the gods so that it shone both day and night, it stood just up under the eaves of the roof and looked down at all who entered with a benevolent expression.

Unlike nearly all the other pilots and avatars, who would have statues representative of who they were rather than what they truly looked like - for Hristiana had never seen any of the pilots, save two - this was a statue of the pilot as she had truly looked; of that, Hristiana had absolutely no doubt, though she had never known the woman in life. At her feet a fountain of extraordinary purity flowed to and from nowhere, free for all to drink from, and on the wall behind her the gods had placed an inscription.

Maddox McPhernon, who gave the whole of herself to save us all.

Hristiana bowed to the statue, relishing the feeling of peace that washed through her at the action, and continued toward the arts district where the rest of the statues were being made. It had been too long since the gods had commanded they be made and there should have been word of progress beyond that they were being worked on. Especially since the gods themselves were taking a lavish hand with this temple, involving themselves far more in this mortal than any other in recent history. Theories abounded as to why they were doing so, but even the blindest fool would have to acknowledge that the gods had a vested interest.

Which doesn’t reflect well on the hidebound fools currently obstructing my efforts, Hristiana thought sourly. Archpriestlis Nasos of the Temple of Themistoklis was the loudest naysayer; lir outrage had been immediate and loud when Hristiana had been granted the helm-crown, and had only been brought down to simmering grumbles when all the wine in lir temple turned to blood overnight - a fact that had li had found the hard way when starting the morning services.

Others had stood with lir, albeit more subtly, and thus long months of arguing and delays had gone by before even the temple’s location could be agreed upon. Hristiana had found the whole song and dance distasteful - they were servants to warrior gods, if the others objected to her or her methods they should meet her on the challenge-sands - but had managed it with as much grace as she could muster and help from a most unexpected source.

Manousos, Archpriest of one of the oldest and most well-respected Temples - one of the few others that housed more than one Exemplar, interestingly - had made a point to meet with Hristiana publicly and congratulate her on the progress she’d made on the temple. He’d seemed sincere enough, but Hristiana couldn’t shake the feeling that something darker lurked beneath the face of such benevolence. She’d thanked him exactly as politely as was required of her, and no more, and privately resolved to keep an eye on him.

Still, his public display had done some good and the very day after that encounter the sculptors towards whom her feet now carried her had shown up to the skeleton of her temple and offered their services. She hadn’t recognized their names when they presented themselves to her, but as it had been years since the life-takers had stolen her away she would honestly have been more surprised if she had recognized them. The examples they had shown her were more than acceptable, and if the gods did not bless them with inspiration she would be very surprised.

And yet, they still had not finished even one statue.

And Hristiana had a sinking suspicion as to why.

Bruno kept his head bowed over his gun as he checked it over yet again.

Submarine operations were usually tense at best; this one brought a new level of stifling fatigue. The stealth submarine that was currently carrying them across the Black Sea ran with an absolute minimum of noise. Engines were muffled with a multitude of extra baffles, wooden utensils handed out instead of he usual cheap tin, and maintenance was kept to whatever they could get done quietly; they were deep in enemy territory here, and discovery would spell disaster for relations between the US and the USSR in addition to their own, grisly deaths.

The silence sat around Bruno, Weber, and the eight other guys that’d been assigned to the mission like a funeral pall. Cards were played in tense silence, conversations done in whispers, notes, or half-remembered sign language liberally sprinkled with military handsignals and general crudeness. The first guy who’d laughed too loudly that morning - PFC Marcus “Lizard” Doughty - had had the skipper of the submarine come down on his head like a ton of bricks; Bruno wouldn’t be surprised if the guy ended up scrubbing the head for the rest of their journey, the skipper’d been that pissed.

Nominally, the Marines in the sub were training for cold weather conditions somewhere in the asscrack of Alaska. Most of the unit actually was; those selected for the current mission had gone with the main group as far as Fort Hill before being split off and sent to the rendezvous point near Istanbul. Bruno wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be here instead of with the rest of the unit or not; teeth-freezing cold was starting to look preferable to spending another three days trapped in this tin can. Lieutenant Henry “Hacksaw” Woodbridge, in overall command of the mission, was a competent soldier with all the charming personality of a Glasgow kiss; Bruno himself wasn’t what you’d call a glowing socialite but at least he’d remembered to pack a deck of cards. Woodbridge spent the long hours alternating between pouring over what schematics Command had been able to provide them of their target and maps of the surrounding area, and having long, muttered conversations with himself that were always loud enough you knew what he was doing but quiet enough that you couldn’t make out what, exactly, he was saying.

A real charmer.

Still, whatever his personal quirks his performance in the field was beyond reproach and Bruno could deal with it. Usually. When not stuck on a tin can for three days with the man.

At least the rest of the assigned personnel were generally less grating. The commander of their tiny craft was a balding Commander William Hayes, a nervous older man who had the pallor of someone who spent too much time beneath the waves instead of above them and the antacid habit of a man who’d spent far too much time behind enemy lines. He knew every inch of his boat and could navigate her through the trickiest of waters, whatever his personal failings, and that was really all Bruno could ask for. The two pilots - Petty Officers Michael Montgomery and Lewis Burbank - were much better company, playing cards with the assembled marines whenever they were off-duty. Quietly, of course. The lone engineer - Lt. Cmdr. John Morrows - kept to himself, as much as anybody could on a tub this size, and never seemed to have much to say. Which, given the mission, was probably for the best.

Now, less than ten minutes away from the target, the tension in the sub was thick enough to cut with a knife. Bruno wasn’t the only one checking his weapon, and all packs of cards had been put away. Woodbridge was lurking near the foot of the ladder with PFCs Ferguson, Hubbard, Lawson, and Graham; clumped up around Bruno himself were Rowland, Estrada, Weber, and the unfortunate Doughty who still smelled faintly of cleaning chemicals. The overall mission, as Bruno understood it, was to go in and take out a listening post the Russians were trying to get operational for monitoring sub traffic on the Black Sea; Woodbridge’s team had the unenviable task of gaining access to the main operations hub and getting as much data about the Russian deployment as they could - including and especially the designs for the upgraded hydrophones Russia had purportedly used - while the secondary team lead by Bruno would conduct physical sabotage of the cables linking the post to the hydrophone network.

Hayes was hovering over Montgomery as the younger man made minute adjustments to the controls, all nonessential lights off in the control room. The listening post was located in an underwater base accessible only by submarine; intelligence suggested that the Russians relied on its secrecy and inaccessibility over more active defenses, but at this range and relying totally on passive monitoring systems it was mostly guesswork and prayer that they didn’t find another sub the very hard way.

Finally the man exhaled sharply and pulled the throttle all the way back to idle. “That’s it.” The words ricocheted around the interior of the craft and everyone tensed for a brief moment. Hayes looked ready for murder for a second, before giving a curt nod to Woodbridge. Woodbridge, in his turn, wasted no time in shimmying up the ladder and cracking the hatch less than an inch. When that produced no audible reaction, he eased it open the rest of the way and climbed out, the rest of his squad following him in short order.

Bruno assembled his own men at the base of the ladder as Lawson’s feet disappeared off the ladder and out of sight; Woodbridge’s group had much further to go, and they’d decided on a twenty-minute delay between each group to decrease chances of the larger combined group being discovered before any objectives could be accomplished. Weber fidgeted as the twenty minutes dragged slowly by, his restless fingers patting down various pockets and pouches as if to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then starting again from the top when he’d checked the last of the pockets he could reach without bending over. Bruno let it go; as far as tics went, it wasn’t a bad one and Weber hadn’t had the easiest time of it since Tunstall had been given his discharge.

The chronometer on the wall ticked over and Hayes gave them the nod. Bruno went up the ladder first, the rubber soles of his boots making as little noise as he could manage on the metal rungs. Poking his head out of the hatch showed him that Montgomery - in a feat of skill Bruno wouldn’t have believed possible - had managed to snuggle them dangerously close to a hulking behemoth of a Russian sub, shielding them largely from view of the buzzing electrical lights above the wharf section of the base; the other side was a sheer wall, which meant they were practically invisible.

Bruno hauled himself out of the hatch and slipped into the water as quietly as he could; the cold concrete walls amplified every noise and echoed them endlessly, though at this point the only noises were the quiet bootfalls and occasional Russian phrases exchanged by the bored guards of the late shift. Bruno treaded water as the rest of his team slipped out of the hatch and into the water one by one; Montgomery had only brought the hatch itself a few inches above water, to keep the profile of both Marines and sub as small as he could. As soon as Bruno’s team was away he’d sink to the floor for four hours before resurfacing to pick them back up and get the hell outta dodge.

Estrada was the last one out of the hatch, and he closed it with a soft clunk before tightening the wheel to secure it. Sliding off the hull, he joined the rest of them in the water and Bruno took point as the struck out for the least-lit section of wharf they could see. Behind them, the sub they’d come in on dropped below the surface of the water with barely a ripple; they had four hours on the clock to reach the hydrophone cables, disable them, and return, or they’d have to find their own ride out and as much as Bruno knew Graves would have been delighted to steal a Russian submarine, he himself would prefer if everything went according to plan and they took their own sub home.

The pair of boots hanging over the edge of the dock itself and belonging to a very unconscious Russian soldier were a pretty decent indicator that Woodbridge had also landed here and as Bruno poked his head cautiously above the level the trail of dripped water not fully disguised by extant puddles sealed it - though the trail was only obvious from a certain angle. He hauled himself up onto the edge as quietly as he could, keeping a sharp ear out for footfalls even as he reached back down to pull Doughty out of the water. Doughty turned and grabbed Rowland while Bruno snagged Weber and pulled him out. Estrada was the last one up, and Bruno gave Rowland the nod as soon as Estrada was out. Rowland nodded back and darted away quickly, following the wet trail Woodbridge’s team had already left.

Fortunately Woodbridge had cleared out most of the guards between the water and the door to the rest of the base; Bruno’s squad was able to get through the door with relative ease and an absolute minimum of time wasted. Once through, the base was like many others Bruno had been tasked to infiltrate over the years. Whitewashed concrete walls and stark fluorescent lighting made shadows stretch ahead as well as behind and doors set flat with no inset made for nerve-wracking progress as they traversed towards their target. Fortunately, this base being more military than KGB meant that everything was labeled. The schematics provided had been rather sketchy on details, but following signs for Electrical Maintenance seemed like a good bet.

Electrical Maintenance was not a good bet. Electrical Maintenance was a dead end with too many guards for comfort; while they’d managed to prevent the alarm from being raised immediately, someone was going to find the bodies they’d stashed in the janitorial closet sooner rather than later and then they’d really be in trouble. Still, they had managed to find a map of the place and hadn’t fallen too far behind on their timeline; two hours in, two hours to go, and a better idea of their actual target location were gratifying in a way that six bodies distinctly weren’t. Their new target - Deep Sea Through Room - had been marked on the simplified floor plan as being recently redone, and in need of extra power couplings; with any luck, the hydrophone cabling would enter the base there.

It took another half-hour to find the correct hallway; the label on the door they wanted still read “Office 4B” and they wasted a further twenty minutes unlocking doors up and down the hallway before they found it. The room was dark and cold, but the retrofitting for the hydrophone wiring was extremely obvious. The wires themselves were thankfully not terribly large; none were larger around than Doughty’s thumb, and the shears they’d brought along were more than adequate for the task of getting through the tough material. The actual execution of their task took less than a handful of minutes; clipping the wires as close to the wall as they could ensured that the cables would have to be re-seated if they were to be mended at all.

With a little more than an hour left before Montgomery surfaced, Bruno’s team began heading back through the base towards the docking area. Bruno himself was wary; he’d seen too many operations where things went sloppy right before extraction and he’d rather avoid that in a base where the only exit was more than twenty fathoms down. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Woodbridge or his squad, either, and that was just a bit concerning; still, no alarms had been triggered which meant that whether they’d succeeded or not, they hadn’t been caught yet.

Their own march back was relatively quiet; one unfortunate two-man patrol nearly caught them in a cross-corridor, but Weber and Rowland managed to silence them before they could yell. Their bodies were dumped in a convenient bathroom; by the time they were discovered, the squad would be long gone. Without further interruptions and a little more than twenty minutes to spare, Bruno’s squad slipped through the door to the submarine area as quietly as they’d entered it. They were the first ones back, and all the patrols Woodbridge had cleared for them had been woken, from the looks of it. The sound of bootheels was hard against the water-slicked stone of the wharf and the Russian exchanges were a good deal less friendly; by the sound of it the two Woodbridge had dealt with had been thought to have fallen asleep on duty and were trying to make up for their mistakes.

Which was the last mistake they ever made.

Bruno’s knife slipped easily between the ribs of the first man as he turned the corner, hand up to catch the surprised shout and coughing as the man drowned in his own blood; Weber took the second with a quick jab to the base of the skull with his own Ka-bar. Both bodies were stashed out of sight behind loosely-stacked cargo containers that also served to conceal the squad. Bruno glanced around, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. Less than fifteen minutes to their ride out, and Woodbridge was still nowhere in sight. Bruno himself was disinclined to leave men behind, but Hayes had been exactingly clear about the timing; any longer, and they risked meeting another submarine slated to come into the base not too long after they were scheduled to leave. And by “meeting” he meant “accidentally ramming,” Montgomery had assured them later; the cheerful grin that had accompanied the statement was possibly more concerning than the statement itself, but the man was a good pilot.

With two minutes to go before the sub surfaced - and another body added to the pile at their feet - the door to the base slid open to reveal Lawson and Graham, followed closely by Hubbard and Ferguson, with Woodbridge himself bringing up the rear. Bruno nodded to them silently, waiting for Woodbridge’s acknowledging nod before fading back into the group. Now that the lieutenant was here, Bruno could concentrate on assessing both squads and keeping an eye on the water where the sub had come up before.

In point of fact, it was almost a yard further out than the last rise - Montgomery had likely figured out how close he actually was to the Russian submarine, no doubt - that started to show the tell-tale disturbance nearly three minutes later. None of them needed any urging to slide down off the quay and into the water; Rowland was the first man to make it to the hatch and in his haste pulled it open with a heavy clank. Everyone froze as the sound bounced back from the walls on the far side of the artificial bay, but after a long moment of silence Rowland slipped inside with barely a thunk. Hubbard was next, followed by Woodbridge, then Ferguson, Weber, Doughty, Graham, Lawson, Estrada, and lastly Bruno himself bringing up the rear and pulling the hatch gently closed behind him.

He turned, looked at the room full of men smelling strongly of sweat and seawater, and sighed internally.

It was going to be a long three days.

Reese hummed to himself as he bounced and rattled over miles of empty desert.

He’d lost his pursuers a fair ways back thanks to a handy gorge, and had decided to strike out overland afterwards because it seemed like a good idea at the time. His current disguise was a red ragtop Jeep; he’d been traveling as a Winnebago for a while, but then he’d seen the Jeep driving over a dirt track and decided that since he hadn’t seen any Winnebagos doing that, maybe the Jeep was the less-conspicuous choice. So he’d switched, and put up hologram dummies of his people in the seats so’s no-one would suspect him.

In the driver’s seat he’d put Patric, since the man talked constantly about how he was good at driving and complained that Reese didn’t need his help. In the passenger seat he put the switch-man - whose name he hadn’t managed to catch, in addition to never having been formally introduced. The hologram didn’t look like the last body the guy’d been in, but that was okay. That face didn’t belong to him and it’d felt wrong to put it up; the dummy had a very different face and body shape, but it was the right face and body shape so that was all right. The youngest of the four he’d put in the back seats, letting the hologram stretch out comfortably across the whole back row like the young guy never did; Reese knew it was wrong, but it made him feel nice to think of the boy relaxing comfortably so he kept the illusion as it was. The metal man he stood in the back, bracing him against the top supports to look out over everyone; he seemed like the kind of guy who would enjoy that. It wasn’t quite right, but Reese also edited the metal bits out of the hologram’s face to keep up the look of being a perfectly harmless Jeep.

“We’re coming up on a road soon,” he said, and the holograms nodded in unison. “Doont stop on t’ road, whale get coot,” Reese said in his best approximation of Patric’s accent, the hologram at the wheel’s mouth moving in time with the words. “But our trusty stagecoach will see us through safe and sound!” He said in a higher pitch, the hologram in the back seat mouthing along with the words.

Reese sighed and settled lower on his axles. Driving alone just wasn’t the same; he missed his passengers with peculiarly fierce ache. Sure, he was pretty certain two of them didn’t like him much but they were all he had in this new, confusing world, and without their guidance he was getting a little anxious. Besides, the boy seemed to like him a decent amount and that made up for a lot; the boy was why he’d gone and made a spectacle of himself in front of everyone that was chasing them after all. The other two seemed like they could handle it, but there was something about the kid that made his….soul, for lack of a better term, ache.

So when he’d picked up the chatter about the attack planes, he’d gone all out. He’d dropped his disguise and blasted all the frequencies he could find with reports of a rabid stagecoach heading down the highway and they’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. Reese still wasn’t sure how he’d survived the missile blasts, but survive he had and now he was on his way to meet his people in Reno, Nevada.

His people. The thought gave him a warm glow and he put on a little bit extra speed because he could. His wheels weren’t Jeep wheels, after all, and there was nothing on them to puncture. They also seemed to be made of something impervious to being bent, cracked, or otherwise shredded by the off road conditions and while he couldn’t explain it, he was certainly grateful. A straight line in the direction he wanted to go was much, much faster than having to obey speed limits on the roads that meandered here and there and boasted such annoying features as stop lights and speed traps. The faster he went, the faster he could find his people again and they could all ride together.

Reese slowed down as he approached the highway; he had to cross it, but diving straight across tended to make people honk their horns at him and he didn’t like that noise - it reminded him too much of Patric complaining how useless and obvious Reese really was. So he slowed to match highway speed and put his hologram’s blinker on - he wasn’t sure exactly what it was for, but it made people more willing to make space for him to get on. As he did, a flash of light caught his optics a few cars ahead and his axles skipped a rotation. There, splashed across the semi-trailer doors of the truck and standing proudly head and shoulders above every other car on the road, was a bottle of beer.

Mmm, beer.

Almost without conscious thought, Reese kicked his speed up a notch and pulled into the left-hand lane. Easing up beside the truck - there was a big logo splashed on the side of the trailer, along with more beer bottles - he increased speed slowly until he matched pace with the much larger truck. His people had given him booze money, but he couldn’t fit inside the tiny liquor stores he’d seen so far. This was much more convenient. Surely they wouldn’t mind if he just stopped a little while for refreshment?

Reese eased back just a little until his front quarter panel was about even with the spot where the trailer hitched to the truck. It was a big, solid-looking connection, sure, but if he just…Concentrating hard, he folded out one of his hidden robot legs and kicked the connector. Once. Twice. The third kick was met with an awful crunch and a hiss of escaping air, and the big rig leaped forward as the trailer came free of its moorings. The trailer itself began slowing down immediately, the sudden loss of air pressure kicking on the emergency brakes and Reese pulled his leg back into himself even as he nudged the trailer gently off the road. The rough surface slowed it even further, and it came to a juddering halt less than a quarter mile from where it had parted company with the truck.

There was no real good or subtle way to do this, so Reese simply shrugged himself into his bipedal mode and set about getting the doors open. There was a lock, sure, but it was designed to foil organic people trying to get into the trailer, not someone Reese’s size; a pinch of his fingers and the thing tinkled merrily to the ground. Pulling open the doors was the work of a moment, and the sight that met his eyes……was a lot of cardboard boxes. Disappointed, he poked one; why did the trailer have a picture of beer on it if it didn’t carry beer? The box made a crunchy tinkling noise, and fluid began leaking out the bottom. Curious, Reese swiped a digit through the stream and tasted it. Immediately, his spirits lifted.

Beer!

Rather than try and deal with the box of broken glass, he reached for another case and tore the top off; sure enough, nestled inside the case were bottles upon bottles of beer. Reese may or may not have squealed for joy, he couldn’t really say either way. The truck was full of beer! It’d been so long, his tank was all dried up, and he wasted no time in pinching the top off a bottle and draining it. Then another bottle. Then another.

“Hey!”

Reese finished his bottle and looked down, the half-dozen or so bottles he’d managed to consume only beginning to touch the edge of his thirst, and saw a short, angry-looking man wearing some form of hat and a huge scowl. He blinked, grabbed another bottle and drained it, then blinked again. The man appeared to be getting angrier the longer the silence stretched; Reese wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, so he reached into the current box he held in one hand and offered the man a bottle.

“Beer?”

“Beer? BEER?? You broke my truck and stole my load, and you’re offering me my OWN BEER?”

The man seemed incensed, though Reese couldn’t quite parse why; the man wasn’t one of his humans, wasn’t relying on Reese for anything, so why was he getting mad about Reese having a few beers? He thought for a second, put the bottle down and then reached inside his chassis and pulled out the bills the boy had left on his seat for him to acquire booze with and offered them to the man.

“Beer money?”

The man reached out and took the bills, rifling them quickly before sighing heavily and tucking them inside his jacket.

“Ah hell. Hitch’s wrecked anyway. Gimme a bottle, I don’t think I’m gettin’ any further today.”

Reese didn’t quite understand the man’s tone, but he definitely understood the request for beer and there was plenty to share in the truck. Reese handed him a fresh bottle and the man did something clever to get the top off while Reese simply pinched the top off his again and guzzled it down. The man took a few sips from his bottle while Reese drank six more before he broke the silence again.

“Why does a robot drink beer, anyway?”

Reese glanced down and shrugged even as he drank another bottle. “Don’t know. I came online like this; it’s not just beer, I love me some booze too, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

The man made a noncommittal noise and silence reigned again. With every dozen bottles he consumed, Reese could gradually feel his joints start relaxing. He hadn’t even realized they’d been tensing up until the beer started lubricating them, and the feeling was wonderful. By the time he’d reached his tank’s full capacity, he was feeling very nice indeed and there were still several cases left on the pallet. The driver of the truck, who by this point was even more drunk than Reese, somehow, had introduced himself as Hank and was sitting on a throne made of empty cases, head lolling and empty bottle held loosely in his left hand.

“Tha- thassh it? Yer fffull?”

Reese staggered to his feet, sloshing audibly, and nodded enthusiastically. “Yesh! Ah, fffeelsh sho good. I’m, I’m gonna - gonna jusht take shhhome for th’ road.”

With some difficulty - and more than one case dropped and smashed due to clumsiness - Reese managed to stack a decent pile of cases a bit away from Hank and the remains of the trailer. Hank himself, stared with glassy-eyed interest. “Hoor - how are y’ gonna, gonna get that inshide you?” he slurred and Reese grinned.

“Watch thish.”

With that he staggered two steps towards his pile of beer cases and put his hands on it even as he triggered his transformation sequence. The cases, held by his robotic hands, were pulled to the interior of his wagon form mostly undamaged; he did lose one or two with nasty crunching sounds, but the rest of them made it fine. As he turned to continue his journey, he saw Hank try to wave after him before falling over an empty bottle and not getting back up; in that moment, Reese wished - just a little - that Hank was one of his people. It was nice to have someone to share a beer with. Maybe the boy would like a beer?

With that heartening thought, Reese sped off into the sunset.

Bruno bowed his head silently as he worked with the knife.

It was hardly the first time he’d had to go fishing for bullets in his own skin. Hell, it wasn’t even the first time he’d had to go fishing after…well. After. Still didn’t make it any more pleasant, of course, but it was better than leaving the damn things in there and having to slice back down to them later when they started moving around and doing damage internally. At this point the pain of digging out bullets was an old friend; at least now the injuries were closing behind the red-hot streaks of the knife, saving him the time it would take to bandage himself up.

The knife didn’t slow in his hands, but the thought nagged at him. With no particular body armor Bruno had taken two full rounds from fully automatic weapons fire. By all rights, he should be dead; he’d done it to other men often enough to know exactly how much damage two full rounds did to the unprotected human body, yet here he was picking bullets out like nothing more than particularly troublesome ticks. It said something about the last few months, about the journey he’d taken to get back of which Joe’s was simply the very last leg, that he’d gotten used to things like this.

Now, in the familiar surroundings of his home metaverse - he couldn’t explain what it was that made it different from all the other metaverses he’d ended up in, only that there was something about the surroundings that said home even though he’d never been to this specific place before - it was glaringly obvious, a brilliant neon sign to how much he’d changed. He’d left this metaverse an old man with a trick knee and come back to it a less-old man who took two fully automatic bursts to the soft and fleshy bits and kept moving. It felt….surreal. He was an old man with too many years under his belt, and he’d just been trying to do right by his granddaughter; now he had the power - and, if Rhodes was to be believed, the responsibility - to do right by the whole world.

The thought was unsettling; not the responsibility, no - he’d saved the world before, from a variety of home-grown threats, though most of those missions would never make the history books. It was the power that didn’t sit right. Bruno was a strong man, stronger than most of the people around him since the age of fourteen, and the years had only brought more strength in the form of finesse and weapons training; anyone could be as strong, learn the weapons systems. But healing so fast you had to re-open the skin with a knife to get the bullets out mere minutes after being shot? Being strong enough to pull open several-ton steel blast doors?

That was something else.

Bruno shook his head as the last of the blood-slicked bullets dropped to the floor, the injuries they’d inflicted closing even as he watched. He could feel eyes on him, and when he glanced up he met the wide-eyed gaze of Mac McPhernon as the boy clutched a wired detonator Patric was busily fiddling with. The boy looked away almost immediately, his eyes flashing down to what Patric was doing as the older man continued a quiet monologue on the niceties of hardwired det cord, and Bruno was reminded for an overwhelming moment of the Jaxun kid. How, even with the sunglasses, the kid never used to look anyone in the face if he could help it.

That had changed, sometime during their time in ARENA. Bruno couldn’t say exactly when, but when they’d begun their journey home - Maddox’s final journey home - Crash Jaxun had been different. He’d stood taller, been more willing to meet peoples’ eyes, given directions with more authority; in short, he’d become the sort of man Bruno was glad to follow, the sort of man that should make any parent proud. Given what the general had done in Jarbridge, however, Bruno had his doubts as to whether Jaxun was the kind of man who would recognize that his boy had become a man in his own right, and a hint of trepidation followed any thoughts of what Crash would do when his father attempted to use him again.

But that was a problem for later.

Bruno rotated his shoulder, feeling the chip in the socket where one particularly difficult bullet had wedged itself fill in and flatten until his should no longer clicked oddly in the middle of the motion. The first few turns had clicked audibly, though, and Mac had flinched with each noise. The kid hadn’t been overly comfortable with Bruno the first time they’d met - the bombastic car chase had seen to that - but he’d been friendly enough on their trip in the stagecoach-submarine-whatever. Apparently watching someone take two bursts of full auto to the torso and then pick it all out afterward had spooked him, though, and he’d moved so that the Patric was between himself and Bruno.

Bruno had let him; people had been skittish with him his entire life, he knew how not to take it personally. Granted, it was usually more for his stature than for his knifework, but the principle remained the same. The kid would have to come to his own terms with what he’d seen, which could take a while. Bruno wasn’t certain if it was the time he’d spent with Crash or if he was just getting sentimental in his old age, but the McPhernon kid had far more to cope with than an old dog with older tricks trying to pass on useful tips and tricks. He’d seen the folder in Patric’s go-bag; the Irishman wasn’t a great believer in hardcopy reading, so the file didn’t belong to him, and the kid flinched just a bit every time his hand brushed it. Bruno had confirmed his suspicions when he’d gone for the suppressed MP5 - the name on the folder was Maddox McPhernon.

Maddox McPhernon. Another name on a long list Bruno carried beside his heart. Too long of a list, no matter how he looked at it, yet he’d never let a name be left off and forgotten. He was a survivor, in a line of work that didn’t make for too many of those and made dying for a cause all too easy, and a lot of the names on his list existed only there. So many of them had been redacted, censored, edited, even straight-up erased from history that only Jaxun might know even half if he started reciting the names, but Bruno refused to let the memories go. Maddox Mcphernon was the latest, and while Bruno had never worked with her directly he’d spoken with her a time or two while they were all under the thumb of T.O.M. She’d been unusually optimistic for someone in her line of work, and their chats had left him feeling more determined than ever to find his granddaughter and do right by her.

Thinking of Andi had Bruno tightening his jaw. Bruno had been chosen to come back to the home front because he had the most contacts in the right places, people who’d be willing to tell him what the world really looked like underneath all the media and sugarcoating spin the government was putting out. He was the best one to know if there was anything the rest of them needed to be back here for; he hadn’t found any argument against that line of reasoning, and so he had gone. Now, with war on the horizon and enemy boots already firmly on the ground, he found himself at once wishing Andi was here where he could keep her safe and glad she wasn’t here so the enemy couldn’t harm her.

As Patric and the kid finished rearranging the wiring on the det cord, Bruno set his mouth in a thin line and stepped up next to John Stone. Whatever happened, he’d make this world safe again for his granddaughter.

Or die trying.

Bruno walked carefully down the narrow passageway, keeping a sharp eye on the torch-lit figures ahead of him.

Andi had been first to duck into the short doorway that marked the entrance to these passages, but by the time Bruno had finished rewiring the plasma pistol to bring the mountainside down on the library entrance and ducked in himself Dr. Clarkson - or, more likely, Queen Shandroth - had taken the lead. Bruno himself had fallen into the rearguard position; while his avatar had some knowledge of these caves, if any of the howling horde behind them managed to slip past the Brotherhood’s defenses he wanted to be absolutely certain he was the first thing they met. Not to mention that while Brother Tyber wasn’t nearly as large as Bruno himself was, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he’d be able to slide past everyone else in the narrow confines they currently found themselves in.

Bringing up the rear in a confined environment wasn’t exactly one of Bruno’s favorite pastimes, but neither was it one he was unfamiliar with. As they followed the narrow, winding path through the mountain’s interior, he could feel old instincts humming to life in the back of his mind. Faint echoes were categorized and dismissed, smells analyzed and filed away, and eyes ticked constantly up, left, right, down again; while ambush from above was unlikely, he’d had it happen once in Afghanistan when some insurgents had holed up in a cave system with valuable intel and the squad Bruno’d been attached to had been ordered to clear the place out.

He’d gone in with twenty other guys and walked out with six.

The concentration required to keep a lookout was minimal but constant, allowing him to put aside things like the fact that his avatar hadn’t eaten for the better part of a day or the weariness that dragged at the corners of his eyes. Staying alive was a higher priority at the moment than bodily discomfort, but some things were less easy to put aside. Constantly keeping an eye out allowed him to covertly observe Andi in her avatar as she stayed further away from him than he would like.

He’d been relieved, mostly, when she’d stepped unharmed out of Pierce’s ship; the invaders didn’t exactly make him more sanguine with the prospect of her being back, but something in his chest had eased when she was back in arm’s reach. Of course, she’d had to jump into a pod almost immediately to assist Crash and the others but Bruno’d been assured by Thomas that even if her avatar died in the course of the mission Andi would be able to return to her body unscathed physically. Mentally was another story, one Bruno was becoming more concerned about the longer they were on a mission together though her avatar had reportedly survived expelling Zenda’s people from the metaverse filled with dinosaurs they had apparently been using as part of their supply chain.

Bruno was observant, and while he’d only known his granddaughter for a relatively short while before that fateful day in Nevada, she’d been a different young woman. Happier, in a way he didn’t quite have words for; she’d withdrawn into herself during their stay in prison (something he still wanted to have a personal word with Jaxun about) and then in Arena Zenda had kept them too busy to interact much beyond mission parameters. But now…When Bruno looked into the eyes of her avatar and through them to Andi herself, there was something in the back of them that reminded him of Weber. Corporal Frederic Weber, one of Bruno’s longest-lasting squadmates, had never been quite the same after a mission had resulted in half their squad getting captured and tortured by the enemy.

Weber had functioned well enough afterwards, carried out his missions in a satisfactory manner, but Bruno had seen the same kind of soul-deep injury lurking in Weber’s gaze whenever he’d had had a drink too many. In the end, Bruno suspected that was what really had killed the man, never mind what the official report said about bravery under fire. He’d spent almost a decade bleeding from somewhere that didn’t leave a mark, and eventually he’d bled out despite Bruno’s best efforts. The thought of Andi running out into enemy fire to save an injured comrade because she didn’t care whether she lived or died scared Bruno on a level he hadn’t suspected was possible.

So he did the best he could, using both his skills and his avatar’s natural abilities to the fullest extent possible. He endured Andi’s needling with as much grace as he could muster, and did what he could to keep the mission on track. When they’d investigated the burned-out monastery, he’d gone in in place of Andi for fear of how the inhabitants would react to her avatar; when she wanted to teleport up to the mountain fortress, he’d taken advantage of his avatar’s status to volunteer at once. When she objected to the Brothers burning the library they had worked for so many centuries to secure, he’d sacrificed the only weapon he had that was at all effective against the 742 invaders without a second thought.

Bruno could only pray to whatever forces were out there that it would be enough to staunch the bleeding.

An almost subliminal noise brought Bruno sharply back to the present. A high-pitched click, at the very edge of his hearing - he suspected that if he hadn’t had the benefit of advanced healing to repair what age had stolen from him, he wouldn’t have heard it at all - was sounding from somewhere, and getting rapidly louder. If he had to make a comparison, the closest thing he’d heard was one particularly harrowing mission where the submersible they’d been using for ex-filtration had gotten lashed by active sonar. The narrow passage they had been following opened out dramatically, and the clicks echoed off the walls.

“Bats?” Andi’s confused voice nearly made Bruno flinch - if they were being lashed, the last thing they wanted to do was make more noise.

“Centimoths.” The name floated up from Brother Tyber’s memory with alarmed alacrity, attached to gruesome stories the older novices had used to tell initiates about these very tunnels. Enormous bugs with a taste for anything that moved, a deeply venomous bite, and a paralytic toxin in the scales of their wings that could stop a man’s heart if he breathed in too much of it. When the initiates had gathered enough courage to ask the Head of Novitiates about it, the old man had confirmed the stories and added stern warnings to never venture down the tunnels unless instructed to do so by an older monk.

Both Andi and Robbins looked deeply alarmed by the prospect.

“Do we put the torches out?” Andi’s voice wavered with uncertainty, glancing up at the ceiling high above them that was almost certainly covered in the things given the way the flickering light from the aforementioned torches wavered against it.

“No point. They don’t need light, but we sure as hell do.” Robbins’ tactically sound advice was delivered in an almost cynical drawl as he moved a bit further out into the cave, stepping around the bones that littered the cavern floor. Bruno had one second to mourn the loss of the plasma pistol before something huge and distinctly insectoid nearly removed the head of Robbins’ avatar.

Robbins dropped into a combat roll with the same grace he’d displayed in the ring back on Arena, grabbing a discarded shield from the floor as he did so. Queen Shandroth - and it was clearly the warrior-queen, not Dr. Clarkson - reacted quickly yet unhurriedly, fixing her torch on a convenient rock before reaching for her bow and arrows. Bruno pulled out his own bow and arrows, for all the good they’d do, and nocked an arrow on the off-chance he could get a clear shot.

Andi disappeared.

Bruno’s heart leaped into his throat even as his eyes darted around as much of the cavern space as he could see - which truthfully wasn’t much. Even Queen Shandroth’s somewhat-elevated torch only cast so much light, and it wasn’t nearly enough to light the cavern in any significant fashion. Not that additional illumination seemed to be the purpose behind the Queen’s actions; even as he watched, she aimed an arrow carefully through the flames toward the as-yet unlit ceiling and loosed. The arrow caught as it passed through the flames, and as it arced higher it revealed more and more of the ceiling of the cavern - a ceiling alive with dozens, if not scores, of centimoths.

Bruno’s mouth went dry even as he slung his bow. If the overlapping carapaces weren’t thick as tank armor, he’d eat his avatar’s cloak; a bow wasn’t going to do enough damage, not with ammunition he had, and if even one of them started dropping the toxic scales of its wings the mission would end here. He hadn’t seen Andi in the brief illumination offered by the arrow, but the Queen was already firing another. And another. And another. Each one lit of the ceiling a bit more, but otherwise seemed not to inconvenience the centimoths in the slightest. Robbins was kneeling on the ground, sheltering underneath the shield he’d picked up, and while Bruno couldn’t hear the words he was mouthing he’d seen him do it before on Arena during his televised matches.

Still, Bruno had his doubts as to whether one punch - even one strong enough liquefy an unarmored person - would be enough to deal with all the centimoths on the ceiling. There had to be something he could do, something that would take care of every centimoth once and for all. He reached back into himself, shuffling through the various abilities imparted to him by association with previous avatars - you people with the super powers, that’s what Patric had said, and while the comparison grated at something Bruno didn’t care to consider in depth, the Irishman hadn’t exactly been wrong.

A memory reared its ugly head, halting Bruno in his search. The greasy, tainted reminder of a man who’d fought a war long enough to forget what it was he was fighting for. A man whose love of violence was only partially met by his lust for a good tumble, who would fuck a woman senseless and then slit her throat for wearing the wrong uniform. A man whose only reaction to destroying an entire planet and every last living soul on it had been a fierce exultation in the power granted to him by the functions of a capital ship.

A man who, but for a few, crucial decisions in his life, might have been Bruno Hamilton.

Lothar Kaldegga.

Bruno disliked strongly to think about it, but Kaldegga had left more than an impression. Power pulsed through Bruno, cycling in time to the throb of the planet’s molten core far, far below him, and he felt an answering hum in the rocks all around him. The memory of Lothar was seared into Bruno’s brain, much as he desperately wished to forget him; using Kaldegga’s power without the channeling devices that had been locked around the wrists of every magic user in that metaverse would have…consequences. Bruno glanced at the ceiling and grimaced - if he died trying this, the mission could continue, but if everyone died then the mission would fail. It wasn’t much of a choice, really, and Bruno pulled on the power in his soul. The thrumming in his core grew more resonant, and he could see the pebbles around him start to shiver.

He was about to call to the others, warn them, when the loudest noise Bruno had ever heard in his life reverberated through the chamber. It threw the rhythm in his chest off for just a brief moment and the world went the kind of silent around him that spelled temporary deafness rather than an actual lack of noise. He looked up to see the shield Robbins had been sheltering under fall noiselessly to the ground, the Queen dropping the arrow she’d been about to fire, and -

“Andi!” Bruno screamed as his granddaughter danced among the behemoth forms far above them. At least, he felt himself make the noise in his throat but not a sound of it came to his ears. The silence was profound. Still, like the rising plume of magma that signaled the eruption of a volcano, he could no more stop the swell of power in his chest than he could stop the tide. “Everyone take cover!” he shouted as loudly as he could into the silence, though the heedless motion of the others told him they were as deaf as he was.

Bruno gritted his teeth and slammed his hands into the wall.

The effect was instantaneous; the walls and ceiling of the cavern began to shake as the power moved through his chest and down his arms like the slow, unhurried progress of a lava flow. Pieces of the ceiling began to fall, small at first and then much, much bigger. A voice echoed in his memory - Cavendish, an ex-SAS explosives expert he’d worked with briefly several years ago - “Bring the whole bloody ceiling down, it will!” He could feel the power, designed to tear rock apart, begin to work on his arms as well. He might have screamed as fissures began opening in his flesh, tracing whatever the organic equivalent of fault lines were as they crisscrossed his hands, wrists, arms-

When the flow finally ebbed, spent in its entirety, Bruno felt like someone had taken him and wrung his soul out like a rag over the sink. As the last of the power flowed out, Bruno found he could finally remove his hand from the stone - leaving twin dark hand prints on it, little trickles running from the bottom of each towards the cavern floor. He looked down at the ruined mess of his hands and forearms - Damn, that was bone peeking out through the ones in his hands - and watched as the split flesh slowly began knitting back together starting where the seam had run over his elbow and up under the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Said sleeves were now more than a little bloody, and Bruno sighed heavily. He didn’t want to think about cleaning the blood out of this shirt; he was weary down to his soul.

Turning, he caught Andi’s horrified gaze as she stared at the raw meat that still made up most of his lower arms. He grimaced at her in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “I’ll be all right, my dear. I’ve had worse.” She didn’t respond and he sighed again. Still deaf, probably. Bruno tipped his head up just in time to catch a gleam of light from the ceiling high above them.

A way out.

It took several minutes for everyone to regain their hearing; Robbins’ shield-punching trick had produced a sound not entirely dissimilar to a subwoofer turned up far, far too loudly for a single beat, and Bruno wouldn’t be surprised if all their avatars experienced permanent hearing loss after the mission was over.

Not that Andi let something so trivial as deafness stop her from having a look at just what, exactly, Lothar’s uncontrolled magic had done to her grandfather. As soon as the rocks had stopped falling she’d rushed over to inspect the bleeding fissures that were slowly knitting themselves together along his forearms.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” her tone was frantic and her voice louder than necessary as her hands skimmed over the sealing fissures - mostly on his wrists and hands now, where they had been deepest. Blood still dripped to the floor from his fingertips with a steady tick tick tick, and he made sure to hold them where they wouldn’t drip on either of their clothes; he had no idea where their journey would take them, but walking into unfamiliar and almost certainly hostile territory while reeking of blood was, in Bruno’s book, not the cleverest of ideas.

“Andi, I’m fine. I’m already healing,” he said in his most reassuring tone, but she didn’t even bob her head in acknowledgement. Still deaf, then, he thought, and nudged her avatar’s boot with one of his feet. She looked up in surprise, and he gave her his most reassuring smile. It probably looked better on Brother Tyber’s face than his own, because she relaxed and let his - now mostly healed - hands go. He took the opportunity to flick the blood off and as far away from the group as he could before he turned back to survey the wreckage.

Queen Shandroth looked disapproving, her eyes flicking between Andi and Bruno, but she made no comment as she retrieved what arrows she could. Bruno nodded to her approvingly, ignoring the dirty look he got in return; they needed as much ammunition as they could get, headed into unfamiliar territory as they were, and no telling when they’d be able to get more. Robbins was looking off to the side, eyes fixed on nothing, and Bruno frowned.

“Everything alright?” he asked as he walked closer, and Robbins jerked like someone’d stabbed him.

“Hmm? Oh yes, I’m fine, everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t everything be fine? We should probably head up to that new entrance up there since you seem to have basically buried the rest of the tunnel.” Robbins’ words tumbled one after the other, reminding Bruno of Thomas for some reason, but a quick inspection of the chamber revealed the advice to be sound. Between both Bruno and Robbins’ enhanced strength they could probably have cleared enough of the entrance on the far side of the chamber to continue into the tunnels but doing so would probably bring more of the roof down on their heads and with the hollow ache of too much power used sitting behind his breastbone, Bruno was inclined to take the path of least resistance.

“Indeed. Let us continue Northward, then, so that we may find the Sky Stone and purge the invaders from my lands.” The imperious voice of Queen Shandroth was unmistakable, and Bruno exchanged a brief look with Robbins before they both turned to look at the Queen. Dr. Clarkson was a barely-there shimmer in the Queen, apparently unwilling to take back control just yet. Given where they were headed, Bruno could hardly fault her but the Queen wasn’t the easiest person to deal with.

Still, she wasn’t his first difficult superior officer and hopefully wouldn’t be the last. He dipped his head in a shallow approximation of a bow. “Sounds good, my lady.” Bruno looked around, assessing, and nodded at Andi when he caught her doing the same thing. She’d picked up a number of useful skills from her avatars and as much as he worried for her state of mind, he could respect the professionalism she displayed in the field when it came to covert operations. Her eyes - following the same paths his had - flicked up towards the weak light, down at Queen Shandroth - who’d begun to tap her foot impatiently - and back over to where Bruno and Robbins were standing.

“Tactically, it makes most sense for us to proceed Brony, me, you, and then Grandpa,” she told the Queen, whose face grew stormy almost immediately. Andi held up a hand and only long practice at keeping a poker face allowed Bruno to avoid snorting at the Queen’s expression - somewhere between petulant and flabbergasted. “However, I know you and your inclination to lead from the front, my Queen, and Lord Gan does not usually possess sufficient strength to make the gap up there any larger if necessary. However -”

“No, no, I wouldn’t want to denigrate my royal wife’s strength. She should definitely go first.” Robbins’ interruption was somewhat unexpected, and Bruno slid a confused glance his way. That didn’t sound like Robbins being sarcastic, but it was hard to tell sometimes. The man had a deadpan delivery that would have been the envy of half the NCOs on the last base Bruno’d served in, never mind the commissioned officers. Still, he looked serious enough and the Queen had apparently decided to take him at his word.

“Very well! Onward, then,” and with that Proclamation - Bruno could almost see it written in ornate calligraphy on a vellum scroll, and he didn’t have much of an imagination for that kind of thing - the Queen began hauling herself up the rock pile. With one confused glance at Robbins, Andi scrambled to follow her - and possibly past her; Bruno had to remind himself that his granddaughter also had super strength, though perhaps not as much as she used to. He pulled his eyes away from the slope one more time to give Robbins another questioning look.

“You sure you’re alright?” Robbins’ grasp of small squad tactics - especially ones with the crazy powers avatars and pilots tended to have - was second to none. Bruno himself was far more used to dealing with squads armed with explosives and guns, and it took him precious seconds to work out the maneuvers Robbins seemed to have down to instinct. Andi’s plan had sounded solid to Bruno, why did the other man not choose to abide by it?

“I said I was fine, didn’t I? I thought we all had our hearing back by then, but I guess old people have worse ears. So I’ll say it again; I’m fine. I’ll bring up the rear, catch anyone who falls, and we all get out of here safely. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.” Bruno gave the other man an obligatory frown for the insult but otherwise let it slide. It was the rest of the statement that he wanted clarification on, but Robbins seemed disinclined to speak further. After a few moments, Bruno gave up and shrugged before turning to follow the more enthusiastic members of their team up the rock slide towards freedom.

It took them the better part of an hour to get out of the cavern; the small beam of light had proven to be a fissure in the rock leading to the surface that had been both opened wider and partially blocked when parts of the ceiling came down, and was narrow enough to allow only two people to work on it at a time - which had added another twenty minutes delay to actually reaching the surface when the Queen had refused to surrender her spot despite being the person with the least amount of superstrength in the party. And, of course, she had insisted the men were too delicate for this task and their frail constitutions would surely fail when faced with such weighty rocks; which had meant, naturally, that only Andi was allowed to help her in a move that irritated Bruno and royally pissed off Brother Tyber.

Finally getting out into the rapidly weakening sunshine was a pleasure dampened heavily by the biting chill of the wind that blasted through their bones as soon as they stepped away from the shelter of the cliff face, and by the meninist rant Brother Tyber had engaged in in the back of Bruno’s head. Bruno winced internally and shook his head as some of Tyber’s points echoed his memories of a feminism rally he’d infiltrated earlier in his career for reasons he wasn’t allowed to disclose to the general public; the movement attracted the attention of the Queen, who’d been surveying the surrounding ridges with a jaundiced eye.

“Are you so discomfited by a little wind, then? Men. Your constitutions are so clearly unfit for the more difficult conditions here,” she sneered, and Brother Tyber - who’d been momentarily distracted by whatever he’d gleaned from Bruno’s brief trip down memory lane - bristled inside Bruno’s head, trying to take back enough control to refute the Queen’s arrogance. Bruno pushed the irate monk back down into their shared psyche and nodded to the lowering sun.

“My lady, we should find shelter before nightfall. I’m pretty sure that cave didn’t contain every centimoth in these mountains, and without as much warning as we had in the cave they’re likely to pick us off in the night.”

Bruno’s dry statement had the effect he wanted, and the Queen blanched before turning to bark at Robbins.

“Lord Gan! I require you to find us a suitable location to rest for the night.” Her tone was imperious, and Bruno mentally rolled his eyes. Of the many things Robbins was not, the most important two at the moment were an outdoorsman and even remotely his avatar. Still, the other man didn’t seem to be too miffed by the Queen’s order and merely bobbed his head.

“Yes, my Queen and wife. I’ll find us a place to sleep at once.” He turned to go, but Bruno caught him discreetly by the elbow and stopped him for a moment.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Bruno murmured, making sure to keep his voice low as the Queen loudly began expounding on the joys of having a husband well-trained in the good, husbandly arts. Robbins gave him an indecipherable look and half-smiled.

“Sure I know what I’m doing. How hard can it be? Just gotta find someplace out of the wind that doesn’t lead back into the hole we just came out of, maybe a little water, and uhhhhh a little, y'know, somethin’-somethin’ on the way. It’ll take me, what, ten-a seconds?” He said the last part in a voice that Bruno supposed was some sort of reference to something Robbins had seen that Bruno hadn’t, and the man deflated somewhat as Bruno kept up his steady stare. “I know, basically, what I’m doing, and I can fake the rest. Trust me, I can do this.”

Bruno released his grip and watched him go for a moment, turning back to the conversation at hand just in time to completely miss Robbins stumble over a rock he would have normally have avoided.

Their campsite for that night ended up being a large boulder that had rolled down from higher up at some point, and come to rest at the corner of an overhang and the mountain face. It provided a certain amount of shelter from the wind and protection on two sides from any opportunistic nocturnal predators, and managed to somehow have ice nestled in the deepest point between it and the mountain. No fuel, of course, but some diligent chipping was enough to get chunks of the ice into their canteens and as unpleasant as sleeping with what were essentially icepacks would be, it’d get them fresh water in the morning.

Robbins took first watch, and the night passed without incident - as did the next few days. As they progressed further and further out of the mountains, the pockets of ice they’d found tucked into crevasses and the hollows behind rocks dwindled in both size and frequency, and there was nothing edible to be found. Not even lichen grew on the rocks, a fact Bruno found disquieting in a way he couldn’t quite put words to. Brother Tyber was unnerved as well, staying in the back of their shared mindspace as the days of travel wore on all of them.

The morning of the third day started off like the two that had preceded it; quiet, cold but rapidly getting warmer, and completely desolate. They hadn’t found any ice the previous night so Bruno had rigged a condenser as best he could with a rock and some of the utensils from Gan’s pack. It’d been barely a third full by the time they’d risen to start walking for the day, and they were all on short water rations.

Midway through the morning, Robbins collapsed.

Andi was at his side in a moment, running from where she’d been walking companionably beside her grandfather, and Bruno himself wasn’t far behind. Robbins was down hard, convulsing, and both Andi and Bruno spent a chaotic few minutes keeping him rolled onto one side so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue or fall off the cliff. While they held on to him, Bruno at least could feel the heat rising off the man in a most concerning fashion; he had to be running a temperature of at best 103, if Bruno had to guess. When the fit finally subsided, they got Robbins into a sitting position and Andi was the first to speak.

“What the hell, Brony?” she demanded, the bright light of panic still shimmering in her eyes. Bruno seconded her question with a quick hand gesture, unwilling to undermine the authority in her voice but equally unwilling to let this slide.

Robbins just breathed for a few minutes, visibly trying to collect himself before reaching for his cloak and flipping it off his shoulder. Underneath the cape his shirt sleeve was torn, revealing a badly-tied bandage from underneath which nasty yellow fluid crusted on the frayed edges of the sleeve. Bruno reached down and twitched the bandage off quickly, prompting a sound of agony from Robbins and a fresh gush of nasty yellow fluid. Underneath the bandage was a jagged and raised puncture mark, surrounded by green-grey skin shot through with dark veins and stinking to high heaven.

Andi reared away, covering her nose and mouth, and even Bruno had to fight down a moment of nausea. Bruno didn’t have to ask what had happened - Brother Tyber was pressing forward in their shared mind with lists of symptoms and possible antidotes to centimoth poison, along with the grim certainty of death without treatment in the first three hours of exposure. Bruno looked down and caught Robbins’ eye, a certainty and regret tinging the other man’s gaze.

“You knew.” The words fell colorlessly from his lips, without a questioning inflection, but Robbins nodded anyway.

“Yeah. Figured we sure as hell weren’t getting any help from the monks after the Ogri got through with them, and thought maybe we’d find something on this side of the mountains.” He waved a weak hand at the black, craggy rock that surrounded them. “Which, of course, we didn’t. Too late to turn back, might as well keep going until I couldn’t any more.”

His voice was weak, and the few words were drowned out by Andi’s sound of protest. “Mmm! No! No, we can still save you - we can still save him, right?” Her eyes appealed first to Bruno then to Queen Shandroth, the former meeting her gaze with a slow shake of his head and the latter meeting it with a cool, unsympathetic look of her own.

“No!”

Robbins reached out and took Andi’s wrist gently. “Listen, listen - hush! I mean it, listen - I will probably be fine. This isn’t my first time dying, and anyway I’m not really here. When this body dies, I’ll jack back into my own back home and I’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about Andi, geez, I mean it, I’ll be fine.” As he spoke he stroked the inside of Andi’s wrist soothingly, even when tears started spilling from her eyes. Bruno blinked as something in the back of his mind clicked.

“That’s why you’ve stayed all pilot, even when Shandroth sends you to go find food and shelter.” Robbins nodded as Bruno spoke, wincing a little when Andi gathered him up in the armored arms of her avatar.

“Yeah. Gan’s not too happy about dying - man that guy is shrill - but this way I get to keep him from feeling the worst of it. Mostly.” He winced again as Andi clutched him tighter and patted her back awkwardly. “Yes, that’s very nice, just - maybe not so tightly?”

Andi obligingly loosened her arms a little and Queen Shandroth took that as her cue to step in. “Husband, what seems to be the matter?” She asked imperiously, and Robbins rolled his eyes.

“You know those marriages vows are always ‘til death do you part’? Yeah, those’re going to expire in the next day or so. Along with me.” His face was a cross between resignation and annoyance - though whether the latter was due to the fact he was still being clutched in steel-clad arms or that the Queen was a casual misandrist, Bruno couldn’t say. He caught Robbins’ eyes and made a carefully covert stabbing motion before sliding his eyes to the dagger the man had on his hip, and frowned when Robbins shook his head.

Has to be natural, he mouthed and Bruno nodded. If Robbins’ greater experience in the Metaverse led him to believe that letting his avatar die slowly of poison was better than a quick end on a knife, Bruno wouldn’t doubt him.

“Well. This is most inconvenient. If you had told us sooner that you had been bitten, we might have been able to do something about it. Then again, men are not very clever about such things so perhaps the expectation of action was just too high.” The Queen sounded bored and moved off before Andi could punch Dr. Clarkson back to the fore like she’d been planning, if the look on her face was anything to go by when her head came up in the wake of that extremely callous statement.

Robbins just shrugged it off. “I know what I’m holding over Jenika’s head for the next forever. Well, you had better get moving, you’re wasting daylight.” His light tone was belied by the darkness in his eyes when Bruno turned a thoroughly appalled glare on him.

Andi beat him to the punch, however. “No. We’re staying with you until…until you go back.” Her voice stumbled uncertainly over the word everyone was thinking and no-one wanted to say, but it firmed up in the end so much that Bruno was vividly reminded of a day nearly fifty and some change years ago when another young woman - so very similar - had firmly declared that he could get over his awkwardness on the dance floor and dance with her if he only applied himself. He blinked at the sudden surge of nostalgia even as Andi marched off to tell Queen Shandroth that they wouldn’t be moving any further today.

It took some arguing, but in the end the Queen agreed and they moved together into the shelter of a nearby depression in the mountain. The stayed there for long hours as the sun traversed the sky and the seizures hit Robbins more and more often, one particularly fierce convulsion mid-afternoon robbing him of the ability to speak. So too did his fever rise as the sun fell, glazing his eyes and leaving him sweating even in the shade. In the end, as the sun crossed the horizon, so too did the light of MetaPilot Brony Robbins slowly drain out of Gan’s body. As the last few pale beams slipped behind the mountains, the body of Lord Gan Vallethio let out a last, raspy exhalation, and lay still.

Nobody slept well that night.

The only sounds in the room are the low beeps and whirs of the machines, and the slow, steady breathing of the man on the bed.

As Butch pushed his way into the hospital room, some of the beeping machines picked up their pace slightly but otherwise very little changed. The man on the bed, bandages wrapped around nearly every visible inch of skin and hooked into what seemed like miles of wires and tubes, looked over at him with the only eye not obscured by gauze - though even that one was still a little milky.

By all rights, the man in the bed should be dead. Butch had seen him take a hell of a beating a number of times, mostly when Butch himself had been Kid Titan, and he’d always been okay by the end of the week. No matter what had happened, by the end of the week he was always ready to ruffle Butch’s hair and take Butch to the ice cream shop and argue with Bob Baker about the morality of allowing children to fight in the never-ending struggle.

But this had been a fucking atomic bomb.

Butch had stopped it, as much as he could, but they’d still lost a lot of people.

A lot of people.

Too many.

The hazy blue eye of Iconoclast blinked at him from across the room and a questioning huff of breath emerged from under the bandages. Butch smiled awkwardly as he stepped further into the room, letting the door close behind him as he held out a bouquet of flowers The Gardener had assured him would be most appreciated. Butch couldn’t name half the flowers or plants in the thing, and it looked a little awkward, but Blue’s - Iconoclast’s - eye crinkled at the corner with a smile hidden by bandages and a clumsy hand weakly directed him to put the whole thing on the table nearest the bed.

There were other tables around the room with arrangements on them, though not as many as there might have been. While Blue was a good guy, a friend and inspiration to many, those many had answered Butch’s call, had followed him into battle to save the entire planet.

Many hadn’t been as lucky as the two of them.

Butch shook his head, banishing the thought as he grabbed one of the empty vases some enterprising soul had lined up in an out-of-the-way corner of the room. Putting some water in it was the work of a moment, and then he plopped the whole kit and kaboodle on the end table Blue’d pointed him to. The other bouquets were just as variable as the one Butch had brought; Iconoclast was one of the few who bothered to remember the meaning of flowers and The Gardener knew it, and tailored every bouquet sent to the older hero accordingly.

“So, Blue,” Butch started, then stopped.

What could he say? Kronos was dead, and it had taken nearly all they had to kill him. Abbi was the Titan now, fully and completely in a way he himself had never been. Funerals and memorials for those lost had been going on for nearly the whole week, and Butch had only just managed to get away from the ceremonies. Too many people were dead, and reconstruction was only beginning.

What actually came out of his mouth was -

“I’m going to ask Abbi to marry me,” he said in a rush.

The single eye blinked, and then crinkled again. Painkillers didn’t have that much effect on Blue - his metabolism was too fast to let the drugs dull his nerves - so he had learned early on to deal with a fair amount of pain. At least, that’s what he’d always told Butch and he did seem remarkably coherent for someone who looked like a mummy.

Butch wasn’t family - not by blood, anyway - but Blue had signed release forms decades ago to let the doctors tell Butch what was really going on. Granted, at the time it had been because an eleven-year-old boy had been having a mild panic attack over the adult superhero who had stepped between him and an oncoming energy blast, but they remained valid. Blue had never rescinded them, not even after everything Butch had done with the resignation and the book deal.

What the doctors had told him just before he entered the room was that Blue would live, but he would likely be in a great deal of pain for the foreseeable future. The bandages were there to take the place of the skin that was always last to regenerate, covering bare muscles and bones and organs and other things that should not see the light of day, ever.

But he’d live, and he was lucid even if he couldn’t respond very well, and he’d heard and understood every word Butch’d just said.

Blue held out a bandaged hand, and Butch took it with only a little trepidation. For all the doctors said about Blue’s overall condition, there wasn’t any hesitation in the squeeze the older hero gave him, even as Butch was pretty sure he could feel more bone than meat under the bandages. The single eye had crinkled so far as to be nearly closed, and the beeping on the machines had picked up substantially. Blue’s vocal cords hadn’t grown back yet, or Butch suspected he would have been congratulating him verbally.

It was only when Blue paused and huffed interrogatively that Butch remembered how he could get and squeezed the hand he held a little more firmly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. She’s Titan now, not sure if anyone told you, and she’s.”

He paused.

“Really good. Maybe the best person I know here.”

Another huff, a weak shake of his held hand.

“You’d like her, Blue, even if she did used to be a supervillain. She’s got empathy powers, but she’s strong enough to be herself and to want to help others, and…”

Butch trailed off as he saw Blue’s eyelids visibly drooping, the hand in his slackening slowly in its grip, the machines slowing in their beeping, and gently set Blue’s hand on his chest. The eye made a valid attempt to stay open, and a put-out huff sounded from under the bandages, but Butch had to shake his head.

“I’ll tell you more when you’re better, Blue. I’ll bring her around when you can speak again and have a real talk. Sound good?”

But Iconoclast had already lost his battle with his current nemesis - sleep - and Butch settled for slipping quietly out of the room, the warm glow of the older hero’s approval sitting in his chest.

Consciousness came slowly.

The first thing that registered was pain; a stitching hitch in his side spelled broken ribs, a coppery taste in his mouth heralded a split lip, and a stabbing pain in his gut that meant nothing good. Donaldson hadn’t been this injured when an IED had taken out his vehicle in Iraq. What the hell had happened on US soil that’d busted him up so badly? His head felt…muddled. Did he have a concussion too? He couldn’t remember - his head didn’t hurt, exactly, but he couldn’t remember.

“Hey Captain.”

That, that was him, wasn’t it? Captain Donaldson, Rangers.

“Wha- what? Huh? What’s going on?”

“Are you with me, Captain?”

Donaldson moved his hands down to lever himself up to face whoever the hell was talking to him and encountered something warm and covered in pockets. He looked down, and tried to wiggle his toes.

Nothing.

“I, I can’t feel my legs. I can’t feel my legs!”

The panic was suffocating. He couldn’t feel his legs. Not his toes, not his hands clamped tightly on his thighs, not even a phantom sensation. Nothing. This was the end of everything - his career, his freedom of movement, his way of life. How the hell was he supposed to do his job and take care of his family with no legs?

“You’re not in good shape, Captain. I’m sorry.”

This guy was sorry? Donaldson couldn’t feel his goddamn legs and this guy was sorry?

“What’s- what’s happening? How did I get here? Who’re you people?”

His voice shook with a mix of anger and the awful fear that churned in his gut. He couldn’t feel his legs.

“Name’s Sergeant Bruno Hamilton, USMC.”

Of all the answers the guy could’ve given him, that one threw Donaldson for a loop. A marine? And old for a sergeant; near mandatory retirement, if he had to guess.

“Wh-what?”

“Can you…feel anyone in your thoughts?”

Donaldson blinked. Feeling people in his thoughts? What kind of new-age hippie bullshit was this guy selling? What kind of new-age hippie bullshit could you get from a Marine sergeant, for God’s sake. This guy wasn’t just close to mandatory retirement, he was close to a psych discharge.

He had to be.

“What kind of question is that??”

“What actions have you taken in the last few days, Captain? Do you remember?”

Donaldson blinked, then wrinkled his forehead. His head didn’t hurt too badly, and his mouth didn’t taste like a dead rat so he probably hadn’t been out drinking in the last 24 hours.

So why did the memories feel so far out of reach?

“I- I don’t remember. I was at Fort Bragg, and then….I, I feel like I’ve been dreaming; I, I stole a helicopter? No, I couldn’t have stolen a helicopter. I would never steal a helicopter.”

“So it works just like your guys’ do.”

Donaldson’s head swiveled around to the other man in the room, who up until this point had seemed content to let Hamilton - if that really was his name - do all the talking. Now that was a face he recognized, from all the nationwide terror alerts that had gone out recently. Patric Leibowitz-O’Kelley, wanted in conjunction with several acts of terrorism on American soil. That was…concerning.

The self-professed Marine didn’t seem fazed, either by his compatriot in general or by the distinctly accented interruption.

“Different avatars react differently.”

What was an avatar?

“Talk to tha pilot.”

Was that him? Donaldson wasn’t certified to fly, but he knew his way around a cockpit thanks to a buddy of his back at the Fort. Hamilton was certainly turning back around to look him.

“Captain, you’ve been….possessed.”

Well, that was unexpected.

“What kind of bullshit are you talking about? Possessed.”

Donaldson scoffed. Possession only happened in movies and TV shows; God knows how many lame-brained privates he’d spooked over the years by busting up their “secret” Ouija board sessions on Halloween. It did his heart good to see them fall over themselves getting to attention, eyes darting wildly like they actually expected Abe Lincoln’s ghost to appear and pop them around the head or something.

“In this century’s people’s terms, they say madness.”

Hamilton ignored the muttered comment from his companion and crouched, bringing him closer to eye level with Donaldson. Donaldson wished acutely in that moment he could sit up, but his legs….

“Well. I wish there was an easier way to tell you this, captain, but you can feel what kind of shape you’re in. The helicopter theft was real.”

No.

“It’s- it’s not possible.”

It couldn’t be possible. He’d remember doing something like that - you just couldn’t steal a helicopter and not remember doing it.

Except he did, didn’t he? A vague feeling of his hands on the controls, the pressure of the headset on his ears, the feeling of the wind in the cockpit as he flew the chopper to the rendezvous. But it was all so distant, like a photograph left in the sunlight for too long. The memories faded as he tried to catch them, running through his mental fingers like sand, going……somewhere.

“You’ve been hunting the men outside for no good reason and for some time now. And…..this is hard to explain. Basically, we’re being invaded by aliens, and they do it by possessing…possessing people.”

That was possibly the most ludicrous explanation Donaldson had ever heard.

“This is completely insane. You are completely insane.”

Definitely out on a psych discharge. Why wasn’t Hamilton confined? He was clearly a danger to society.

“Yeah. You have a better explanation? Because I’d love to hear it.”

The worst part was, Donaldson didn’t. But Hamilton had to be lying. Had to be.

“This is….This is not right. This is not right.”

“This guy’s still in your head right now. He can hear what I’m saying. He’s from another world. And he’s got some kind of invasion going on.”

Donaldson could feel his gorge rising. There was something, something in his mind - a shadow?

“Did you drug me?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“Didn’t need to. I wish we had some stronger painkillers for you right now, though.”

“That’s kind of the opposite of what we need to get what we need outta this fella.”

Leibowitz-O’Kelley’s statement was flat and unfriendly. Donaldson’s eyes followed Hamilton’s gaze as the older man looked over, and the irishman’s stare was as flat and unfriendly as his voice had been. The man was clearly losing patience.

“Well, unless we can figure out how to get his pilot to talk to us…He doesn’t know anything.”

Donaldson’s eyes snapped back to Hamilton for a moment before being drawn back to Leibowitz-O’Kelley. Of the two, the terrorist was clearly more unhinged.

“Right! Yeah, no, I’ve got just the thing.”

So saying, the terrorist produced a large knife and Donaldson fought to keep his face straight. It was…easier, than he’d thought it would be. The fear was further away than he’d thought it was. Like it had somehow moved away when he wasn’t looking.

But that wasn’t a thing, was it?

“Doesn’t work like that, Patric.”

Hamilton’s statement was dry with just a hint of weariness, and Leibowitz-O’Kelley responded with a nasty grin.

“Sure it does.”

The man gestured with the - very big - knife as he spoke. Donaldson felt his heart try to race, but again the feeling was oddly muffled. He should feel more fear, but the feeling was just out of reach.

“Wh-what are you doing with that?”

Leibowitz-O’Kelley flourished the knife, the light reflecting malevolently off the blade.

“Well, the pilot can feel everything that you feel, and uh, you’re as good as dead. But I can keep him alive another half-hour and make him feel the worst pain of his life. Might not talk, but from what I understand he can’t jack out until you’re dead. Right?”

That question was addressed to Hamilton, who nodded slowly, and Donaldson felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“That’s my understanding.”

Hamilton seemed reluctant, but that didn’t slow the terrorist down one bit as he took a few deliberate steps in Donaldson’s direction.

“No. No no no no no…”

Even as he spoke, Donaldson could feel his fear somehow draining away towards the darkness in the back of his mind. He tried desperately to hold on to it, inexplicably more afraid of what might happen when he failed, but fail he did and the shadow in the back of his mind rose up and swallowed him whole.

“So. Talk to me, pilot. What do we want to know - where you from? And if you say Kansas…”

Donaldson’s head lolled as for a brief moment two people were in perfect balance inside his head, and no-one was holding the reins. In that instant Donaldson knew everything; who the man in his head was, what his mission was, how he was doing this.

Everything.

And then the moment was broken and Donaldson was pushed to the back of his head as the other took control. He watched in horror as the other - what’d Leibowitz-O’Kelley call him? A pilot? - looked out over the two men in the room with him and curled his lips in a small sneer. The expression felt alien to Donaldson’s face, and he felt like his stomach should be trying to crawl up his throat. He should be horrified, the buzzing static in his head was definitely panic but the Other Guy didn’t let a single thread of it show. In fact, the only real feeling in their shared skull was…a faint amusement?

Donaldson screamed, thrashing out with everything that he was in a single uncoordinated attack. The Other Guy didn’t even bat an eye, rolling Donaldson into an even deeper corner of his own psyche with some sort of mental aikido that felt disturbingly practiced. The first step to controlling an avatar is emotional and physiological control, a memory that definitely wasn’t Donaldson’s whispered. Once you have that, there is very little the host can do to resist you. He slumped, despair crashing over him like a tide. He could feel his mouth moving, hear vaguely the words being said to his ears, but it didn’t matter, none of of it mattered. Not now.

I’ll never see my wife and kids again, he thought with a sudden, awful clarity.

Their faces flashed in front of his eyes. Bonnie, with her vivacious smile and bouncy brown curls holding his youngest son Loyd as Alix, Nikki, and Major clamored to see their new baby brother. God, he loved them. Regret seized him as he thought of everything he’d miss - he’d never teach Loyd how to throw a baseball, never put the fear of God into any boys or girls Alix and Nikki brought home, never see Major get that photography degree he was always chattering about. And Bonnie - God, she’d have four kids to deal with, all alone. If he couldn’t be with her, he could only pray she found someone good to help her out.

Donaldson’s steadfast ignorance of the outside world was brought to an end by a sudden, sharp sting in his arm, and he looked out of eyes that were slowly dimming into the regretful face of Patric Leibowitz-O’Kelley. He tried valiantly one last time to take control, to beg the other men in the room to look after his family. But his tongue refused to move, the Other Guy’s spite ringing clear in their shared head as even last words were denied to him, and

everything

went

dark.

As the bright white light of the metaverse dissolved around him, Bruno blinked at the prison bars in front of his face.

Prison wasn’t the most unexpected place he’d ended up in when first jumping into an avatar, but it was a sub-optimal one. A swift survey of the room revealed that he wasn’t alone in said prison; two other people were bickering in cells nearby, and if he squinted he could just make out the halos of pilots around them.

Since, from what Bruno had seen, people mostly got dropped into avatars that matched their own gender, he felt safe in assuming that the blonde female was probably the avatar of Andi and the guy with the metal arm was probably Crash. They were, after all, the ones who’d gone into the pods at the same time he had and they were supposed to be entering this metaverse together, but both of them were deep enough in their avatars that Bruno couldn’t tell for absolute certain. The banter was certainly all the avatars; Crash had a reasonably solid grip on his brain-to-mouth filter, even if what he did end up saying didn’t always make the most sense, while this guy poured out every thought flitting through his head; the one he assumed to be Andi’s was British - or sounded like it, anyway - and seemed to be needling Crash’s avatar for the hell of it.

While they bickered, Bruno took the opportunity to stretch and get a feel for his avatar’s body. He was definitely shorter than usual, and much more wiry, but the most surprising part with the flexibility offered by every joint as he tested them. Elbows bending beyond 180, shoulders that rotated nearly out of joint to let hands clasp forearms behind his back, and hips that rotated easily enough that he was pretty certain he could do the splits if he cared to. Bruno had never been this bendy in his life; even before Africa he could lift several hundred pounds more than the average person, but even in his prime he would never have dreamed of bending far enough to get his own feet behind his head if he so desired.

He filed that flexibility away under useful information and returned to the conversation at hand.

The blonde woman - Jane Blonde, something in the back of his mind suggested and he very nearly snorted at the thought before putting it aside - was still sniping at the other man - Baron Bad? - so Bruno tuned back out to take a more thorough inventory of the cell he was nominally imprisoned in. A quick glance told him that while he was smaller and thinner than usual, the bars were still set sufficiently close together that squeezing through them wasn’t an option. The only bars not anchored in the floor and ceiling were the ones that comprised the door, which was locked securely. Said lock, on closer inspection, was a big 1960s mechanical affair that he could probably have picked with a paperclip if he’d had any. The lack of amenities put it a step or two below several prisons he’d been the unwilling guest of in the past, but the rotting corpses in several of the cells nearby were nearly par for the course.

As far as outside the cell went, the room was much longer than it was tall or wide as near as Bruno could tell. The cells marched down the sides away from a large steel door and seemed largely unused save for the six currently occupied by bodies. The steel door was the only entrance or exit he could see, though the fact that the place lacked windows and still managed a breeze suggested there were air circulation vents concealed somewhere; likely close to the roof, to make it as difficult as possible to use them for anything while guaranteeing any heavier-than-air elements introduced that way would reach maximum dispersal in minimum time.

“Look at that, Ramsbottom being remarkably attentive. Didn’t notice the roofie in his drink when he tried to seduce Blonde, but. Still.” The rather pointed remark made in his direction by the heavily-accented voice of Bad pulled Bruno from his evaluation and he glanced over at the other man. Taller than his own avatar with greasy black hair and the pallor of someone who spent far too much time inside hunched over cathode-ray tubes, the most immediately arresting feature of the Baron was his metal arm. Given the jerkiness to its movements and the audible grind of servos inside the thing, Bruno wasn’t overly concerned if it came to having to manhandle the Baron along in their escape until Crash chose to exert himself. Additionally, he now had at least part of the name of his own avatar: Ramsbottom.

Apparently that had been all the Baron wanted to say about him because the man immediately went back to commenting on Blonde’s hair, of all irrelevant things. Bruno shrugged mentally and grabbed the bar to which the locking mechanism was attached. The thing about locks is that while they tended to be reasonably well-fortified in their own right, they were really only as secure as what they were attached to. An experimental tug was enough to confirm that Bruno’s own strength, used through his avatar, would be more than sufficient to pull the lock and its bolt enough out of position to allow him to get the door open.

He pulled.

“Oh hey, that’s good thinking, Dick, maybe if you - oh shit, it’s working. That’s cool.” Bruno flexed his hands as he stepped through the ruined remains of the door. The part of the mechanism attached to the door hung uselessly in midair, the hinges of the door itself creaking slightly. It’d taken a bit of doing, but the residual ache in his hands was already fading even as Blonde pushed open her own door and stepped out. From the look of the door behind her, she’d managed to conceal a cutting torch somewhere on her person.

“Well done Dick,” she said, a sparkle in her eyes and a smirk on her lips. Bruno smiled back politely, but refused to acknowledge the unspoken warmth in her gaze. Whatever was going on between his avatar and Blonde, it was neither the time nor place for it and he’d already had the unpleasant experience of one avatar lusting after his granddaughter while he was piloting; he’d prefer to avoid another such experience if could reasonably manage it.

“Dick, if I was have known that you could do that, I would have hired you for something other than shagging good guys. That’s - Wow!”

“I’m a man of many talents,” Bruno responded dryly, deciding to take the Baron’s words at face value. The guy’s accent was thicker than several planks, but beyond that he tended to speak very plainly. What he said was what he meant, even if it sounded like his brain didn’t always stop it to sense-check it first.

“And that strength extends aaaaall the way down.” There was a pleased satisfaction in Blonde’s tone that Bruno didn’t want to think about.

“Wow - Oh! Oh, I see what you did there. That was innuendo for the time that, that you two did, uh, did the dirty deed. Which, I am still not sure what it is, but.” Bad’s rambling continued, accompanied by frankly obscene hand gestures, and Bruno shook his head as he went to go destroy the Baron’s door as efficiently as he’d broken his own. For all that the Baron had been offering to fight them both to the death earlier, Bruno didn’t think it was a good idea to leave him in the cell. For one, the Baron probably had at a least a vague idea about what they were facing and for another Crash was the one who’d insisted they come to this metaverse in the first place; leaving the person who was probably his avatar behind seemed counterproductive.

“Please don’t disillusion him, he still thinks it was beautiful.” Blonde’s voice rang out behind him and Bruno couldn’t resist the urge to shake his head as he yanked the bars apart on Bad’s cell perhaps a tad harder than was really warranted. Sometimes the enhanced strength granted to him by his time in the metaverse still surprised him; he’d accidentally crushed a few (unfortunately full) cans back on Arena by gripping them too hard, and Zenda had castigated him on the waste of food.

Not that canned bread really constituted food, but that was beside the point.

“Is that true Dick?” The Baron’s eyes were gormless in their staring at Jane Blonde, who had taken the opportunity presented by being free to inspect her nails for damage. “You know she used you, right?”

His tone was more bewildered than anything, and Bruno shrugged physically and verbally. “We’re all using each other,” he responded blandly and resolutely ignored the resultant giggles from the direction of Blonde as he pulled the cell door open.

The Baron continued to chatter even as he stepped out through the newly-opened door, and from behind Bruno there came the tiniest huff of annoyance. Turning, he met the reproachful eyes of Jane Blonde, who looked more than a little peeved that someone who claimed to be her greatest nemesis was being let out of the jail cell he’d been locked in. Normally Bruno would agree that bad guys belonged behind bars, but this was something of a special case considering the rest of his team was supposed to be in these two with him.

“Now why’d you have to go and do that, Dickie? That was our chance! We could have left him behind.” The pout reminded him strongly of the last time he’d seen even part of a frankly awful movie starring female spies when he’d had to spend six hours in a bar, staking out a target. The movie was only thing that the owner had played on the scattered tv screens and after that it was bad enough Bruno couldn’t remember half of it.

“We need all the help we can get,” was the simplest explanation, and one that seemed to satisfy her. She straightened, patted down her already immaculate curls, and gave him an imperious look.

“Dick, are you coming?”

He didn’t bother rising to the bait. “Let’s go.”

Proceeding to the only door in the room that didn’t obviously lead to another cell was the work of a moment; the Baron spoke ceaselessly as they went, every thought in his head apparently spilling out of his mouth. The door itself was a solid steel construction, with hinges inward and heavy cross-banding making battering it down an excessively difficult proposition. The Baron spent several minutes inspecting it, nattering about possible traps he’d put into place on such an ordinary-looking door, before finally just trying the handle.

The thing swung open easily, revealing a room made entirely of mirrors. Floor, ceiling, walls, all of it mirrored in such a fashion as would have the tackiest nightclub drooling in envy. It was one of the gaudiest things Bruno’d seen in a while, and he silently blessed the training that had beaten the vertigo response out of him years ago as he looked down into the infinity of reflections stretching endlessly beneath them.

Blonde and Bad were still sniping at each other when he glanced over at them to see if they had an opinion on what the room actually contained, and the rush of affection that shot through his veins at the sight of Blonde was as surprising as it was strong. Bruno’s eyes snapped away as he shoved the feeling down; it was something he himself hadn’t felt in a very long time. That, combined with the reasonably graphic images that popped into his mind, was enough to verify that his avatar was trying to reassert himself.

“…And we have D, for Dick,” Blonde’s voice was almost merry as she slid a wicked glance over at Bruno’s avatar, and Bruno had to close his eyes for a few moments to push the images that statement conjured back down into something manageable as he tuned into the conversation at the worst possible time. A half-dozen responses sprang to his lips and he said none of them, opting instead of exhale slowly as he attempted to bring some kind of order back into his head. Ramsbottom - Dick Ramsbottom, because of course he was - from what he could tell of the man, was as adept as Bruno himself when it came to compartmentalization; had to be, in his line of work. He compartmentalized about everything - except Jane Blonde. Something about her upset the man’s mental boxes, and it was left to Bruno to keep things in check.

The next few minutes were spent trying to figure out a safe way through the mirror room, with Bruno’s suggestion of using the heavy metal arm attached to the Baron to break the mirrors shot down immediately by Bad himself. Who, given his remarks a few moments later, apparently thought Bruno had been hitting on him; Bruno wasn’t interested, but Ramsbottom didn’t seem to find the idea too objectionable. Apparently Ramsbottom enjoyed trying to get the somewhat oblivious Baron into a bed for some “education” when said Baron hadn’t given him a mission in a while, though if the Baron’s comments about Ramsbottom and Blonde were anything to go by he hadn’t been met with much success yet.

As the Baron began to crawl across the mirror-coated floor, Bruno was completely unsurprised when the lasers started firing. Given what he’d seen of the place so far, he’d’ve been more surprised if there hadn’t been lasers, quite frankly; the Baron didn’t seem the type to build a mirrored maze, and since most of the crazy shit in this metaverse seemed to be technology-based the more magical options were remote possibilities. As the Baron made his way across, Bruno noted some very familiar moves as the lasers were expertly dodged and sighed mentally in relief. It appeared that Crash was coming more to the fore of his avatar; a covert glance toward Blonde didn’t net him anything more than another uncomfortable fantasy, but he could hope that Andi was becoming more present as well.

Getting through the mirror room once the Baron had made them a safe path was easy enough, and the next room was only remarkable for Bruno’s avatar managing to slip out a witty one-liner in response to the Baron talking about tying up and gagging Blonde. Bruno had nearly bitten his avatar’s tongue after that’d come out, he’d closed his mouth so fast, and some determined shoving put Bruno solely in the driver’s seat. The images that accompanied the line were firmly put back into the place where Bruno did not have to think about them, though they spent a few seconds seared into the back of his eyelids.

Watching Blonde ride a shark across the room while pursued by a large number of other sharks was nerve-wracking, though her dismount onto the safety of the ledge beside both Bruno and the Baron was flawless. The next room was merely a bunch of so-called ninjas; while Bruno had never fought ninjas before, he had gone hand-to-hand with members of military organizations from around the world and the “ninjas” wielded their weapons in a style more reminiscent of East Missouri than the Far East. He ended up putting four of them down, and then the rest were taken out in one fell swoop by the Baron in a move that smacked of Crash.

It was only when Blonde started making comments about Bad and the ninjas that Ramsbottom managed to worm his way out of the bad of their shared mind and begin exerting himself again. He didn’t have much to say about the pool of acid, for which Bruno could only be grateful. The course was much similar to one they’d used to drill the recruits on back in Basic, except that instead of sandbags and waist-deep mud it was live steel blades and acid; still, it required split-second timing to get across safely and he needed all the concentration he could muster. In spite of all that, he made it across safely and popped open the door on the further wall.

And promptly closed it again; until the other two arrived, he didn’t want to have to try and deal with that many snakes alone.

Blonde crossed easily, avoiding each swinging blade adroitly, and Bruno couldn’t tear his eyes away. Ramsbottom had eyes only for Blonde, and made their shared heart beat in arrhythmia for a few seconds after the petite Blonde had landed safely on the ledge behind them. Bruno managed to keep a grip on the motor functions, at least, and answered succinctly when questioned about the contents of the room beyond. It was only the arrival of Crash and the large blade he’d apparently pulled out of the ceiling that allowed Bruno to pull their eyes away.

Itching with the need for action, and the need to get away from the outright uncomfortable at this point thoughts and feelings Ramsbottom had for Blonde that simply refused to stay in the neat compartments he’d laid out for them, Bruno stepped into the room perhaps a bit more quickly than he should have. Taking point came to him as naturally as breathing after four decades of it, and in the last two rooms his own set of pilot abilities - more familiar to him now, after a number of missions - had made him the best choice to go first. In this room, however, he got maybe halfway across before there was a sudden stinging pain in his ankle and a slow crawl of fire up his leg.

Using the broom handle he’d confiscated from one of the “ninjas,” he swatted the offending reptile away and hurried to the other end of the room before lifting his pants leg examining the bite. The twin puncture wounds were still oozing blood, something he hadn’t seen in a while, but the burning sensation had stopped at his knee. Bruno shook his head and let his pants drop back into place. Apparently, the healing factor he had could deal with the poison or with injuries, but not both at the same time. He’d have to remember that in the future.

“Really? You’ll toss me up?” Bruno looked up at Blonde’s voice, the unexpected sound of it pulling him out of his contemplation of the snake bite. Unfortunately, Ramsbottom reacted just a bit quicker than Bruno could suppress the impulse to.

“I thought that was my job.” Bruno wished that biting his tongue would actually make Ramsbottom stop, but his avatar seemed to only find it amusing.The middle of a mission was neither the time nor the place, but he couldn’t seem to make his avatar understand the gravity of the situation.

“Why do you got to make everything about your name, Dick?” Bruno couldn’t quite tell if it was the Baron or Crash asking, but he answered dryly anyway.

“I wish I knew,” he called back as he adjusted the cuffs on his sleeves. They’d come a bit undone after being soaked in the shark room and it had been bothering his avatar.

Fortunately the rest of the banter was a bit too quiet for Bruno to catch, but the sight of the Baron holding Blonde in his arms to do a short but elegant waltz was enough to ignite an ugly feeling in his avatar’s chest, one he didn’t quite recognize and didn’t like in the slightest. Baron Bad, dancing with his girl - !

And then she was flying in his direction, tossed by the extraordinary strength of one Crash Jaxun and time slowed. In that moment, all Bruno Hamilton could see through his avatar’s eyes was his best girl soaring through the air towards him - Lori, as beautiful as she was elegant. In that same moment, Dick Ramsbottom saw the beautiful, dangerous, competent, and sly Jane Blonde - the woman who’d stolen his heart over the course of one meal - falling into his arms.

In a surge of overwhelming feeling that made their shared heart rise to inexplicable heights, Bruno caught Andi carefully in his arms and Dick planted a passionate kiss on the love of his life.

Bruno didn’t quite realize in time to stop it from happening, and though he struggled mightily he could only mitigate what was being done. The kiss ended swiftly, but the deep shock in the eyes of both Andi and her avatar was enough to have Bruno pushing away from reality violently and leaving Ramsbottom in charge.

As Ramsbottom came to the forefront and the sounds of Crash being violently ill faded into something that was no longer Bruno’s problem to deal with, Bruno put his metaphorical head in his metaphorical hands and struggled to get a hold on himself. When he’d been in the avatar of Lothar Kaldegga, Andi had been in the avatar of Grace Lyonns, and Kaldegga had taken spiteful satisfaction in filling their shared mind space with ever more explicit images of what exactly he’d like to do to Lyonns. While Bruno hadn’t been able to shut him out completely, it had been reasonably easy to keep their thoughts separate. He’d quashed the ones that obviously weren’t his and kept on going doggedly.

This, though, was something different; Dick Ramsbottom might be a man of particular talents more often hired for his face than his combat prowess, but he was no less methodical than Bruno was in his own way and approached every job with that same steady approach that comprised his best. Ramsbottom had gone in to the Blonde job the same fashion he always had, but something about her got through to him in a way that no other mark had managed before or since; sure, she’d roofie’d him and taken him to a secondary location before sharing the night and her mission with him, but Ramsbottom loved her. He loved her for her looks, he loved her for her wits, he loved the way she moved, he loved the way she looked in the morning before she cleaned up, he loved her for the constant double entendres she made of his name.

He loved her.

And that was what had tripped Bruno up. Bruno hadn’t felt that way about anyone since he’d held Lori in his arms and promised her the world. She’d been smart, and fierce, and beautiful, and she’d fit into his arms like she was made to be there. But he’d gone to war, to a front from which men came back heavily damaged if they came back at all, and she hadn’t been able to take the stress of knowing he might never return; her letter, arriving ten months after he’d been deployed - and dated seven months post-deployment - had outlined the reasons methodically and clearly. Whatever else could be said about her, she never gave anyone anything but straight talk and the letter had pulled no punches in that regard either.

Bruno had been drunk for a week straight, or nearly, and it was sheer luck that his unit saw no major action for that entire week. At the end of it, pulled out of his funk by one Sergeant Michael Haverly, he’d gone to the Captain and requested heavier duties. It wasn’t too long after that that Jaxun had pulled him for special duty in his unit and the rest was history. Bruno had thrown himself into the military, drowning his hurt in regulations and orders, in hard-won camaraderie and card games, and the years had slipped away almost without him noticing.

Even when he’d found out his daughter - whom he’d never known - had had a daughter, the sparkling joy that had filled his heart when he had been with Lori had been absent. Instead, he’d felt a steely resolve to do right by her, to be the family he’d wished for when his parents had died; finding her had been a mission that had consumed him for months. And when he finally did find her - save her, from Cole - he’d thought that would be that. A bullet burning in his gut and gritty sand in his eyes, it would have been worth it to see her safe.

But that hadn’t been the end of their story, and they had been far and away from safe.

When his avatar had begun to exert himself earlier, Bruno hadn’t recognized the feeling. Hadn’t recognized the the double-beat of their shared heart for what it was. He’d pushed it aside and dismissed the fantasies with as much vigor as he’d done to Kaldegga, and when his avatar hadn’t pushed back like Kaldegga had he’d eased up. His avatar’d snuck out a dirty comment or two, but so had Kaldegga and both he and Andi had agreed to never speak about it by the simple expedient of never speaking about it.

This, though…

The fact that Bruno had, for a split second, mistaken Andi for Lori disturbed him. From the first moment he’d seen Andi, the physical resemblance had been obvious; but he had put it aside in order to operate without distraction by the feelings it evoked. Feelings he hadn’t realized he’d still had; feelings very similar to the ones Ramsbottom held for Blonde.

Apparently, even after all these years, he still loved Lori.

The thought stung, the pain of the Dear John entwined deeply with it, but not nearly so much as it once had. Her second letter, the one that had set him on his current course, had gone a long way towards mitigating the injury caused by the first, and he hadn’t even realized. Not until he’d been forced to think about it by Ramsbottom.

By Ramsbottom kissing his granddaughter full on the lips.

…

He still didn’t want to think about that.

The feeling of bullets hitting his flesh reached him where he rested at the back of their consciousness, and he jolted forward a little in their shared consciousness until he could see the fight going on around him. There was still an ongoing mission, and the other two still needed his help. From what Bruno could tell, however, Ramsbottom was doing a none-too-shabby job taking down what appeared to be some kind of Russian soldier wielding a submachine gun.

Bruno readied himself as Ramsbottom leaped forward; a mission was no time for introspection or retreat, and guns were very simple. The weight of it in his hands as he took back full control from Ramsbottom let him push all the simmering worries and revelations away to the back of his head where he could deal with them later.

A later that, for once, perhaps wasn’t ‘never.’

He fired.

Bruno sat quietly as the plane made its steady way back to England.

That’s not to say the flight itself was quiet; Baron Bad von Charlottesville was currently pontificating to both his granddaughter Andi and her avatar Jane Blonde, who were taking it in turns to wind him up whenever he looked like he was flagging. That made enough noise to completely fill the otherwise deserted cabin, the lone attendant having decided that discretion was the better part of valor and gone to hide in the front with the pilot and co-pilot after the first hour of this.

Not that Bruno could blame them; the last mission had been…stressful. He covertly rubbed his chest and suppressed the urge to cough at the memory of his avatar’s chest caving in. General Cassius - or, more accurately, the 742 pilot who’d been using General Cassius - had shown no quarter. Bruno had felt his avatar’s ribs crack under the first blow, snap under the second, and puncture vital organs on the third. Three punches, in the span of maybe two breaths, on top of the still-seeping bullet holes from the Russian’s gun. Bruno had always thought his least favorite this about broken ribs was the stabbing pain that came with each breath, the way that each breath came shorter than the last like his lungs were trying to avoid the pieces of rib around them.

And then his avatar’s heart had stopped.

Richard “Dick” Ramsbottom had been dead for seven seconds.

Bruno Hamilton had been alone in his avatar for seven seconds.

Bruno Hamilton had, over the course of a long career, been shot, stabbed, sliced, pierced, punctured, tortured, blown up, shocked, dipped in acid, set on fire, and various other things that had been exquisitely painful in the worst ways.

None of them were as bad or lasted as long as those seven seconds.

Bruno grimaced as he remembered pushing himself to the fore of his falling avatar. There’d been no resistance, not even the token amount he usually felt when he exerted himself; nor had there been any sign of the light of the metaverse, lending credence to what Robbins had told him about how natural deaths being the way for a pilot to jump out of an avatar. Instead, there had been a blank gulf where Ramsbottom had been, a depthless, gaping void between himself and the body he was in. Being alone in a piloted avatar was strange, and not in a good way. The body had been meant for Ramsbottom, and while Bruno could make it work by force of will, it wasn’t meant for him, wasn’t designed for him.

That, and the massive amount of trauma Ramsbottom had received. Bruno had felt the shattered pieces of rib grinding together and digging into the soft parts of the chest as he’d pushed himself away from the floor. He had felt it when one of Ramsbottom’s lungs went, leaking air into the chest cavity. Digging deep into reserves he hadn’t known he possessed had allowed him to get a hold of General Cassius and break the man’s neck while using the body against the closest two enemies; it was in that moment he’d felt Ramsbottom’s heart begin beating again, sluggishly at first and then stronger as Crash’s magic took hold and the burn of snake venom faded.

Of course, healing completely shattered ribs had been unpleasant in itself; as soon as the last threat had been negated - by Baron Bad’s paranoia, of all things - Bruno had collapsed. Ramsbottom was back but nearly catatonic in the back of their shared mindspace, which meant he at least didn’t have to feel the tearing pain of pieces of rib being pulled back into place. The moving pieces of bone had caused nearly as much damage on their way back as they had moving to where they’d gotten to, and Bruno had been unable to suppress the overwhelming urge to cough as blood filled his lungs.

Andi had not been pleased when her grandfather started coughing up blood, and Blonde had seemed equally alarmed about how much blood was coming out of Ramsbottom’s mouth. Bruno hadn’t been able to catch his breath to reassure them, the tears in his lungs leaking air into his chest cavity in a sensation he could feel. He’d had to grab the knife he’d gotten in the armory and pierce the pneumothorax before his lung collapsed completely, and Andi had nearly pulled the knife out of his hands when he stabbed himself with it. It was only when the blood had spurted with the hiss of escaping air that she understood, and while Bruno could barely wheeze the words out he managed to get her pick the Russian’s bullets out for him for the next several minutes while his lung re-inflated completely and his ribs became gradually more homogeneous.

But their avatars had had a schedule - or Blonde did, anyway - and Andi had hauled Bruno to his feet long before his internal repairs were done. Making their way to the plane Blonde had waiting for them in a protected cove not too far away from the Baron’s castle had been an exercise in patience and Ramsbottom’s ribs were still more cracked than whole by the time they’d boarded.

But.

He’d lived.

Bruno rubbed his chest again, feeling the reassuringly steady beat of his heart. If Crash hadn’t managed to negate the poison in his blood and allowed his healing factor to address the more pressing issue of crushed ribs…He cut a glance over to where the other two were sitting. Crash was there with his avatar, Bruno could see that much, but the Baron seemed to be the one doing most of the talking. The current theme seemed to be how superior Bad’s 400k system was to many current retirement plans; Bruno wasn’t entirely certain how he’d gotten onto the topic, but a glance at Blonde’s mischievous face gave him a pretty good idea.

The Baron himself was an…interesting individual. Bruno flexed his left hand as the vague sense-memory of heavy metal and recalcitrant servos ghosted along his nerves. He wasn’t sure how or why it had happened, but finding himself in the body of Baron Bad and facing down a mob of angry henchmen had been an…experience. The shock of it had pushed him to the back of the shared mindspace, and the complex whirling of the mind around him had been enough to leave him off-kilter and dizzy. The Baron’s mind had moved at a million miles a second, complex calculations for orbital mechanics and the possibility of putting together a lunar base had been superseded by more immediate calculations of angle and trajectory for best use of his machine-gun arm. Underneath all the science and math had been a constant stream of objective observations about the world around him that managed to completely miss interpersonal cues while spilling out of his mouth.

Baron Bad was smart, smarter than Bruno himself for all the Baron had the interpersonal skills of a hungry raccoon, and Bruno had to take a moment to wonder how Crash had dealt with the man’s head. There was so much, going in a thousand directions at any given moment. If thoughts could make actual noise, the inside of the Baron’s head was an unending cacophony that Bruno himself would be glad to never have to deal with again. There was no organizing such a mess, no compartmentalizing the thousand and one concurrent lines of thought; Ramsbottom, for all Bruno personally objected to the man’s hitting on his granddaughter in her avatar, was at least something familiar, and returning to the man’s head had been a relief.

Bruno shook said head as he took a deep breath and felt his ribs protest - though less than they had an hour ago. Ramsbottom would live, Blonde had the villain she’d set out to capture, and Baron Bad had perhaps some perspective on things. Him and his team had managed to thwart the 742 invasion before it could gain a foothold and, in the end, that would have to be enough.

Joe’s Diner was pleasantly cool after the oppressive heat of both Arena and the barren wasteland where he’d been sent to fight.

Bruno sipped quietly at a beer - a Heineken, though he hadn’t specified such when he’d asked for one. Hollywood had simply brought it to the table with Crash and Andi’s milkshakes - and a glass of water for the still-unconscious Thomas propped up in the corner of their booth - and bustled off before Bruno could question him on it. How Hollywood knew each person’s food preferences would have to remain a mystery, it seemed. Neither Andi nor Crash had seemed too concerned about it, and both seemed to be enjoying their milkshakes, so he had to be content to let it go for now.

Andi was doing most of the talking, with Crash nodding at various points but not contributing much to the overall conversation; from Bruno’s point of view he seemed almost distracted, mind clearly on something other than the subject at hand. He wasn’t sure if Andi had noticed Crash’s preoccupation and didn’t care to mention it or had simply not noticed; either way, she carried most of the burden of conversation.

Bruno had to wonder what Crash was thinking about. He’d asked - nearly demanded - a debriefing from the younger man, and a fuller outline of the situation; what duties did they have as Prime pilots? What did he mean ancestral meeting place? Where had the boxes really come from during the fight? Why were the Trinity the first? What did he mean when he said that Bruno was a Class 4?

Crash had promised to answer them once they got back to the base so he could answer everyone’s questions at once, and Bruno had to be content with that. It was logical to wait, and make sure everyone got all of the information at the same time, but he was - somewhat ironically, given his previous line of work - tired of secrets. Secrets in general, but ones pertaining to or kept by Jaxuns in very much particular, and he had the slightly nagging feeling that if he let it get pushed off for too long he’d never get his answers.

Hollywood came back with their food, and Bruno was surprised to see him put another bottle down with his plate. He glanced down at the bottle in his hand and found it nearly empty; strangely, he couldn’t feel the warmth that usually came with the first bottle, no ease in his shoulders or the muscles of his back. It was strange enough that he sniffed the second bottle when he opened it to verify that it did, in fact, contain alcohol - with a seven-foot-tall lizard man drinking what looked like sriracha two tables over, he wouldn’t put it past Hollywood to have served him something that tasted like Heineken but was not actually beer - but the whiff of chemical fumes was familiar enough. He shrugged mentally and handed his empty to Hollywood, who whisked it away and headed towards a table that looked to be getting ready to leave.

The food’s arrival seemed to break through whatever the Trinity had done to Thomas - Crash had been obtuse on the subject, though whether that had been on purpose or Bruno simply lacking the necessary context for his statements, Bruno couldn’t be sure - and he roused as his plate was set in front of him. He blinked as he looked around in bewilderment, eyes sharpening quickly. “How the hell did I end up in Joe’s?” He demanded of the table at large, and both Andi and Crash started at once trying to fill him in on recent events.

Bruno decided that discretion was the better part of valor and slipped from the booth as they sorted themselves out of the resulting conversational tangle. He’d only had a bottle - and a half - of beer, but it had been a few hours since they’d left the home metaverse. A glance and a mouthed question at Hollywood netted him a nod towards the hallway that they’d once taken to get to Arena to fight a warlord. There was no sign of that door in the hall now, but Bruno didn’t really expect to see it. Fortunately the door he wanted was labeled neatly and clearly: BATHROOM.

Pushing his way inside, he found a clean, white-tiled room with plain white fixtures and a stainless steel faucet. It didn’t take him long to do his business, but as he was washing his hand a glint of light caught his eye. Peeking out from under his sleeve was the wrist band of the control braces he’d pulled out of the strange, silvery box that had fallen from someplace further away than the sky. The metal glistened in the bright light of the bathroom and Bruno had to resist the urge to roll his sleeves up to see all of them. So that everyone could see all of them.

Not that the bracers were much to look at; these were slimmer than the bulky, ornate bracers his avatar had used and favored, the fit comfortable and close beneath Bruno’s preferred style of shirt and the bands of it lacking in the ornate runes and obfuscating mechanisms his avatar had prized. One wider band fit around Bruno’s arm just below the elbow and connected to a second band that rested around his wrist by thin, flexible rods that did not chafe as his previous experience with such devices had, and a small circle of a metallic concentrator in his palm that hooked to the wrist band by wires and which did not impede his grip on his guns (he’d checked).

Bruno clenched his left hand around the power concentrator and breathed through the urge. Lothar Kaldegga, a previous avatar, was the one who’d given Bruno access to elemental magic in the first place; he had been a bitter oilslick of a man addicted to power and the wielding of it. And every time Bruno accessed his power, a little bit of that mire bled in with it.

Bruno had boiled a man alive because he’d needed to end the fight quickly after using Kaldegga’s earth powers, not three hours ago. He had concentrated heat into his opponent - who had looked and acted so like the General - until the man had cooked from the inside out. He had killed so very many people in a wide variety of ways with a frankly astonishing array of weapons over his long career; this should have been no different.

But this time, something inside him had enjoyed it.

Bruno splashed his face with water as the memory coiled in his head like a viper. It had been a brief flicker as he’d watched his opponent’s eyes pop in their sockets and steam boil away from the other man’s mouth, just briefest thrill at the power unleashed from the palms of his hands mixed with an odd pleasure in the agony and death it caused, but even the memory of it made him want to take an icepick and remove Kaldegga from his head by force.

Bruno had never been the kind of man to enjoy suffering - not his, not anyone else’s. He’d take the hits because he could, better than anyone else, and he’d do what was necessary only for as long as it was, in fact, necessary. He’d told the McPhernon kid once that he’d never broken the Geneva Convention in his work; he refused to become the man that broke it with glee. Kaldegga had been that man; however righteous his purpose had been when he’d started, by the time Bruno had shared his body, that idealism had long since fled in the wake of a physical lust for power and a sickening joy in the exercise of it.

Kaldegga had been an object lesson, one that Bruno would not forget easily; for all that the powers granted to Kaldegga - and, by extension, Bruno - made it easy, he refused to become that man or forget what he’d done.

As much as he wished he could yank Kaldegga out of his soul by the roots.

The thought had a hand going instinctively to his chest as the phantom sensation of broken ribs and punctured organs flared in a brief moment of remembered agony. Worse still was the sensation of the void that accompanied it, the memory of an empty space where an avatar was supposed to be and the straining effort to push a dead body into moving when its life had fled.

Richard Ramsbottom was another avatar Bruno wouldn’t forget in a hurry. The less Bruno had to think about the man’s affections, the better, but the fact remained that Bruno had failed him more comprehensively than he’d failed anyone in years. Bruno still wasn’t quite sure how the whole pilot/avatar thing worked, but Rhodes had been quite clear about the laws regarding killing avatars and he hadn’t specified whether he meant your own or others.

Beyond even that, Ramsbottom had been just as much a member of the team as Andi or Bruno himself, and he had let the man die. However temporary that death had proved, no matter that Bruno had been pushed to the back of their shared psyche at the time, Ramsbottom’s safety was a mission priority and Bruno had gotten him killed.

Bruno didn’t fail often, but when he did he didn’t wince away from it. Ramsbottom had died, and Bruno would accept the consequences of that. Kaldegga’s influence became more apparent - and abhorrent - as Bruno used his powers, and Bruno would have to keep a sharp eye on himself when he accessed those powers in the future. Ramsbottom’s interpersonal activities…Bruno splashed his face with water and dried off with the nearby towel. The less he had to deal with those interpersonal activities, the better.

With a deep breath and a reinforced sense of determination, Bruno headed back out into the noise of the Diner proper and rejoined the other three.

He would not fail again.

Bruno sat in silence as Reese creaked and swayed over a highway in Virginia, heading back towards DC.

Reese was a useful ally, in spite of his completely baffling nature. Whatever force allowed him to move allowed him to move fast, much faster than a number of other more conventional vehicles. That, combined with his ability to chameleon into basically anything, was what had allowed Bruno to get away from the seemingly endless meetings in Congress to see his granddaughter for a few days.

When Bruno had found the stagecoach parked outside his current government-issued housing in the guise of an old station wagon, Reese had claimed that he’d simply been in the neighborhood looking for a drink - then offered Bruno a lift down to Archangel base, since he was “heading that way.” Bruno would have suspected Patric’s interference in getting the transforming stagecoach up into DC like this, but the man had adamantly refused to have anything to do with the submersible stagecoach after the government had revoked his persona non grata status and he’d been allowed to leave Archangel Base without being shot into little pieces.

Still, whatever the reason for Reese’s appearance, the offer had been too tempting and Bruno had grabbed his go bag from his room - and, after a brief moment of consideration, a briefcase full of papers and writing utensils so he’d have something to work on during the trip - and climbed in. Thirty hours overland was no joke, but Reese’s tireless nature and negligent disregard for whether or not he was actually on a road had made the trip shorter than it would have been otherwise. The most annoying part was Reese begging for a drink whenever Bruno requested a pit stop; it was too much trouble getting enough to fill his tank, and the disappointed sighs whenever the booze ran out were a little grating.

Still, they made the trip in record time and not two days later they were surfacing in the hidden base on Archangel Island.

Bruno’s reunion with Andi in person had been brief; he’d arrived just as she was about to go on another mission with Stone and Jaxun, so he’d volunteered to go along with. Finding himself in an avatar completely separated from all the others had been something of a nasty surprise; that, and the lingering weariness of weeks of testifying before Congress had made him a bit clumsy in his approach to his avatar, putting him at the forefront immediately with no hint of Night Watch coming through. His avatar had accepted the decision without a qualm, hiding in the back of their shared mindspace as much as his physical body was hiding in the guise of a hot dog vendor.

That trend continued for a goodish bit of while; the only time Night Watch showed any interest in pushing forward was when Hotwire had jumped them off the bridge. Bruno’s brief panic at the high-speed free-fall had been enough to pull a hint of the stoic ninja to the fore, but he’d relented again easily enough when Bruno had needed to be in full control to deal with the cutters. It wasn’t until Bruno consciously let go and invited Night Watch to the fore that the ninja truly stepped forward.

Night Watch, like Bruno himself, was highly focused and mission oriented. He had his goals in order of priority, and his fallbacks for when things inevitably went to shit. Unlike Bruno, Night Watch was a still river that ran deep; where Bruno would take the most direct action, Night Watch would stop and wait for the precise moment. His skills reflected that, with an emphasis on stealth and speed and dealing with enemies before they even knew he was there. In the helter skelter, tactically nonsensical enemy responses in this world he was a breath of fresh air and Bruno observed him from the back of their shared mind space with appreciation for another professional at work.

And then Andi had taken an RPG to the face.

Bruno’s mind had stalled for a moment, shock and horror paralyzing him as he saw blood spray into the air. Night Watch hadn’t even hesitated, the wielder of the grenade launcher having identified himself as being clearly the biggest threat in the room. Night Watch didn’t bother trying to simply subdue the enemy this time, as he had earlier; this time, the garrote was in his hands and around the soldier’s throat before Bruno had quite grounded himself. The familiar feeling of blood dripping over their shared hands - even though it vanished in the next instant - was enough to galvanize him and he pushed his way to the fore of their shared consciousness.

In complete control of his avatar, Bruno had instinctively reached for the bond to Kaldegga deep inside him. He was surrounded by too many enemies; they were too close to him, and by far too close to her. The windstorm he had conjured was a desperate, unfocused thing but it was sufficient to send all the nearby enemies scattering every which way. Jaxun had taken advantage of the chaos to shoot two of the people about to enter vehicles, and Stone had started to emit a high-pitched, annoying noise before throwing a car into a knot of soldiers. But it wasn’t until Andi stood up from where she’d been thrown by the RPG, blood streaming from her nose and a cut above one eyebrow that Bruno had felt some of the anxiety clenching in his chest ease.

Bruno had been enjoying being out in the metaverse again with Andi; the way she’d grown had left a warm feeling in his chest. Her feats of strength and daring had made him feel younger than he had in decades, and at several points he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to point out a particularly good move. She was his granddaughter, the only family he had left, and he would be damned before he let anyone hurt her and live to tell the tale.

Even now, sitting in a stagecoach rolling down the highway, the thought of someone hurting his granddaughter and getting away with it was enough to make his fists clench reflexively. Bruno took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing his fists to relax as he did so. The feeling of protective anger was his, he was pretty sure - Kaldegga hadn’t a protective bone left in his body, as near as Bruno had been able to tell in their brief acquaintanceship - but the ugly need to hurt anyone who hurt her - to revisit on them a thousandfold what they had the temerity to do to Andi -

That kind of white-hot rage, the thirst for vengeance, that need to hurt the enemy soldiers, had had him reaching for the ceiling above their heads and pulling. He’d tapped the deep well of power behind his breastbone and let it resonate with the ceiling, willing the concrete to shatter and rain down on his enemies. The concrete had resisted him, much more so than the stone of the cave had when he’d last tried the trick, and while later events had explained why that was it hadn’t mattered much in the moment. When the well in his chest had run dry, not nearly enough of the soldiers were dead; he’d picked up the launcher that had dropped from the one Night Watch had garroted and fired it into the ceiling above the largest remaining cluster.

Bruno shook his head. He should have just used the rocket launcher right away. That personal, deep-seated need for vengeance - that thirst for the pain of his enemies, that was detrimental to the mission. He’d experienced such a bleed before, on ARENA, and he’d made a personal note to keep an eye on it. The problem was that it had felt…natural. Like it had simply come from a part of himself, in the same, sickening way Ramsbottom’s love of Jane had gotten tangled up in Bruno’s love for Lori. Later, after all the information TOM had laid at their feet - Dreams? Nightmares? Bruno wasn’t sure what to think about that, and there hadn’t been time to talk to Andi or Jaxun before he’d had to leave - it hadn’t been just the fact that next destination was an enemy stronghold where the enemy determined what reality looked like that made him suggest talking to Dr. Clarkson.

A thirst for vengeance was not mission readiness. The kind of heartsick love Ramsbottom had had in spades was not mission readiness. And yet neither feeling would stay in the neat, compartmentalized boxes Bruno had been using for years. Decades. Whenever he looked away for a moment they kept creeping back out and coloring his actions and intentions. If he couldn’t get a grip on himself -

“Do you want a beer?”

Reese’s voice interrupted Bruno’s thoughts unexpectedly, and the older man blinked.

“Didn’t you drink all the beer from the last gas station forty miles ago?”

The question was largely rhetorical as Reese couldn’t drink by himself when he was a vehicle; he needed someone else to pour the bottles down his intake. Bruno had spent a solid half an hour pouring bottle after bottle down the small drain concealed beneath one of the seats until the case of beer he’d bought had run out.

“Yeah, from the last stop - but there’s some I have under the seat next to you I was saving for an emergency.”

Bruno raised an eyebrow - he was never quite sure how much Reese could see in his own interior, but he made the gesture anyway just in case. “And what’s the emergency?”

Reese swayed from side to side even more broadly than usual, which Bruno interpreted as a shrug. “You seem kind of down, is all. Beer makes me feel better, why shouldn’t it help you?”

Bruno shook his head. “I don’t think a drink is going to fix my problems,” he responded dryly, and Reese swayed again.

“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m driving, couldn’t hurt to give it a go.”

Bruno blinked and shrugged, before lifting up the seat beside him. Sure enough, underneath the seat was a case of beer. A familiar green case.

Bruno’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you have a case of Heineken under your seat?” he asked, keeping his voice calm and level. He didn’t even want to contemplate a transforming stagecoach with mindreading powers…

“One of the guys on the base told me to get some, said it was your favorite. The one who wears sunglasses all the time and has the weird big feeling to him?”

“Crash Jaxun?” Bruno asked, confused. True, he’d eaten in the diner with the kid after the mission to ARENA which would explain how he knew Bruno preferred Heineken, but - “And what do you mean by weird big feeling?”

“Yeah, him. Didn’t you notice? Him and the red-haired woman have more to them than anyone else. There’s just more there.”

Bruno digested that for a few minutes while Reese continued down the road.

“Reese?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you see when you look at me?”

Reese paused for several long moments, though whether he was thinking about what he was going to say or giving Bruno a once-over inside the cab, Bruno couldn’t tell.

“You look like Nick. Or that other guy who talks a lot - we were never really introduced. There’s not as much to you as Crash Jaxun or Red Hair, but more than most of the others. Only, it’s a little bent? It’s weird. Something’s not quite right.”

Bruno looked at the bottles under the seat one more time before putting the leather cushion down. While the beers in the diner had done nothing to him, he wasn’t sure if that was an effect of the diner or something that had followed him out of the metaverse; either way, it probably was not the best idea to imbibe before a meeting with some senators.

“Thanks, Reese, but I’ll pass.”

Reese swayed again.

“More for me, I guess.”

Both of them fell silent as Reese continued down the road.

“I’m sorry, my friends. I just can’t find them anywhere - and neither can Monday. They saved her - I don’t know how - but…it seems they paid the ultimate price in doing so.”

The words had barely left Zenda’s mouth when Bruno snapped into action.

Turning, he made a swift count of the other pilots clustered around to hear Zenda’s news and made a quick decision. Bruno was not in the habit of leaving teammates behind unless they were confirmed dead; he would do a great deal more for family. And after all, Zenda hadn’t said they were dead - only that he couldn’t find them. Bruno could think of at least two instances off the top of his head where people had hidden from the previous Rhodes by taking advantage of his nature. Zenda might be more wily than the previous Rhodes, but there were places he could not go, and Bruno was prepared to search them all for his granddaughter.

Zenda stepped away through reality, and Bruno turned to Pierce, who’d been loitering at the edge of the circle looking pained - Bruno wasn’t sure if it was at the news of Monday’s rescue, or the fact that the ship had gone missing that was bothering the man, and frankly at this point he didn’t care. “Pierce, can you set up the pods to work? Aim them, monitor them, that kind of thing?”

Pierce glanced over at the pods the kid had made, eyes unreadable, before nodding. Bruno squared his shoulders and turned to the rest of them. “Robbins, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, you take those pods to the last known metaverse this Nightmare was attached to. Harvin, Stone, you’re with me. We’re going to head to the metaverse most closely adjacent to where they disappeared from.”

After a moment of frozen inaction where everyone carefully didn’t look at anyone else, the other pilots ground into action. Bruno would have liked to get Pierce to come with his team, but it was more important that they had someone with experience monitoring the pods from this end, and he also had the creeping suspicion he couldn’t have gotten the other man to use a pod anyway. He’d been singularly reluctant to travel using anything but the Reliance, and with the ship gone he didn’t seem too keen on finding alternate forms of passage.

As Pierce started fiddling with the side of the first pod - Thomas’ pod - before the man stepped into it, Bruno turned to the last two non-pilots in the room.

Mac McPhernon wasn’t looking at him, but seemed oddly stricken by the news about Crash and the others. Bruno didn’t have a good read on him at the best of times, and the current moment was anything but. It quickly became a moot point as Patric stepped between them and glared up at the much larger man.

“You leave that boy alone. You’re down four of your super powered folk, and his sister is dead after gettin’ mixed up in all this.”

Bruno held up a placating hand. “I wouldn’t ask it of him; it’s you I wanted to talk to. I need you to go to Washington and speak to Congress while I deal with the situation here.”

The Irishman frowned. “Would they listen to me? Really? Dunno if you’ve noticed, mate, but I’m not exactly a legal US Citizen - never mind about all terrorism charges. Or the drugs.”

Even as he spoke his hands slipped into his pocket to pull out a small unmarked bottle - nearly empty, from the way it rattled he shook out some plain white tablets. Bruno wondered briefly exactly how much of a stash the other man maintained, to still have some even after being stuck in a completely isolated underwater base for a week and then decided he didn’t actually want to know. He leaned forward.

“Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley, you are one of the few men alive who knows a damn thing about metaversal travel that I can trust to deal with this. Getting the others back has to be our top priority; we can’t spare any pilots to speak to Congress, so I’m asking you to do it. For me. For Andi. As one ‘super powered folk’ to another.”

His words seemed have struck some sort of nerve; he knew the man had come back from 742 with the ability to repair anything with a touch, but apparently it hadn’t quite hit home before now what that meant. Patric covered his mouth with his hand as he looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then finally over to McPhernon. The kid didn’t meet his eyes, but was putting things in the go bag - his Archie comics, some explosives Patric had left lying around. The Irishman heaved a sigh before nodding to Bruno.

“Alright. Alright, damn your eyes. We’ll take the damn stagecoach and we’ll go to D.C. and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise miracles, mate.” He rocked for a moment, like he had something else to say, but seemed to change his mind. Turning, he stalked away cursing everyone in visual range under his breath.

Bruno let him go, and turned to make sure the others had gotten into their pods safely before finally stepping into his own. As the bright, white light that signaled metaversal travel washed over him, he grimly clung to one thought: Missing wasn’t dead. He’d find her, come hell or high water.

The Metaverse swept him away.

That mission was followed by another, and then another, and then another. Bruno wasn’t sure if it was the Metaverse working with them for once, or if Pierce was that good at making the pods work, but at the end of every mission both teams would step out of their pods and nearly the same time to fall on what passed for food in Archangel base. Fed and hydrated, Bruno would grill them mercilessly on what they’d observed in their respective metaverses. Any clues about Nightmares, any whispers of Monday or of the Masters of the Metaverse - that’s what he wanted, sifting through the chaff of extraneous information like a farmer checking grain for rot.

The first few missions spawned a dozen and more leads, and Bruno chased them like a man possessed. More than a dozen missions for each team in less than a week, and only two of those later ones produced actionable intelligence. Bruno had reluctantly decided to split up in the name of time efficiency, sending the other team off to one metaverse and bringing Stone and Harvin with him to the other. He’d have preferred to get his own eyes on both, as he knew approximately what to look for, but he couldn’t be in two places at once and time was of the essence.

It was enormously frustrating, then, for both leads to dry up almost immediately. Almost a week and a half since Jaxun, Andi, Aquamarine, and Maxwell had gone to rescue Monday, and he had nothing. Bruno had debriefed both teams thoroughly, then dismissed them for some downtime while he contemplated their next move. It was while the others were shuffling towards the area they’d converted into a makeshift mess when a surprising interruption made itself known.

Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley came storming in through the door leading to the submarine day and made a beeline for where Bruno was sitting at a table covered in handwritten notes. He didn’t even wait for Bruno to acknowledge him before he started talking.

“You’re in deep shite now, mate.”

Bruno frowned. “I realize that the situation with the 742 tech is pressing, but we have four people MIA. If we don’t find them -”

Patric cut him off with a sharp gesture. “It’s more than pressin’, it’s about to go up in flames. Three new terrorist groups popped up with stuff in just the week I was up North, d'you realize? And I had some a’ me old mates reachin’ out to me about how China’s rushin’ to get a pod program going, make their own pilots. Lane’s disappeared from his prison, an’ I’ll give ye three guesses where he’s like to have ended up.” The Irishman waved his hands, making a helpless gesture that encompassed the room, the pods, and the other pilots who were clearly listening in while pretending not to. “World’s goin’ to shit, mate. And them in D.C. don’t give a damn about who’s missin’, they want whoever’s here up there dealin’ with this shite.”

Bruno scowled. “We can’t just -”

Patric actually grabbed him by the shoulder, giving it a fierce shake. “What ye can’t do is stay here. They’re talking about assault teams, watch lists, kill orders - if ye’re not their pilot, ye’re the enemy. They’re already after the Jaxun kid.” He must’ve seen the hopeful light in Bruno’s face and waved his free hand. “His other one, the girl kid. Tessa, I think? They’re hunting her. Drones, special force black ops bullshite - I even heard tell about the damned canine squads.” He released Bruno’s shoulder and took a step back, something like pity in his face. “Ye can’t stay here, mate. Ye’re needed elsewhere. Yer granddaughter’s tough, even for one of us super powered folk. And that Jaxun boy probably knows more about th’ Metaverse than everyone else here. Ain’t nothin’ you can do for 'em from here that they can’t do for ‘emselves.”

Bruno rested his forehead on his clasped hands, feeling the weight of fifty years a soldier on his soul. Patric was…right. As much as Bruno would like to deny it, there were responsibilities here - responsibilities he could no longer safely ignore. And the other man was right again in that if Andi was stuck somewhere she couldn’t get out of, it was highly unlikely Bruno or any of the others would be able to get her out. Bruno was out of leads, out of luck, and out of time.

He swore and slammed his fist into the table, leaving a hefty dent in the surface. Thomas, Harvin, and Robbins looked up from their food, startled, and Patric fell back a step. Bruno sighed as he pushed himself to his feet. “Pack it in, people. All the pods, any advanced tech we’re not taking we’re scrapping. The pods go in Reese until we hit shore, then we’ll find a hauler to take them the rest of the way with us. We needed to be in D.C. yesterday.”

Nobody moved for a frozen second, eyes full of disbelief and - in the case of Harvin - something like betrayal, and Bruno gritted his teeth.

“We have possible pilots in China and terrorists with 742 tech.”

“But what about -” Harvin started, eyes going to the pods, and Bruno shook his head with something like despair bubbling in his gut.

“We have no leads, and no more time. If the others can’t make it back from wherever they are, we can’t help them right now.”

Several more seconds of heavy silence went by before John Stone stood up, walked over to a pod, and picked it up like it weighed nothing. Pierce lurched to his feet from where he’d been sitting and leafing through a gossip magazine, and half-staggered half-ran to the pod to begin frantically undoing power connections before Stone could rip them out of the wall. Thomas and Dr. Clarkson stood up to help, though Rosie and Robbins both seemed frozen in disbelief and remained seated.

Bruno was about to join them when a hand on his shoulder stopped him. Patric had snuck up uncomfortably close behind him, and it was all Bruno could do to suppress the reflexive urge to punch the guy. The other man seemed to notice the effort, and stepped back a little.

“Bruno. Somethin’ else.”

He hesitated and Bruno raised an eyebrow. The Irishman seemed to be debating whether or not to say something, and eventually seemed to make up his mind. He took a deep breath and looked Bruno in the eye.

“So. Ye’re not wholly without allies in D.C., and one of 'em came to speak to me before I came t’ get ye. A Colonel Woodrow, retired?” He spoke quietly, and waited for Bruno’s confused nod before continuing. “So, ye’re not the only one whose had people go missin’ on 'em. Whose had soldiers go missin’ on 'em. And, well - it’s been more'n 24 hours, Bruno. More'n a week. You and I and the old Colonel all know the chances of gettin’ 'em back alive after that amount of time.”

Bruno clenched his jaw and nodded.The odds weren’t good on finding them alive in the first place, not after what they’d gone to do and where they’d gone to do it but -

“Get to the point.” His voice was harsh but low, and the other man regarded him for a long moment from behind his preferred sunglasses before reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small envelope and holding it out discreetly.

“Well. The old man asked me to give this to ye - wasn’t sealed, so I had a look.” Bruno took the envelope with no small amount of trepidation and looked up for further clarification. Patric just shook his head and gestured for him to open it.

Bruno did, and spent a long minute staring at the contents before folding the paper back up and putting it in his inner jacket pocket and nodding mechanically to the Irishman.

Both of them turned to the others and began the surprisingly quick process of stripping the base and loading it into Reese. Aside from the ever-growing pile of novels and self-help books Thomas kept pulling out of somewhere Bruno really didn’t want to think about, none of them had much in the way of personal possessions. Pierce and Stone had methodically gone through the labs and either stripped or destroyed anything useful, and Harvin had gone through afterwards to rig up some traps for anyone who tried to raid the place in their absence, as unlikely as that was.

For all their work, they were underway before 1600 local - this time with Thomas at the helm to assist Reese in navigating the murky blue waters. The trip back to land was accomplished in nearly suffocating silence; Harvin looked about ready to either break down and cry or start hitting something until it broke down. Thomas spoke quietly to Reese whenever he did speak, and even Dr. Clarkson was more subdued than usual; Robbins appeared to be at a near-total loss for words. Bruno simply sat and contemplated what they were doing - what they were leaving behind, what he could have done better to prevent the others from being lost in the first place.

He was beginning to appreciate why Patric hated submarines.

It wasn’t until they’d reached the mainland that Bruno finally spoke again, voice only a little hoarse. “Patric’s arranged transport for us; there’s a truck waiting on pier 34. I need Patric, Stone, Harvin, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, and Robbins to load the pods on the truck and escort them overland to the D.C. safehouse - Patric has the location, and will get things set up to continue missions from there. I’ll take a plane and get to Washington ASAP to begin debriefing Congress on what happened.”

His tone didn’t leave any room for questions, and while both Patric and Robbins gave him something of a side-eye, the rest of them took it at face value and nodded in agreement. Bruno nodded back sharply and walked over to where Reese had beached himself, tapping on the wooden hull with its bright copper finishings to get the robot’s attention.

“Reese.”

“Yes?”

“After they finish unloading…I need you to go back to Archangel Base.”

The hull shuddered under his hand, and the aborted sounds of transformation clicked from within.

“But there’s no booze down there!”

Bruno stayed firm. “If the others make it back, that’s the most likely place they’ll land. I don’t want any nasty surprises waiting for them - I need someone there, Reese. If I could stay there myself, I would. But I can’t. So I’m asking you - for the sake of our lost friends, for the sake of the only family I have left in the world - to please, go back down there and keep watch. Wait for them, when the rest of us can’t. Please.”

The last word felt unpleasantly close to begging, but for Andi Bruno would swallow any pride he had left in a heartbeat.

It seemed to work, thankfully, and Reese settle more heavily in the sand with what sounded like a gusty sigh. “When you put it like that, it would be pretty crummy of me to refuse. Alright, soon as they’re done I’ll head back and wait.”

Bruno patted the hull once and turned to walk purposefully towards the silver Lexus Patric had arranged to take him to the airport. Whether it was some kind of joke or the Irishman’s subtle way of trying to be helpful, Bruno was too tired to figure out. Climbing in, he confirmed his destination with the driver and they started off.

The drive was quiet, the driver seeming to sense Bruno’s general disinclination to talk - or perhaps just intimidated by his size, he was having difficulty giving a damn about which it really was - and pulling into the airport was relatively painless. He didn’t have any baggage with him, and thankfully the Mexican authorities weren’t as annoying about bringing handguns on a plane as the American TSA was. It was a five-hour flight North, and Bruno spent most of it dwelling on the contents of the envelope burning a hole in his breast pocket.

When he landed, he went to the car rental desk and rented himself another Lexus - no drivers this time. He drove the car himself, the heavy urban landscape eventually giving way to something greener. It was at once too long and not long enough before he was pulling up to the gates of his destination.

Parking his car, Bruno walked up the rows slowly, the wind tugging at his jacket and shirt feeling as though it was trying to hold him back. Each step was slower than the last in minute increments, but he never stopped and eventually he reached his destination.

Three graves stood before him, two somewhat weather-worn but the last fresh and newly cut.

Claire Jaymes 1976-1998, Beloved Daughter.

Lori Jaymes 1951-2018, Loving Mother.

Andi Jaymes 1992-2020, Lost But Never Forgotten.

The Colonel’s letter had been brief but not unkind:

Sergeant Hamilton,

I may have retired years ago, but I still have ears in certain places. I’m sorry for the loss of your granddaughter; the son of mine you saved in Vietnam went MIA less than six months later and never returned.

The hardest part of any loss is accepting it, in acknowledging there’s nothing left that you can do and moving on. My wife and I found that having a physical marker helped in dealing with what happened, so I have arranged for Andi to be memorialized beside her grandmother.

My sincerest condolences,
Colonel Gregory Woodrow (ret)

Bruno stared down at the grave, the crisp letter slowly crumpling in his grip. Andi was lost, not gone, and if Bruno had more time he would find her. He hadn’t gone to ARENA yet, to speak to the pilots there, nor had he visited Joe’s Diner. Hollywood knew a great deal, though he never seemed to actually come out and give a straight answer to much. The point remained that he had other avenues that were unexplored…but not the time to explore them.

And that felt like the worst failure of all.

He knelt before the fresh headstone, the ground before it largely undisturbed with no body to bury. He couldn’t bring himself to reach out and touch the thing; it seemed like a too-final notation on a situation that hadn’t lost all hope yet, like if he touched the words they’d really come true. Like acknowledging her gravestone would mean she truly would never come back.

He huffed a gusty breath and looked to the sky, speaking more to the gravestone beside him than the one in front of him. “I never really thought I’d have kids, you know. Never really thought I’d have a family. Especially not with you, Lori.”

His words were as hollow as the crypts a few columns over. He hadn’t really had a family with her, not like it should have been. He’d fathered a daughter on her and left, never to return. He’d never known Claire, and had nearly missed knowing Andi. But she was his family now, as surely as the sun rose in the morning.

“I didn’t have anyone to leave behind, so I never hesitated. The mission was everything; the worst that would happen if I’d died would be that they’d have to find another man to replace me.”

He cleared his throat quietly, the stillness in graveyard taking on an almost listening quality.

“And then you told me I had a granddaughter. I took it as just another mission, at first; get enough money together to provide for her for the rest of her life. As long as she was taken care of, then my mission would have been successful. I was nearly dead when I finally found her, and all I could think to do was to ensure mission success. Tell her about the money I’d put together for her.”

He remembered hot sands and blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip through dealing with the agony of a gut shot. He remembered a white light, and the pain of a dying hero. He remembered Andi, tears in her eyes, taking one of his enormous, gnarled paws in her hands and smiling at him through the tears.

“She didn’t want it, Lori. Took me a while to figure out what she wanted was - ”

Was me, he couldn’t finish, breath catching in his throat. All Andi had wanted was a family and he’d taken - too long - to figure that out.

And now she was gone, and he couldn’t guarantee when or even if she’d return. Couldn’t go out and find her like he’d done two years ago, tracking her all across the globe as TOM - the TOM he’d come to hate - had kept her just ahead of him the whole time.

He turned to address the headstone in front of him directly.

“Andi, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe. I’m so very sorry that you went on that mission without me. If…” he trailed off. If he could have, he’d have gone in her stead. If he could have, he’d have gone with. If he could have, she’d be here and safe with her friends and this old soldier would be MIA, as was a fitting end for him.

But he couldn’t make any of that true. Not by kneeling here in front of a grave for someone he refused to believe was dead. He sighed and stood, brushing the grass off knees that didn’t protest the motion. Bruno remembered when his knee had twinged at every third step, had screamed when the barometer dipped, had refused to bend correctly after more than a few minutes of running. He felt old, his seventy years belied by the black of his hair and the breadth of his shoulders.

He started to turn and leave, then hesitated a moment.

“Grandfathers should never outlive their grandchildren.”

He headed towards the entrance to the graveyard, wind tugging at his coat, and didn’t look back.

Bruno gritted his teeth as warmth pulsed beneath his fingers in time with his heartbeat.

Cole was a professional bastard who liked to play with his prey before he killed it, which was the only reason Bruno was still alive and Cole’s corpse was drying on the sand not too far away with a bullet in its head. The asshole had aimed very deliberately; he hadn’t hit any immediately fatal organs or arteries, but Bruno had been in enough fights to know a mortal wound when he saw one. A shot to the guts, this far from any kind of professional medical help? He’d die of peritonitis is he didn’t bleed out first.

He coughed suddenly, the motion taking him by surprise and sending daggers of pain through the hole in his stomach. A spray of red glistened on the hot, yellow sand in front of him. A shiver ran through him involuntarily, the heat around him suddenly cooler than the raging brushfire of pain in his core; apparently, Cole had nicked a lung with the shot.

He’d probably bleed out first.

Still, he was still alive right now and his goal was in sight; Bruno wasn’t the kind of man to die with a job half-finished. If he died, he died with mission objectives achieved. The fact that his granddaughter hadn’t stirred once throughout the firefight he’d had with the mercs who’d been guarding the perimeter or Cole’s monologue was concerning. If she was injured, he’d have to find some way to help her; her health and safety were mission critical. He’d spent two years and change searching for her, setting up untraceable accounts with enough money for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. She was his mission.

He just had to get to her.

Bruno set his teeth and took a step forward, pain immediately slicing him up and down the torso. He breathed through it and took another step; the hardest part of walking through an injury was getting started. Once you had enough momentum, you could keep going for miles longer than you thought you could. But he didn’t have to go miles; he didn’t even have to go a hundred yards.

Each step towards the stone slab was agony, and his boots squelched unpleasantly with a mixture of sand and blood. Red footsteps marked where he’d been, swiftly curdling in the heat and mixing with the sand to something gritty and red-brown. He could feel the flow under his hand - he had a bad angle to keep pressure on it, and there wasn’t much he could do if he had a better one. Bruno been in the business for nearly five decades; fifty years of missions on soil both foreign and domestic, fifty years of a gun in hand and explosives in his pack, fifty years of objectives and the knowledge that every day could be his last - the fact that today was the day wasn’t surprising. It was almost a relief that he hadn’t ended up under the boot of some petty thug, gang leader, or minor warlord like some bizarre hunting trophy - of all the objectives he’d put his life on the line for over the years, it seemed fitting that the last one would be taking care of Lori’s granddaughter in a way he hadn’t been able to do for Lori herself.

Sure enough, after the first few stumbling steps the going got easier - though not any more graceful. Bruno was a big man, and had always had a strong kinesthetic sense, but he barely noticed when his knees collided with the edge of the slab. Both hands went instinctively to brace against the obstruction, to prevent himself from falling flat on his face. The release of pressure brought a fresh flow on blood, and red handprints smeared on the surface of the slab as he levered himself up. His legs wouldn’t support him any longer, but his granddaughter - she was beautiful, just exactly like her grandmother, though he couldn’t ever remember Lori looking that small - was just beyond the reach of his hands.

So he turned, got his knees underneath him, and crawled. Blood painted the slab, red handprints lost in the large drips and smears the marked where his knees went. One shuffle, two - he could reach her now, the tacky blood on his hands leaving prints on her shoulder and neck as he felt for a pulse. It took him several long and tense moments, hands shaky from blood loss but - there. Strong and steady under his hands. He could see her breathing, too, deep and regular. She looked for all the world like she was asleep, and Bruno’s arms could no longer support him at the rush of relief at that knowledge.

He collapsed against the sun-heated stone of the slab, and the world went white around him.

Bruno paused for a moment to resettle the heavy weight over both shoulders before continuing on.

Tunstall didn’t miss the pause, and glanced over with a raised eyebrow once Bruno had fallen back in line. “Is he gettin’ too heavy for you?” He asked, with a nod to the unconscious body of Sergeant Amos Graves that Bruno had slung in a fireman’s carry.

Bruno shook his head. “Not as long as I keep him balanced,” was his swift reply, and Tunstall nodded before falling back a few steps to bring up the ‘rear’ of their impromptu column. In truth, Bruno wasn’t sure what he’d’ve done if the answer had been affirmative; Tunstall had salvaged what he could from Graves’ kit and carried that as well as half of Bruno’s kit. In terms of weight, he wasn’t hauling that much less than Bruno - and it was still another ten miles to their extraction point.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the dim shadow of Weber dipping in and out of the jungle ahead of them. Tunstall had given him a minimum amount extra to carry and had ordered him to scout ahead; with both Bruno and Tunstall carrying more than twice their usual loadout in weight, neither of them were capable of much in the way of stealth. It was Weber’s job to find and intercept threats long enough for one or both of the conscious members of the team to drop what they were carrying to help him. So far, it’d been quiet, and Weber had ranged almost twenty yards ahead of them.

“Probably not a good sign he ain’t woke up yet,” Tunstall muttered as Bruno was forced to stop and readjust once again.

Bruno grimaced slightly, the lines in his face deepening. “No, probably not,” he conceded with a glance at Graves’ slack face, “but isn’t much we can do about it here.”

It was Tunstall’s turn to nod, a shallow dip of his chin acknowledging the point. They’d bandaged up Graves’ head as best they could, packing the cut where it’d been bashed against an unfortunately-placed tree branch so at least he wasn’t bleeding all over the place, but there just wasn’t anything any of them could do about any internal bleeding. Once Weber had verified that none of Graves’ bones felt broken, Bruno had volunteered to carry him out and Tunstall had made the call on their gear. That had been nearly three hours ago, when they’d accidentally encountered a VC ambush on their way to their extraction point.

Neither side had been prepared to see the other, but Bruno’s team had been expecting trouble and had managed to get the first shots off. They’d have gotten away relatively clean if one of the VC hadn’t managed to set off what in hindsight was some sort of makeshift grenade; Graves had been thrown clear and hit his head on a tree midflight, which still put him several up on the VC in question who’d managed to pulp himself with the blast.

“Think he’ll have a better personality when he wakes up?” asked Tunstall with strained humor as they continued walking.

Bruno snorted and shook his head. “Better hope not. Better hope he asks for a medal for his ‘boo-boo.’” Radical personality shifts after getting hit in the head weren’t that uncommon - Bruno knew a couple of guys it’d happened to back in his Marine unit - but they were bad news. It was roulette as to what kind of personality they’d end up with afterwards, and half the time they’d drop dead anyway 'cause it’d scrambled their eggs too hard. Graves was a bastard, but he was their bastard and Bruno would rather have him back to cover his six than some FNG who’d need breaking in.

It was Tunstall’s turn to snort. “Maybe if it’d happened a couple hundred miles further East,” he said, dryly indicating the Cambodian landscape around them. “As it stands, I don’t think it’ll even make a footnote in a report.”

Bruno dipped his head to acknowledge the point, and paused again to adjust the awkward burden of Graves’ body. “Think we’ll see any more trouble?” Bruno asked, nodding in the direction he’d last seen Weber.

Tunstall shook his head. “Frankly, I’m surprised we even saw that group back there. We left the Chinese contingent scattered from here to the Ba Na Hills; if they pull themselves together before monsoon season, I’d be impressed.”

Bruno nodded, and both resumed a watchful quiet for the long trek to extraction.

Blue coughed, and red dotted the concrete slab less than four inches from his nose.

The memories leading up to this point were somewhat hazy - villain named Earthshaker? Resonance powers? Las Vegas? - but the situation as it stood seemed pretty clear. The only light was shining through chinks in the rubble all around him, but it was enough to show him the six inches of rebar sticking out of his upper torso. Of course, on the heels of that realization came the crashing wave of pain that having rebar jammed through your soft and fleshy bits generally entailed. He resisted the urge to cough again as he felt more blood welling up his throat; the motion would only tear him up more as his muscles tried to move around the obstruction.

Blue shifted, and was rewarded with a spray of pebbles and an ominous groan. He stopped moving quickly, and waited for the structure to re-stabilize. How had he ended up under what felt like forty tons of building? He wracked his mind, trying to remember, and hazy images floated to the surface; standing at a map table with half a dozen other superheroes, Bombshell 2.0 striding in, another map on the table - another bank robbery - and some discussion. In the end, they’d decided to send Iconoclast (him) for strategy, Bombshell for civilian assistance, and Titan to deal with the villain.

For some reason, thought of Titan struck a chord. Blue wracked his brain trying to remember. Baker wasn’t the nicest of men, true, and he tended to revel in his power too much, but that was old news. Blue had been trying to get him to see reason for years. No, it was something else to do with Titan. Someone else. Someone…Someone…

“Butch,” Blue gasped quietly.

Butch Baker was Bob Baker’s nephew, and when the kid’s parents had sent him to live with the guy Baker had decided to make the kid his sidekick. Blue had objected strenuously; no matter what powers the kid did or didn’t have, the safety and security of the nation was neither his responsibility nor his duty. Baker had responded by bequeathing a fraction of his powers on the kid, and Blue had very nearly come to blows with the man; it didn’t matter if the kid was now bulletproof, he was too young to be shot at.

Still, no matter what Blue tried, Titan now had Kid Titan as his sidekick and the two went together everywhere - ostensibly so Butch could learn the ropes, but Blue had yet to see Baker teach the boy anything. Titan was always in the thick of it, shrugging off bullets and other physical weapons with an almost contemptuous ease, and he tended to only be called out for the most dangerous of fights anyway. From the way Butch fought, the most he’d learned from Baker was to get up every time you were hit, laugh it off, and run in to be hit again. Blue had seen the kid get hit through two walls, get up with an obvious concussion, then activate his rocket boots to do it all over again.

Blue grimaced as the memories started to come back. Earthshaker had been in the middle of shaking another bank to pieces to loot the rubble when they’d arrived in Las Vegas, and Baker had dropped Blue to bull straight in. Earthshaker had done…something, Blue couldn’t remember, and Baker had gone flying. Some kind of blast? Things got hazy again, and the last thing Blue remembered with crystal-clear certainty was diving between another one of those street-breaking blasts and -

“Butch,” he said again, a little louder this time, and a slew pebbles bounced off his head. He blinked - he hadn’t moved, had he? - and looked up. One wide eye looked back down at him, and the scrabbling mixed with shouts from above.

“Titan! Titan I found him, he’s under here!” The painfully young voice of nine-year-old Butch Baker echoed down the space between concrete slabs, and Blue suppressed a groan as it bounced off his headache. Butch was a good kid, but living with Baker was doing nothing for his discretion or volume control.

Indistinct sounds answered the young sidekick, and he looked up at someone. “This is like half a building! I can’t lift that much, and Blue can’t either. Please, you have to help him.” Butch’s eye reappeared in the gap, looking down anxiously. “Blue! Blue, Titan’s on his way, he’ll get you out. Are you okay?”

Blue coughed wetly, unable to suppress the urge any longer. A spray of red splattered the concrete in front of him, and he could feel more blood dripping down his chin as he bit down on a groan of agony. “Chunk of rebar through my lung,” he called back, voice weaker than he’d like. He didn’t want to spook the kid, but Baker could be awfully negligent when it came to tossing thirty-ton chunks of anything around and while Blue would heal from this - he always healed, some things just took more time than others - the rebar was preventing his body from fixing the lung. The less stress he put on it now, the faster he’d heal up later.

The visible eye widened for a moment, then vanished. “Uncle Bob, you gotta help him now, he’s hurt real bad!” Blue winced at the real fear in the kid’s voice; he’d seen Blue heal before, but it never seemed to comfort him when he had to see it again.

“He’ll be fine, Kid Titan. It takes more than that to put a true-blue hero down!” Blue didn’t miss the not-so-subtle stress Baker put on the kid’s sidekick moniker. Baker could do subtlety like a shambling sewer monster could do a beauty pageant; badly. Apparently there were enough people around that Baker wanted to leave a good impression. God forbid a scared kid call out for his uncle.

The concrete slab in front of Blue shifted, and he blinked against the sudden light. Two faces looked down at him, one with concern written all over the parts not covered by a yellow bandana and the other with an easy smile smeared all over it.

Titan laughed. “Well! It seem the true-blue hero has gotten himself into some true-blue trouble. Let me help you with that, friend,” he said as he reached down and pulled Blue from his hollow in the rubble.

Blue bit down on a hiss as the rebar came with him. “Please get it out,” he said from between clenched teeth, gesturing towards the chunk of rebar that was beginning to drip blood onto the concrete with a steady tick-tick-tick.

Butch looked a little green, but Baker just laughed and grabbed the rebar to pull it out in one swift motion. A fountain of blood followed, and Blue couldn’t help collapsing like someone cut his strings. Butch caught him under one arm and held him as he hacked out the last of the blood in his lungs, already feeling the deep-tissue itch that signaled healing. He reached over as best he could and patted the kid’s head.

He’d be all right.

Bruno poked his head out of the carefully-concealed roof access hatch and scanned the road behind them with a pair of binoculars.

They’d been driving for several hours now, with about half the kids in the camper-trailer hooked into metapods. Staying mobile was a good way to stay under the radar, but Bruno couldn’t shake the old instincts that were poking at him to be alert. Still, the road behind them looked free of anything particularly organized - he was pretty sure no self-respecting organization would use white Ford trucks loaded down with hay bales to try and tail them, and they were the vast majority of the traffic on the roadway - so he ducked down and pulled the hatch shut behind him, landing with a soft thump on the floor of the Winnebago.

He winced as he landed, right knee throbbing in pain. It liked to remind him whenever he took a step taller than a curb that no, it did not like him anymore after he’d twisted it wrong in Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, after he’d been blown out a sixth-story window by the mad bomber currently in the driver’s seat.

“Still nothin’ ta see, mate?”

Patric’s taunting voice came from the front, where the skinny Irishman was holding the enormous steering wheel in one hand with the negligent grace of someone who’d driven this type of vehicle for years. Bruno had had a go at driving it for a bit sometime around four that morning to try and let the other man get some sleep, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as the madman made it look and after almost jacknifing the trailer, Patric had banned him from driving and gulped down some white pills Bruno did not particularly want to know the provenance of.

He shook his head in response to the question. “No, it’s all quiet back there, but I can’t help feeling like there’s another shoe waiting to drop.” The people hunting them - whether they were Program or Founders, Bruno wasn’t quite sure - had had more than half a dozen gunships and a whole fleet of vehicles chasing them through the heavily populated city of New York. The wide open roads of Manitoba didn’t feel particularly safer. Especially with Patric at the wheel, as the Irishman took a swig from a bottle Bruno was almost sure did not contain water.

“I keep tellin’ ye, Opal’s got her ears on and she’ll let me know if anyone’s headed our way.” Patric patted the dashboard and the engine revved. Bruno shook his head; he’d never been a technical man - not for that kind of tech, anyway - and after fifty years he wasn’t about to start now. Whatever Opal - the Winnebago they were traveling in’s alter ego - sensed or reported to Patric, Bruno would trust the truth of his own eyes over some gadget. Still, saying so would just send Patric off on another diatribe.

Instead, he reached into his duffle bag and pulled out the .50 caliber rifle; it’d seen heavy use recently, and wanted maintenance before he had to use it again. Keeping it pointed away from anything important, he pulled the magazine and emptied the chamber before reaching into the duffle again and pulling out a compact toolkit. An assortment of rods, oils, swabs, and screwdrivers greeted him when he opened it, and he selected one before beginning to clean the weapon.

Patric glanced back, alarm written all over his face. “Woah, woah, woah mate! You can’t be doin’ that while we’re drivin’, it’s not safe!”

Bruno looked pointedly in the phone held loosely in Patric’s right hand, which he’d apparently been either texting with or playing some sort of game on until Bruno had distracted him. “Right. Because you’re all about driving safety.”

Patric sputtered indignantly. “I’ll have you know-”

Bruno cut across him. “Relax. This isn’t my first rodeo; I know how to handle a gun.”

Patric snorted. “I’m not questionin’ your gun handlin’ skills, mate, I’m-”

Bruno tuned him out and resumed cleaning. The Irishman continued to rant in the front seat as they fled down the empty miles of highway away from their erstwhile pursuers. A particularly shrill note made Bruno wince and sigh; it was going to be a long day.

But then, when Patric drove, it always was.

Lothar Kaldegga hated magic-suppressant collars.

He’d been forced to wear one constantly when he was young, his elemental magic strong enough from a young age to destroy houses when he got upset. The United League had provided a specially sized collar to his parents after one particularly strong tantrum had left a smoking hole in the side of their house. Lothar had regretted his outburst, begged them not to put the collar on - to no avail. His mother had locked the iron ring around his neck, kissed his cheek, and told him it was only until he was old enough to control his powers.

The collar never left his neck for the next six years.

He’d felt it against his throat every time he talked, swallowed, turned his head, or tried to sleep any other way than on his side. The other children had known what it meant, of course, which made things slightly more bearable, but - six years. Even with the gel-adjustable padding and “ultra-comfortable design,” it’d left a visible mark, a place on his neck where the skin had been worn smooth. His father had taken him to a specialist to have it corrected, determined to pretend like Lothar had never worn a collar - that he’d never been an out-of-control child instead of his parents’ meal ticket to the good life. They’d been executed years ago, of course, not long after Lothar had very publicly escaped the confines of the United League military to start a new chapter in the Resistance. It had been a very public affair, ostensibly because they had raised such a disobedient son - but he’d known better. It was a scare tactic designed to discourage others from following his example, and for almost a decade it worked.

Those six years in the collar left him with a lifetime dislike of things around his neck - which included the stiff, high collars of the United League’s formal military attire. Having as much elemental power as he did had afforded him a certain amount of leeway in the matter of attire, a thing which he took advantage of shamelessly. Unfortunately, Lothar’s power couldn’t shield him from the consequences of all of his actions, and he’d ended up in proper restraining collars a number of times during his involuntary service to the United League. They were not the comfortably padded creation of his youth, and the feeling of the circuits next to his skin cooling as they neutralized the neural signals along his elemental nervous system was something he’d grown to hate almost as much as he hated the United League for everything it had done.

He’d had to use the collars on others, of course, over the years since his escape. Lothar was pragmatic enough to know that they were sometimes a necessary evil, though his use of them tapered off over the years as he took fewer and fewer hostile elementalists captive. It was, after all, much simpler to kill them than to waste the resources it took to keep them captive. Translocationists, on the other hand, were much harder to come by and while he was never sure if the collars affected them in the same way, they still received a priority for capture if possible.

Still, no matter if Lothar was the one being collared, or doing the collaring, he hated the feeling of the things. Even in their inert state they grounded and weakened the magic that was near them in a way distinctly opposite to the elemental bracers he used. They were made from the same base metal - or so he’d been told - but the collars were refined differently and acted in a directly opposite fashion. Lothar wasn’t sure which had come first, the bracers or the collars - and frankly, he didn’t care to know. All he cared was that he never wanted to wear the things again.

Which made the current situation all the more intolerable.

Bruno Hamilton was a man as orderly and pragmatic as Lothar himself, though not nearly so ruthless. The man had a strict moral compass that simply couldn’t apply to the real world, however much the man tried to make it so. Lothar knew better from years of bitter experience in fighting the galaxy-spanning power of the United League; if you gave quarter, they took a mile. Any enemies you left alive behind you would simply come back and kill good friends and skilled fighters later. Sometimes, civilian casualties were unavoidable collateral damage. It was the way things had to be, the way Lothar had fought for years, and the fact that Hamilton refused to acknowledge the fact was infuriating.

Even more infuriating was the way the man had just…stepped in to his body, somehow, and taken possession of Lothar. It didn’t feel like magic - none of the tricks he’d learned over the years for manipulating the basic forces of the universe seemed to help push the man aside and give Lothar control back - but he didn’t have any other words to describe it and Hamilton nearly as in the dark as he was. Their minds were so very alike, and yet.

And yet.

Hamilton had had his own agenda - steal a warship, blow up a planetoid. It had been deceptively simple, and had gone surprisingly well; they’d stolen the warship, and then Hamilton had let Lothar loose to destroy the planetoid below them. Lothar had tried to take advantage and steal the ship to take it and destroy more tactically valuable targets - nobody cared about the monks who lived on the dustball they’d been jumped to - but his attempt had failed and Hamilton had fumbled his way through destroying the monks instead.

And now they were here; Hamilton had just removed their shared hands from the weapons systems, and voluntarily put a collar around their neck.

Lothar howled in rage at the back of their shared skull, helpless to prevent it. His hand remained steady under Hamilton’s control, and their breathing didn’t even hitch as the locking systems popped into place. Hamilton didn’t flinch as their connection to the elemental forces of the galaxy died a sudden death, and he equally calmly allowed the cyborg across from them to cuff their body as well.

Lothar thrashed against the weight that was holding him the the back of their shared mindspace, but Hamilton ignored him. Pictures of what Lothar would do to the man’s granddaughter, thoughts of destroying United League planets with the battleship, desperate thoughts of negation - all to no avail. The handcuffs closed around their shared wrists with a solid thunk, locking mechanisms ticking into place even as the cyborg quickly stripped away Lothar’s elemental gauntlets as well.

And then, between one breath and the next, Lothar Kaldegga was alone in his body once again, standing on the bridge of a warship with three bounty hunters pointing their weapons at him and a blasted collar around his neck. He did the only thing he could do.

“Void take you all the HELL!”

The bounty hunters were not impressed.

Bruno reflected for a moment on the sequence of events that had led him to hanging by his fingertips from the edge of a very tall cliff.

First Pierce had come to him with information - less unusual now than six months ago, but Bruno was still at a loss for how he was getting it. As far as Bruno was aware, Pierce’s contacts were mostly reachable through the Reliance, and with it gone Pierce had been largely left up the proverbial creek. He’d refused to use the pods and been so uninformative at such length the one time Bruno had asked him about jumping to ARENA that Bruno hadn’t bothered to try again; all in all, there were very few avenues left to Pierce through which to garner information and yet he still managed it anyway.

Still, as cagey as he was with his sources, Pierce’s tidbits tended to play out well more often than not. Bruno had listened, ordered Patric to clear his schedule for the next day, and sent quick messages to Stone and Harvin to get prepped for a jump. In an ideal world, he would have had either Thomas or Dr. Clarkson as a fourth, but both had been unavailable within the given time frame and from what Bruno had gathered by reading in between the lines, it wasn’t the kind of metaverse where Mac would be very helpful.

Bruno suppressed a curse as he shifted his grip and grit fell into his eyes from the cliff face. He could pull himself up any time he wanted, he was plenty strong enough for it, but his part in the current plan called for him to wait for Harvin’s signal before he moved. So he waited, hanging off the side of this godforsaken cliff face without climbing gear, for that signal.

The jump in an of itself had been uneventful; they’d jumped in and asserted themselves almost immediately. Bruno had ended up in the surprisingly spry body of Liu Bao, 65-year-old Chinese army veteran who lived in a small village called Xiehe and whose town was being plagued by bandits - most of them ex-military peasants, who had decided that robbing people was more profitable than farming. Harvin and Stone ended up in Liu Mingmei and Liu Hu, respectively - grandson and granddaughter to Liu Bao - and the three of them had landed right in the middle of a quiet dinner for three with a side of mayhem.

The table had been stacked neatly with maps and notes detailing exactly where they thought the bandits were hiding, and the best ways to be rid of them when the odds were nearly twenty to one. Bruno had sped-read through them, then marked their own objective - near to three of the seven possible hideouts their avatars had identified, a cave with what Pierce had assured them was unusual amounts of metaversal disturbance. Pierce’s contact had put it down as a possible location for a Map of the metaverse, but Bruno’s personal opinion was that it was probably just smugglers again.

Bruno winced as the sun reflected off the nearby waterfall and lanced him in the eyes; for all that the current metaverse’s resemblance to Zhangjiajie back in Prime was absolutely breathtaking, especially in this light, the hemmed-in forests and steep, dangerous trails made this an operator’s nightmare. Mountains rose starkly in every direction, limiting approach and escape vectors and making assaults on fixed positions dicey at best. That was why Bruno was hanging here; Harvin should be driving the bandits out of the cave they’d holed up in at any minute, and right into Bruno’s waiting ambush. Stone was waiting a little further on to catch any stragglers. All they were waiting on now was the signal from Harvin.

Scouting the locations marked on Liu Bao’s map had been more time-consuming than difficult, with both Stone and Bruno able to run for miles before Bruno, at least, got winded and Harvin could cling to Stone like a particularly snippy backpack. The first three sites had been complete busts; one had been used as a living space - more than fifty years ago - and the other two were nearly inaccessible without either mechanical assistance or earth powers. The fourth site was further away from their intended target, but they’d hit pay dirt; Stone’s enhanced vision was able to pick out no less than four sentries ranged around a little cavern tucked discreetly behind a waterfall.

Stone had scanned the cave system as far back in as he could, and reported back that the number of bandits was closer to 100 than their avatars’ estimates of around 60. 100 people carrying weapons, anyway; there were at least another 30, possibly more, who appeared to be doing various chores or simply running around inside the cave. Harvin had snuck in closer to visually confirm, and had come back with the somewhat grim news that the unarmed opponents actually appeared to be family members and camp followers. Bruno had had to improvise a plan on the fly to lure them out, a challenge he almost relished after weeks of being stuck in appropriations hearings.

Which had lead them to now, with Bruno hanging off a cliff by his fingertips and the pink light of dawn shining on his back.

A loud whistle cut through the early-morning stillness like a knife, and Bruno flexed his fingers one more time as the rapid pounding of feet echoed along the would-be road.

Time to go.

Bruno barely noticed his surroundings as his feet carried him along the well-worn path to the metapod room in the wake of Zenda’s request.

For three years, he’d made the effort to come here as many times a week as he could manage. In the first year, he’d pushed as much responsibility onto Patric as he could manage, and come here nearly every day. Jump after jump, mission after mission to try and find their missing friends - he’d been to so many strange and fantastic metaverses now, he could barely remember most of them. And yet still, they hadn’t been able to find a single clue to the whereabouts of their absent friends.

As time went by, his desperation had mounted even as they continued to hit dead end after dead end. And with that passage, his responsibilities increased; he had less time to visit the pod room, less time for fact-finding missions out in the metaverse when the situation here needed him - and his team - so urgently. Rogue metapilots using avatar-bled powers to commit crimes, terrorist organizations making demands while using 00742 plasma weaponry - the list went on and on. Bruno Hamilton, ex-Marine Sergeant and freelance operator, had been able to devote nearly his entire time to finding his granddaughter; Bruno Hamilton, Director of the Metaversal Task Force, could barely find ten minutes in the day to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Every government wanted his time, every mission here in Prime was a priority, and every diplomat was too important to fob off on Patric. After the first year, Bruno could barely find six empty hours a week to go into a pod and try yet another dead-end mission. Instead, his days filled themselves with paperwork and meetings, plane flights to foreign countries, and testimonies given before every major power in the world. None of them had wanted to work with him at first, and even after Patric’s “little fixes” it was still an unremitting hell of political doubletalk and schmoozing. He was a soldier, through and through; a few of his avatars had been reasonable at the political arena, but that just meant he didn’t actually strangle any puffed-up two-bit idiots who wanted the prestige of talking to him about problems in their country more than they wanted to actually have him solve those problems or anyone else’s.

Bruno’d spent so long wishing for Andi and the others to return - especially Crash - that he almost hadn’t believed it when Reese had told him. The robot had been tasked with monitoring security systems for every major Metaverse Taskforce outpost (and a few other places that Patric had either added or “acquired” feeds to) being as how he needed neither food nor sleep - though explaining to the appropriations committee why Bruno needed enough beer in a month to float a reasonably-sized barge had been an experience Bruno devoutly wished never to repeat - and when he’d told Bruno that the Reliance had returned, Bruno couldn’t find it in himself to believe the much larger robot. Not until he’d seen their missing members with his own two eyes; holding Andi had been like getting back a piece of his heart he hadn’t known was missing, while seeing Crash had been a relief. Someone he trusted, someone who knew more about this metaverse stuff than he did - someone he could step down in favor of, and get back to what he knew best; boots on the ground.

And then they’d interrogated Strickland.

Bruno tried to avoid torture whenever possible - and when you were 6’ 4" and built like a brick shithouse, ‘whenever possible’ was basically all the time. The Crash he remembered hadn’t been fond of it either, preferring to either eliminate a threat outright or get answers to his questions some other way. But he’d hit Strickland right in the throat - the sickening pop of a crushed trachea was a sound with with Bruno was well familiar - and then used his bond-given powers to force the man to require oxygen to the point of passing out. Dr. Clarkson had been standing by with the emergency tracheotomy kit - a knife and the tube out of a pen Jesus Christ - and hadn’t seemed too fussed about having to perform an emergency tracheotomy on someone who was in their custody, but for Bruno it had raised a flag he found impossible to ignore.

Then Crash had started talking about expanding the unilateral power the Metaverse Task Force enjoyed within its own walls, and all the hairs on the back of Bruno’s neck had stood up.

He’d spent three years - three mortal years - building up the foundations of trust with the government, with other agencies, with the people of the world in order to get the job that needed doing done. And even having as much power here as he did stuck in his craw; Harvin was a good sounding board to make sure he didn’t cross the line, but the fact that sometimes he couldn’t tell where the line was any more had concerned him. I try to never break the Geneva Convention in my work, he’d told Mac once, and the kid had responded with I don’t think the Geneva Convention covers other universes. Maybe the kid had been right, maybe the kid had been wrong, but Bruno had had to skirt the Convention more in his tenure as Director than in the past four decades of his life put together. He’d been looking forward to handing over the reins to someone he’d known to have an unshakable moral compass.

But he wasn’t sure the man who’d come back was even Crash any more.

Going on a mission with him hadn’t been terribly enlightening, either; Agrippa had been a very assertive avatar, and Bruno had difficulty seeing through the exaggerated mannerisms the man used like a smokescreen to Crash underneath. Then, too, while the setting was one Bruno had become unfortunately familiar with over the past three years, it was one he still wasn’t comfortable in. It didn’t matter how long he’d been out of the jungle, he’d always be a soldier at heart and he’d stepped back to let Machiavelli deal with the assorted kings and queens of Renaissance Europe they’d encountered on the mission. Machiavelli was a soldier too, and a damn good one, but he was also a far more political animal than Bruno himself would ever want to be and Bruno was content to let him deal with that side of things.

Then, when they’d returned from 1512 Europe, Crash had declared he was going to go find Krieger and had swanned off with Andi and Wyatt in tow. Bruno had let him go partly because he did want to know what, if any, information Krieger had on the situation at hand, and partly because he wasn’t sure he could stop the younger man. He’d had a moment - just a moment, before he shoved it where it didn’t need thinking about - of almost paralyzing fear at the thought of Andi going on a mission with Crash and this time not making it back, but it was irrational and he knew it. Andi was competent enough to hold her own and smart enough to know when to fall back; he trusted her judgement. She would be fine.

So consumed was he by his thoughts that Bruno barely noticed as his hands followed the familiar routine of opening up the pod, making sure it was clean - sometimes the jump back could be…messy - and getting in before pulling it closed around him. It wasn’t until the bright, white light of the metaverse pulled him from his body that he remembered he was jumping at all, and by that time it was too late to recall his scattered thoughts.

Landing back in Vietnam was expected; the familiar, muggy heat, the whine of insects and equipment, the rumble of machinery and men. About the only difference he noticed right away was the fact he wasn’t sweating; his uniform wasn’t bunched up uncomfortably up at the armpits and crotch absolutely soaked with salty sweat and it took him a moment to remember why. His avatar was foremost; his distraction while jumping had put him on the back foot, but for now that was fine. Corporal Jethro Worth was an anthropomorphic beagle, a fact that was immediately and jarringly obvious when he started panting to try and deal with the muggy jungle heat. It didn’t work as well as it did back in Worth’s home of Alabama, of course, but Bruno had yet to encounter any cooling methods that were available in 1968 that worked to any real degree in the jungle and he would have been surprised to find anything different here.

There were distinct advantages to letting the avatar have the lead. For one, Bruno had been a sergeant longer than he’d been anything else, and while he could certainly work with other sergeants when the situation demanded it getting a dressing-down from the enormous bull of a bull wearing sergeant’s stripes wouldn’t have sat well. Especially since his avatar’s rank was corporal. And for another advantage, being so far in avatar meant he got the a decent view into the avatar’s knowledge and memories - most of it Bruno knew from his own time in Vietnam, of course, but the codes and callsigns were different to make up for the changes in species and the weaponry was a little more dated than his own stint. The M14 was a heavier, more solid weight than his M16 had been, and if he remembered correctly it was a much lower fire rate for more stopping power.

Of course, it also had a kick like a mule and could be hard to control, but for some reason Bruno didn’t think he’d have much of a problem with that any more. Of course, he’d have to step up to make sure Worth had access to his enhanced strength but he’d want to do that anyway if they were in combat. Bruno had more than four decades worth of experience on the corporal, and he had a responsibility to keep the man…dog…safe. It’d been more than three years, yet the phantom sensation of having pebbles where ribs should be and something more akin to fruit pulp than organs spilling out through pressure tears in his skin still woke him sweating from nightmares more often than he’d like; Ramsbottom hadn’t been a bad man, and certainly undeserving of what had happened to him on Bruno’s watch. It hadn’t happened again since, but he’d learned his lesson and remained vigilant.

As if sensing his thoughts, Bruno could feel his avatar stepping aside a little and leaving room for him. Pushing up, they both stood equal in their small, shared body as the rest of the team got themselves sorted out. Worth had already packed their kit up, for all they had another three hours to wait until the PBR was ready for them. Bruno grimaced internally at the orders they’d been given; he’d done work all over Vietnam - and the surrounding countries, not that you’d find those entries on his service record - but the fighting in the Bà Nà Hills had been among the worst as far as ambushes and unexpected engagements went. The hills were lush, green, and full of nasty little places where the enemy could hole up and patrols would never even see them. Fights started quickly and ended faster, and casualties were almost a given. It made sense for an LRRP to be deployed to the area, but that didn’t make keeping Corporal Worth alive any easier.

And, of course, Zenda had given them a secondary objective; find and save Ray Delamano from a POW camp somewhere in this conflict. A quick canvas showed that none of the avatars knew or knew of a Ray Delamano, and Bruno suppressed a sigh as Thomas fiddled determinedly with the clunky radio assigned to the unit. Unless Delamano was a colonel or better - unlikely - the radio probably wouldn’t produce any actionable intelligence; John Stone’s computer hacking ability had likewise drawbacks. If they needed to find the records of Delamano, they’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.

After some prodding, Stone ended up leaning on a records clerk until the man - well, actually he was a sheep and the sideways pupils would likely haunt Bruno for a while - gave them the records they needed. Private Ray Delamano, not terribly distinguished but not a bad soldier, had been captured three days ago…in the Bà Nà Hills. It seemed that once again, the Metaverse had sent them approximately where they needed to be, and as they shifted their gear into the PBR - crewed by what appeared to be several rodents and a goose - Bruno couldn’t help but relish the sensation of familiarity with both the environment and his situation in it. He’d do the diplomacy, the politics if he had to - but he’d much, much rather have his boots on the ground and a clear objective ahead.

This was what he was trained to do.

Bruno made a face as he took a sip from his by-now long-cold coffee.

It’d been six weeks since Andi disappeared. The first week had been a haze of jump after jump out into different metaverses, searching for any sign of her and the other three who’d disappeared at the same time. They’d found nothing, and then they’d been forced to return to D.C. to answer Congress; in what Bruno privately thought of as a stroke of irony, they’d been set up in the same building Jaxun had operated out of for the last year or two of his tenure and they’d forcibly given Bruno his office. Director Bruno Hamilton, Head of the Metaversal Task Force. That’s what his door said, anyway, on the days when Patric didn’t get bored and deface it, and while Bruno disliked the idea intensely none of the other pilots had objected or stepped up - and he wasn’t about to let some bureaucrat who’d barely heard of the metaverse take the reins.

For better or for worse, he’d taken the title up properly four weeks ago in front of the Congressional committee appointed to oversee the task force. He’d answered their questions - the same questions every other Congressional committee had asked him ever since he went to DC to testify the first time - as thoroughly as he’d deemed wise, and then gone to ensure that the building was safe for use. That had taken up most of the last three weeks, between hauling out debris caused by Nick and Patric’s last visit plus scanning for possible bugs plus repairs plus, oddly, replacing all the computer equipment that had been torn out at some point.

None of which allowed much time for sleep, especially not with the jumps out into the Metaverse that he insisted on fitting into every spare moment he could carve out of his schedule, but Bruno had pushed through doggedly. He knew every trick in the book for staying functional on the absolute minimum of sleep required, and the healing powers granted to him by the metaverse let him go even further than he had in his DOD years. Five hours of sleep a night had decreased to two, supplemented by power naps during the day, and he’d managed to get the headquarters something resembling functional in record time.

Yet even with the offices up an running there were a thousand and one things that needed his attention, and sleep was near the bottom of his priorities list. Bruno took another slurp from the stone-cold coffee in his cup and grimaced; coffee didn’t give quite the same kick that it used to before all this. This was his sixth cup of the night and the previous cups seemed to have gone right through him without making a dent in the massive weight of exhaustion that had tied itself around his neck. Still, the familiar taste was enough to remind his brain that now wasn’t the time for sleep and he looked back to the heavily annotated chunk of legalese Congress was attempting to force through the committee.

Most of it seemed to be pretty straightforward through all the lawyering double-talk. Restrictions for access to metapods, grounds for confiscating 00742 technology from private owners, standards for pursuing suspected illegal metapilots, how private property laws played into the whole mess, and a number of other small, but important things that would help clarify his team’s actions and scope in the future. It was a lot more useful than the previous four documents that had been mostly demands from the military and private corporate contractors that any and all pilots and technology be remanded to their custody for testing and study, all of which Bruno had rejected out of hand once he’d had Thomas explain them.

This one, though, had a clause near the end that pinged on his bullshit meter. Rubbing his exhausted eyes, he forced them to focus and read through the paragraph more clearly. Any objects determined to be not naturally occurring in this metaverse (see metaverse definition in title 1 chapter 1 article 3.06) will be remanded to the custody of the committee of the senate designated to oversee all metaversal affairs to fully determine the best and most accurate place to hold such objects against misuse by foreign powers.

Bruno scowled and scribbled a nearly-illegible note for Thomas to take a look and revise it before sending the document back. Clearly another attempt to pry Reese and the remnants of Robopal from the Task Force, it would also deprive Bruno himself of the armbands that even now rested against his skin. Without Lothar’s powers they were useless, of course, but he remembered clearly the feeling of his skin fissuring apart like dried mud in the sun and didn’t relish the thought of trying to use elemental magic again without the bands.

Settling back into his chair, he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes in a vain attempt to drive the gritty feeling away. God, he was tired. Six weeks, and no sign of Andi. Six weeks, and just more red tape piling up. Six weeks, and no end in sight.

“Well, you look like shit.” The lightly twanged voice rang from his door - opened without a knock - and Bruno dragged his hands down his face as he looked over at one of the most stalwart pilots on his team.

Rosie Harvin, recruited nearly three years ago against her will by the Program and one of the longest-running pilots on the team, was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. Bruno sighed and pushed the legal document into the stack destined for Thomas’ secondary review before picking up his mostly-empty mug and walking over to the coffee machine that was one of the few perks of the office. He grabbed the half-empty carafe and held it up.

“Coffee?” he offered, refilling his own mug as he did so, and she shook her head.

“You realize what time it is?” she asked, and Bruno glanced at the glowing numbers of the regulation digital clock on the wall. 0330 blinked back at him accusatorially and he sighed.

“I still have two more documents to review before - ”

“That is not what I asked. I asked if you knew what time it was, and I saw you look at that clock which means I know you do.” She walked over and leaned against the edge of the desk, and Bruno suppressed the reflex to order her back. None of the documents he had out were things she didn’t have access to if she wanted, and he refused to be anything less than transparent with his team.

“Bruno, how long has it been since you’ve slept? And I don’t mean five minutes between meetings, I mean a full night’s sleep, like eight hours of it.” Harvin’s voice was determined but not unkind and Bruno frowned at her.

“I can still fulfil mission objectives - ”

“Can you though?” Harvin frowned and stood to face him fully. “I can’t remember you sleeping more than a few hours at a time since…well, since y'know. You need to take a break.”

Bruno scowled back. “I can’t let anything get in the way of mission priorities, and priority number one is retrieving the MIA pilot team.” The MIA pilot team that includes my granddaughter, echoed loudly in the room and Harvin waved a hand.

“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t spend every day missin’ Crash and them and thinkin’ ‘if only we had a little more time in the day to look, we could find them’?” She snorted. “Of course I do. Of course I believe we can find them if we only keep lookin’. But,” she pointed at him firmly, “we need you. We need you at your best if we’re going to find them. We need you clear-headed and ready to take on those sons of bitches in Congress without lettin' ‘em sneak somethin’ by you. We need you to be gettin’ more'n a couple hours of sleep a night.”

Bruno looked at his mug of lukewarm coffee and said nothing.

Harvin walked over and plucked the mug out of his hand before emptying it down the drain. Turning, she gave him a light shove on the shoulder. “Go to sleep, Director. This-all can wait until morning.”

Bruno glanced back at the last few papers on his desk - they really couldn’t wait, actually - before capitulating with a sigh. Turning in early for one night wouldn’t upset too many things, hopefully.

He followed Harvin out of the room quietly, and didn’t remember getting to bed when he woke up the next morning.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day.

Andi leaned back and smiled as she felt the sun on her face. It felt so good to just take a load off and relax; no responsibilities waiting for her, no world-shattering consequences if she failed or made the wrong choice. Just her, the sunshine, and her favorite people in the world.

Opening her eyes, she looked out over the assembled group. The first person her eyes landed on was her grandfather, looking more relaxed than she’d ever seen him in a dove-grey sweater vest, button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows, and grey slacks. He caught her glance and smiled back at her for a moment, warmth suffusing his face before he turned his attention back to assembling sandwiches from the ingredients in the picnic basket. It was a large wicker basket lined with a gingham cloth, and with the lid open she could almost make out the various sandwich fixings and treats she knew had been packed inside.

The other two members of their group were already chowing down on sandwiches, sat on the opposite side of the large picnic quilt they’d tossed over the soft green grass. Butch was sat up straight with his legs splayed out in front of him, eating roast beef on sourdough rye with a single-minded intensity, while Abbi had sat herself in his lap and leaned back against him to eat a ham and swiss on ciabatta, only pausing every now and again to remind her husband to make sure his crumbs fell off to the side and not down her back. Andi could feel the easy warmth between the two - a lasting gift from Abbi herself - and knew the complaints weren’t serious.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her grandfather - ex-Marine Bruno Hamilton, career soldier, and badass - leaning over and holding out a sandwich in a napkin. “Here you go, Andi, your favorite,” he said with a twinkle in his eye and she smiled back gratefully as she took it.

One glance was enough to let her know that he hadn’t quite gotten her sandwich right. “Grandpa, I asked for ham and swiss on white, not on rye!” She had to laugh a little as his brow furrowed - it wasn’t the end of the world, she’d still eat it, but it wasn’t her favorite sandwich by any stretch of the imagination.

“Isn’t that what I gave you?” he asked, the puzzled look on his face somehow not darkening his features like she thought it would.

“No, see-” she looked down at the sandwich she held in her hand, and found a perfectly acceptable ham and swiss on white bread. “Huh, guess you did. My eyes must be playing tricks on me.”

“It’s probably the Lunch Lady exercising her sandwich-manipulation powers,” Butch managed to say with a perfectly straight face - an effect somewhat impaired by the immediate fit of giggles that overtook his wife.

“Th-that’s not a real thing and you know it,” she managed between laughs, and the other three had to join in.

For several long moments, laughter rang across the pleasant meadow and drowned out the softly chirping birds and buzzing insects, but eventually the quiet returned. Andi took a considering bite of her sandwich as her grandfather made his own. It was a pretty good sandwich; the ham was smoked to perfection, the cheese still cool and an excellent counterpoint to the saltiness of the ham, and the bread was soft as a cloud. She had to smile as a memory popped into her head.

“Sure beats the hell out of canned bread, right grandpa?” she asked, and he laughed loud and long.

It was a little weird actually; before now, she’d only ever heard him chuckle with a rusty little laugh that sounded like he didn’t get to use it much - or else with a bitter, sharp laugh that didn’t happen because whatever he’d heard was goddamn funny. To hear him belly laugh was definitely weird, but…she could get used to it. The smile when he finally wound down was weird, too. Most of the smiles she’d seen on his face were small, barely there things that looked a bit like he’d forgotten how to do it. Or like his face didn’t move that way, but he was trying to make it work for her.

“What the hell is canned bread? Sounds awful,” said Butch, drawing Andi’s attention away from her grandfather as she nodded forcefully.

“It really, really is. We had to basically eat nothing but for months. Canned bread is just the worst kind of carbs.” Of course, the canned bread had only been the tip of the iceberg when it came to awful things about the time spent in ARENA, and she shivered at the memory of the hollow, empty ache of the severed bond to Abbi.

Something nudged her foot, and she looked up to see Abbi smiling at her gently. “Hey, we’re back now, remember? And we’re never going to leave you again.” Her words had the comforting weight of finality in them, but Andi didn’t feel the rush of warmth she’d expected. It was a little strange to hear Abbi talk about forever, when she came from a world where every day could be your last, where there was always a new villain, where there was always the next threat to beat. Even more than that, their bond had already been severed once, and there was no telling if it would happen again.

Andi was distracted from her growing thoughts by a tap on the arm. “Strawberry?” her grandfather asked as he held out a particularly juicy-looking specimen.

Andi shook her head. “No, strawberries were grandma’s favorite - I was never very fond of them,” she said distractedly, trying to regain her previous chain of thought. “My favorite fruit is-” She looked back over at her grandfather, and the fruit he had in his hand - a clementine.

A thread of suspicion wound its way out of her subconscious.

“Weren’t you just holding a strawberry?”

“Your favorite fruit is a clementine.”

“That’s not what I asked. What happened to the strawberry?”

“You don’t like strawberries, why would we have packed strawberries in the picnic basket?” asked Butch, sounding eminently reasonable.

Andi bit her lip. “But I thought -”

A heavy arm settled around her shoulders. Her grandfather had never been the most physically expressive of men; the only other time he’d touched her like this had been when they were at TOM. He was nearly a foot and some change taller than she was, and when he’d put his arm around her then he’d done it almost gingerly, almost like he was afraid to hurt her - but it had also felt like a bulwark against the world, supporting her, creating a place for just the two of them in a metaverse fraught with danger and strife. It had been too fleeting to really enjoy, but she’d loved every second of it.

This time it felt like a great weight, like his arm around her shoulder was an anchor holding her down, holding her back. This time his grip wasn’t safe, it was suffocating - and the easy way he’d simply grabbed her was almost careless.

“C'mon Andi, aren’t you having fun? What’s one clementine among friends?” he asked, Butch and Abbi nodding sympathetically behind him.

Ice shot through her veins. This wasn’t her grandfather, and those weren’t her friends.

She had to get out of here.

“National terrorism suspect, ex-Marine Bruno Hamilton, is a white male, 6’ 4”, and wanted in conjunction -“

Bruno reached over and twitched the tuner on the radio to another station. The technician who’d been listening to the small device while working on some wiring in the wall of the abandoned veterinary hospital he was currently stationed in gave him a wide-eyed look but didn’t object to the change. Bruno’s employer had assured him that all the contractors that had been working on the place for the last several weeks were both discreet and trustworthy, but he hadn’t reached sixty in this business by trusting people just on an employer’s say-so. Work with them? Sure. Respect that they could do the job they were hired for? Absolutely. Trust them? Only as far as he had to.

The station he’d landed on was playing some kind of pop tune that would probably be annoying if it lasted longer than three minutes, but for now was better than listening to the news broadcasts. Bruno Hamilton was a professional freelancer, and he’d done jobs like that since the late 80s without the media catching wise - though part of that may have been the fact that he was mostly operating on foreign soil. The fact that one rescue mission for his current anonymous employer was enough to get him on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and outstanding warrants for his arrest in more than half a dozen police departments was troubling - especially because they had his name. Not some alias he’d had papers made for, or a persona he’d adopted specifically for the mission, but him. If he burned his identity, he’d lose access to the funds he’d accrued so far for his granddaughter, not to mention make it exponentially more difficult to claim her if he did find her.

Not that the terrorism charges were making that particularly easy; he’d received more than one email to his encrypted account from the various private investigators he’d hired all over the states backing out of their contracts with him. The more upstanding ones returned whatever unused portion of his fees they had, while the more unscrupulous simply notified him of the cancellation of his contract. He’d made a note to use the good ones again in the future - assuming he could pull this identity out of the hole, of course - and had seriously considered asking Patric to audit the others. The only thing that put paid to that plan was the fact that he’d have to talk to Patric to do it, which automatically made it his lowest priority; the Irishman spent more of the time he wasn’t doing something for their shared employer bonding with his sentient Winnebago.

Bruno really, really didn’t want to know what the man was doing in there when he locked the garage door.

”…we’ll be right back after Sheila gives us the week’s news! Take it away, Sheila!“

"Well, the top story for today is the nationwide bulletin about the currently at-large terrorist Bruno Hamilton, wanted for the deaths of thirty people in New York City, and injuries to sixty more. Local police are co-ordinating with…”

Bruno reached over and turned the radio off with a quick jab. The tech who’d turned the radio on in the first place paled a little and bent over their work even more assiduously. Bruno suppressed a sigh and stood to wander “casually” over to the other side of the room, noting the release of tension in the technician’s posture as he did so.

The real kicker was, of course, that he wasn’t a terrorist. None of the actions Bruno had taken in New York had been done with intention of inciting mass fear or panic. His mission parameters had been clear; rescue Crash Jaxun and Aquamarine, and then use their help to rescue Mac McPhernon from the organization that had been holding him captive. The car wrecks, civilian casualties, and multiple helicopter crashes had all been a direct result of the opposition trying to prevent him from completing his mission - nothing more, nothing less. He still wasn’t quite clear on who the opposition had been, exactly, but they’d been well-armed and well-equipped and seemed to not give a single shit about collateral damage. Whoever they were, they were well-connected enough to get him on the terrorist watch list and keep themselves off it, and that was really the bottom line.

Bruno pursed his lips and pulled out his phone. If the heat didn’t die down after this job was over, he’d have to lie low in a foreign country for however long it took for the interest in his case to die down before he returned. That would make finding his granddaughter even more difficult and inconvenient, but it was better than being disappeared into custody the FBI. Typing a quick message, he sent it off to an internet dead drop and put his phone away. It would be a few days before the message might even possibly be read, and a few more after that for an answer to come; the forger who monitored it was a paranoid sort, but he was the best at doing flawless deep covers and Bruno would rather not be found before he found his granddaughter.

Turning, he walked out of the pod room and heard the radio click on behind him as he left.

“..so watch out, because this Hamilton guy - no relation - is seriously bad news! And now, #1 on the charts…”

Weber cursed roundly as Bruno dropped into cover beside him.

Twenty minutes from mission completion and exfiltration, and one of the spooks they’d been sent in to support had managed to trip some sort of alarm and everything had gone straight to hell. The fact that the people who were shooting at them were also yelling orders in Russian was a good sign - given that their mission had been to assist the CIA in expelling one of the more entrenched Soviet “advisors” from Egypt - but didn’t change the fact that they were being shot at.

Or, in Weber’s case, shot.

Weber bit out another curse and Bruno felt his attention sharpen as red bloomed under the hand Weber had clamped to his side. Blood, but not too much of it and not spurting; fortunately Weber carried pressure bandages in one of the numerous pouches he habitually stocked and carried everywhere. They festooned him like a particularly prolific type of fungus and carried a frankly astonishing number of odds and ends, even for a Marine. He kept meticulous track of his stock, though, and was already scrabbling at the button on a particularly bulky pouch with his left hand.

Bruno fired four more shots in quick succession over their current choice in cover - a (hopefully) ornamental column that had gotten knocked over by some grenade-happy idiot in the first volley. It wasn’t covered in too much ceiling, which spoke to it probably being more ornamental than structural, but Bruno’d had one too many roofs come down on his head to trust that the ceiling would stay up for long enough. Fortunately, a yell of pain greeted his last shot, and the rate of fire slacked in their immediate vicinity. Bruno stowed his gun within easy grabbing distance as Weber shoved a roll of gauze and a brown glass bottle into his hands.

Bruno himself was privately impressed that Weber had managed to keep a bottle of iodine intact through several firefights, but didn’t pause to consider it. “This is going to sting,” he told Weber seriously, and the smaller man shrugged.

“Can’t feel any worse, just do it,” he retorted, and Bruno wasted no more time. The sharp sting of iodine cut through the air as soon as he opened the bottle, managing to briefly override even the heavy sulphur stink of the four shots he’d just taken at the Russians down the hall. He moved without pause, and poured half the bottle over the surprisingly small hole in Weber’s side.

Weber arched up off the floor convulsively. “Christ!” he half-shouted, and Bruno shoved him back against the column; now wasn’t the time to be out of cover even the smallest bit. Weber settled, and Bruno grabbed the roll of gauze and folded cloth pad Weber had magically produced from another pouch. Pad first, then he wrapped several lengths of gauze all the way around Weber’s middle, the smaller man maintaining a brutal grip on his arm as he worked.

As he tied the last knot on the bandage, Bruno settled back against the column to inspect his handiwork. “You good?” he asked Weber after finding no signs of more blood coming through the cloth and no slippage in the gauze or knot.

Weber exhaled explosively through his nose. “Let’s get this shit done,” he responded, and with one well-practiced move both men scooped up their guns and renewed their assault on the Soviets.

Chad lay perfectly still on his soft, so wonderfully soft bed, wishing for his head to stop pounding.

It had started three days ago. Well, in all honesty it had started several weeks ago when Thomas had disappeared from Chad’s soul, but this specific episode had started three days ago. It had started out a day like many others, with the unwelcome addition of a headache that had slowly built itself up behind Chad’s eyes. Normally, he would have just grounded himself in the warmth of his bond with Thomas and kept going; the memory of Thomas’ well-banked fire kept him on an even keel, and reminded Chad of why he’d fought so hard to return to the camaraderie of Brad and the Sparkle Sisters. But Thomas hadn’t been there when he’d reached, and other memories just didn’t have the same effect for some reason. Even Brad could only help so much, and by the end of the day the pain had gotten bad enough that even the thought of taking a mouthful of wonderfully greasy turkey meat had turned Chad’s stomach.

He should have seen it coming. Ever since Thomas - never Tom - had gone where Chad couldn’t follow, life had gotten much, much more difficult. Random shooting pains in his legs and spine had simply become part of the daily routine, and fine tremors in his hands that he just couldn’t stop had made most of his favorite hobbies either difficult or impossible; still, he’d tried to keep up appearances for the Sparkle Sisters so they wouldn’t worry about him and had been largely successful for the last few weeks. Firmer grips when cooking food, ignoring the shooting pains, walking with a firmer step to avoid stumbles - little things, but they added up over the course of the day and by the time it was time to hit the hay Chad was exhausted. And then he’d get up in the morning to do it all over again, because people were relying on him and he couldn’t let them down. Not again.

Still, the headache hadn’t gone away overnight, and he’d woken up to the persistent feeling of pins and needles in his left leg - like he’d slept on it funny, but somehow worse. And more persistent; the feeling hadn’t gone away during the day, and over time his right hand had developed a tic as well. He’d taken painkillers and gone to bed earlier than he usually did, though not early enough to excite comment.

And then yesterday morning - early enough that it might actually still have been the night before - he’d been woken by waves of pain pulsing through his skull. Chad had only just been able to make it to his bathroom before his stomach had violently rejected everything he’d eaten the day before, each heave bringing a fresh roil of agony through his head. Brad had been concerned, but just the smell of him had been enough to send Chad retching into the toilet again and Brad had retreated to the other side of the admittedly palatial bedroom Chad had been accorded aboard the Glamatron.

After what felt like hours Chad’s stomach had untwisted to the point where he could creep back over to his bed and bury himself there. At some point Brad had thoughtfully lowered the lights, but Chad was too afraid about what might come out if he opened his mouth and ended up waving at his companion in a manner that he desperately hoped would convey his gratitude. Brad didn’t say anything in return, for which Chad could only be grateful; he didn’t really want to know what speech would do to his brain right now.

The waves of pain in his head pulsed in time to his heartbeat, and started at the Keepstone embedded in his forehead before spreading out to encompass his whole brain. Much, much more acutely than usual anyway; ever since the thing had attached itself to his brain and nervous system a second time the pain had been something of a constant. In his head, down his body, along every nerve and muscle fiber, the magic of the Keepstone pulsed night and day. It was that magic that let him join the Sparkle Sisters, of course, and kept Brad alive and fresh but - there was never really a point where it didn’t hurt. Magical Space Princes weren’t meant to have Keepstones, weren’t designed to channel them and their power correctly, and some pretty serious work had gone into making this one work through Chad.

When he’d had the memory of Thomas to lean on, to keep him upright and moving forward, it hadn’t been so bad. Without him…

A knock sounded at the door and Chad twitched involuntarily as the sound echoed between his ears. The silence brought tinnitus, but the knocking was so, so much worse he couldn’t help the little sound of agony that tore itself from his lips as he burrowed deeper into his bed. He just had to stay here, and quiet, and still, and the pain would leave eventually.

“Chad?”

Ricci wasn’t the most shrill of the Sparkle Sisters - that honor belonged to the beautiful and bubbly Elliana - but her voice still seemed to bounce off his Keepstone and reverberate through his head that just made the paint that much worse. Chad couldn’t hold back the groan of agony at the spike, and that also didn’t help any.

“Chad, nobody’s seen you in a few days, and we’re worried.”

He was fine, he could handle this, he would be fine. Nothing was wrong beyond his ability to handle, he just had to wait this out and the pain would go back to manageable levels. He could do this.

“Chad, I’m coming in,” Ricci sounded both apologetic and determined, and Chad had no chance to object before a slice of harsh fluorescent light from the hallway landed squarely on his face.

Chad couldn’t help the sound of agony he made as the light drilled holes into his skull directly through his eyes. He’d been hit full-on by laser blasts that hurt less. Direct shots from plasma weapons hurt less. The redoubled pain in his head made his stomach twist and it was all he could do to wriggle over to the side of the bed before retching. There was nothing to come up but bile and a little bit of the tepid ginger tea he’d managed to choke down at some point in the last six hours, but it still smelled and that kept his stomach from settling back down like he wished it would.

“Chad!” Ricci’s cry of dismay did exactly nothing to help matters, and Chad whimpered as it echoed.

“Ricci! Over here,” Brad called in a half-whisper half-shout that made Chad want to curl up and die a little less than Ricci’s shout had.

Ricci shot a glance his way before walking over to Brad, but Chad was currently beyond speech. Fortunately the door had closed behind her at some point, so at least the light was off his face, but his stomach still roiled unpleasantly from the smell and from his hasty movements. He could hear Brad and Ricci conversing in whispers, but with his brains slowly leaking from his ears he couldn’t tell what they were saying. He couldn’t tell how long they’d talked, either, just that it seemed like forever and no time at all. Finally, Ricci approached the bed where he’d curled himself into a protective ball under his covers again.

“Chad?” she asked in a voice just above a whisper, and he twitched at the sound. Taking that as an affirmation he was listening, Ricci continued on. “Chad, I’m going to time bubble you and clean this mess up, okay? And once you feel better, we’ll get Elliana to heal you.”

He managed to grunt an affirmative, but he wasn’t quite sure what Elliana could do. It was his Keepstone forcing so very much magic down magic channels that simply weren’t designed to handle the volume that was causing the problem, as far as Chad was aware. This was just the reason why boys weren’t allowed to be chosen by Keepstones; there was nothing wrong for Elliana to repair.

Still, he couldn’t articulate his thoughts - in fact, he was probably lucky just to be able to think thoughts at this point - and so in the space between one breath and the next Ricci and the smell of vomit vanished. It was probably closer to twenty minutes in real time, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. All he had to do was hang on, and he could get through this.

He could do that.

Ex-Sergeant Alexei Petrov was a patient man.

He’d been a patient man when he was young, he was a patient man when he had served his planetary defense force, and he was a patient man now. Forty years he had served as his planet’s first line of defense, and he would have served forty more before retiring comfortably had high command not tested the limits of that patience. To be in the military was to follow orders, to subordinate your will to that of the chain of command and use your skills to the utmost to fulfill mission objectives that would, in the end, never be explained to you; Petrov had done that without qualm for forty years.

But he drew the line at killing children, even alien ones.

His unit had been tasked with discouraging alien settlement on the moon; Petrov had not questioned the orders, had simply done as was required of him until one day it was him, his squad, and a room full of terrified alien younglings. He had looked around once, considered his orders and his options, and put down his gun before walking out. The rest of his squad had followed him, and when the army branded them all traitors and deserters they had accepted the consequences. Now they fought a running battle with the shadowy element that rotted their government from the inside out with a motley crew of rebels, anarchists, dissenters, and idealists of all stripes and species.

Bruno Hamilton had landed in his mind right in the middle of a firefight. Rather than distract his avatar from the battle at hand, Bruno took a step back in their shared mindspace and observed. The guns were very different than he was used to - still the same principle, point one end at your enemy and a projectile comes out, but they were strangely integrated into the user’s body and apparently tracked pupil movement to aim and used muscle contraction to fire. Very odd, to Bruno’s sensibilities, but to his avatar they were as familiar as breathing.

Getting a view of their tactical position, Bruno was pleased to see that Pierce had managed to land them just outside the Hall of Archives that would hopefully contain records that would indicate whether or not the Nightmare being attached to this metaverse at one point in its history - and if so, when. It was a slim lead, one they didn’t have a lot of time to pursue, but Bruno had had a rare break and so had brought Thomas and Stone with him on the jump. If anyone could get the information quickly and store it safely, it would be one or the other of them. He couldn’t see them, from where his avatar was, but he’d expected that and trusted Pierce enough by this point to know that they’d be relatively nearby.

It was a little strange, actually; Bruno could see from his avatar’s vantage point that none of their elements were pushing up, even though a quick glance showed the defenders firing rate had dipped perceptibly in just the few minutes Bruno had actually been in this metaverse. Tactically, it would be wiser to start moving in, keep the pressure on the defenders and force them to consolidate behind their set perimeter. Instead, the attackers just kept blazing away, staying well back from the building in fixed positions; Bruno could feel a watchful anticipation curling through his avatar, but no memory-images surfaced to explain it. What were they waiting for?

The shrilling alarms changed to a pitch Bruno could feel in Petrov’s back teeth, and a rolling door he’d taken to be some kind of loading dock slammed open to reveal…Something. It looked like some kind of horrible mishmash between a cow an some heavy machinery, but he didn’t get a good look before his avatar was up an pushing forward. Out of the corner of their shared eye Bruno could see other elements pushing forward as well, but it looked like only Petrov was aiming for the now-bellowing monster. A piece of plan crystallized in Petrov’s mind; keep the guardian-protocol occupied. Apparently, the thing was immune to the type of bullets they used in this metaverse and the only way to keep it from shredding the whole unit was to engage it at close quarters and pray you didn’t die - Bruno could see Petrov’s memories of doing so twice before, but he crept a little closer to the fore of their shared mind anyway.

Petrov collided with the thing with an almighty crash right before it hit another member of his squad - Bruno could see the wispy form of Thomas hovering over the other’s head before the man rushed inside but it was enough to reassure him of achieving mission objectives. It allowed him to narrow his focus to the thing in front of him.

This one was a little different than the other two Petrov had faced; the organic parts were reinforced with some kind of cladding that neither pilot nor avatar recognized, and the cabling was armored. Those upgrades, combined with the shine of the metal on the augmented portions, was enough to mark it out as an upgrade - possibly in direct response to the last two Petrov had comprehensively wrecked. The AI didn’t seem to be any better, though; within a few moments it had settled into the same pattern that Petrov had identified in the previous two. Swipe, swipe, back up, ram - Petrov dodged them with a wary eye as Bruno watched carefully. He didn’t want to interrupt his avatar at such a crucial moment, when far too much relied on muscle memory that Bruno simply didn’t have. Petrov had faced these things before, and it was that experience that was required now.

At least, right up until the monster switch from a ram to a swipe mid-motion. There was an audible crunch as steel-reinforced horns came up under Petrov’s guard and rammed him in the chest. Bones snapped like matchsticks, and Petrov was hurled a dozen feet away into the solid stone of the wall.

For a single, breathless moment all Bruno could remember was the pain of crushed organs, the burning of snake venom, and the desperate, yawning void of space where an avatar’s soul used to be.

In the next instant, he was in the forefront of their shared mind, shoving Petrov away and down. The man’s experience was no longer a benefit, and the less he had to feel of their shared ribcage pulling itself together the better. Bruno stood up and jumped to the side just in time to narrowly avoid being hit by a full-speed charge that shook the entire wall when it connected. In a move that he’d seen his granddaughter do a half-dozen times or more, Bruno vaulted onto the back of the metallic monstrosity. His ribs protested mightily, and he could feel blood wetting corners of his mouth as the movement jarred some of the broken pieces into piercing organs, but the important thing was that he now had a direct line to the main power cabling running along the spine of the beast.

No regular person in this metaverse could have made that jump; the thing was half again as tall a Bruno was in his own body and nearly twice the height of Petrov. No regular person could have gotten into the cabling, either; heavy plates, bolted into metallic augments and semi-organic cladding alike lined the cable as it snaked up from the saddlebag-esque battery mounts along the spine to the circuits that let the thing work.

But Bruno was a class 4 metapilot, and he was far from a regular person.

Reaching down, he hooked his fingers underneath the plate closest to the battery packs and heaved. The thing beneath him bellowed and bucked, trying as hard as it could to get him off - but it could never do the one move that could have worked, having been gyroscopically stabilized specifically to prevent; roll. Bruno gritted his teeth and held on as the shattered chunks of his ribs jarred once more, before heaving one more time. The plate popped off, and Bruno reached down to tear the cabling away from the power cell.

The thing gave one last horrible bellow before going stiff and silent, and Bruno could feel Petrov’s approval in the back of his mind.

Mission accomplished.

“Status?”

Bruno had more than a decade of service to his name, and he’d heard that word hundreds of thousands of times. Most of them, it seemed, in the last hour.

“I’m fine,” he gritted out, and Weber nodded exactly the same way he had the last four times Bruno had answered the question.

Weber normally kept a pretty even keel; wound a bit tight ever since ‘Nam, but that was usually more helpful than harmful. The last time Bruno had seen Weber engage in this kind of oddly hands-off mother-henning was back in '76 when Tunstall had gotten himself shot in the thigh and they’d had to walk him ten miles to the evac point. Bruno had been the one even remotely close enough in height to help the captain limp along, while Graves had been carrying as much extra gear as he could take and bitching about it the entire time. Weber had alternated between ranging out of sight ahead of them and following so close behind that if he’d been any closer he’d’ve been walking in Tunstall’s boots - though fortunately at that time he’d directed most of his demands for status to Tunstall, who’d born it with the patience Bruno was pretty sure had earned him his captain’s bars.

Now Bruno was the focus of that strangely watchful gaze and wishing strongly that their current commander had split up the vehicles a bit differently. Bruno, Weber, Daniels, and Lopez were crammed into the nearly-full cargo compartment of an unmarked truck that had been chosen for the job largely because it traveled the route several times a day than for any comfort or space considerations; using US equipment would have caused the covert part of the mission objective to fail in a pretty dramatic way, so it had been arranged for the team to be split across two local vehicles hired specifically for that purpose. Cleburne, Wilkerson, Fuller, and Tottle were in a laundry vehicle somewhere ahead of them; Bruno had originally been slated to go on that vehicle as well, but…

He glanced down at the already-reddened bandage and grimaced. He’d underestimated the guard he’d been sent to dispose of, and paid the price. He hadn’t quite counted on a five-nothing civilian having blades sewn into the elbows of his clothes, and he certainly hadn’t expected the man’s first response to being grabbed from behind with a hand over his mouth to be to go absolutely crazy. The man had wriggled, kicked, writhed, clawed, and tried to bite his way to freedom before Weber had slipped over to slit his throat, and had gotten Bruno several times with knives in unexpected locations.

The worst was his gut, though, and he winced as he put a hand on it, bandage tacky to the touch. The truck wasn’t designed for a smooth ride, either, and the bumping and jarring was doing absolutely nothing to help stop the bleeding. He suppressed a sigh as he adjusted his position on the seat in the vague hope of easing both the pain and the rattling, and the small movement attracted Weber’s attention again.

Weber’s eyes zeroed in on Bruno’s hand, palm red with blood, and his lips thinned. “You’re-”

Not fine, lying to me, going to need new bandages - whatever he’d been about to say Bruno would never know as the truck hit an enormous pothole and the entire cargo compartment bounced a good ten inches. Bruno ended up on the floor with Lopez - who’d been sitting next to him and looking relieved that Weber’s focus wasn’t on him - on top of him, elbow right in the sore spot. From the cursing coming from Weber and Daniels’ side, he had to guess that Weber had probably ended up in Daniels’ lap. Not that he stayed there for long, as Lopez was suddenly pulled off of Bruno with what was probably excessive force.

“Status,” Weber barked and Bruno didn’t quite manage to stifle the sigh this time.

“Fi-” he started, response nearly automatic at this point, before Weber glared pointed down. Bruno looked, and saw a stain spreading up his uniform shirt.

“I think I need a medic,” he said deadpan, and Daniels snickered rudely.

Weber flipped him off with one hand while pulling another pressure bandage out of his pocket with the other, and Bruno only just resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Weber was never going to let him hear the end of this.

“Two, this is three. Status check, over.”

Bruno carefully pulled the handheld radio off his belt with an absolute economy of movement. “Three, this is two. We are in position, over.”

The radio hissed softly for a moment before the reply came through. “Two, this is three. Stand by for signal. Over and out.”

Bruno clicked the radio once in the pre-arranged acknowledgement and returned the unit to his belt before looking around. In the dim light of pre-dawn, his team was nearly impossible to see. A flicker of motion here, a slight scuffling sound there - nothing that couldn’t also be attributed to vermin and Bruno felt a slight rush of satisfaction; the last few times he’d been contracted he’d been sent out with teams of green hotshots who’d been far too impatient for the mission they’d been assigned to, and he’d said as much in his AARs. Not so this time, with every man on the team having a good half a dozen missions under their belt - if not more.

Though it was slightly puzzling that a team like this would get sent here. Bruno had never been in the area before, but the mission brief had said this was a city booming on the back of the fruit industry. Why insurgents would be hiding in a warehouse that also contained - according to the briefing - several tons of dried fruit, neither Bruno nor any of his current squadmates could figure out. One particularly verbose Englishman - Woolverly - had said it best when he’d speculated loudly that maybe the terrorists were trying to give the West scurvy by denying them the citrus supply on the plane in.

Whatever the reason, Bruno hadn’t reached his fifth decade of life by assuming that a mission would be easy - however nonsensical the location was - and had briefed his squad extensively on local geography. He’d done his best to position his squad tactically, as well - his team was the second wave, designated to go in hard and loud once the infiltration team popped red flares, and he’d identified three key spots that would give his squad maximum cover inside after they’d breached. Once in, they were to eliminate all hostile targets and either destroy or retrieve targets designated by the infiltration squad.

All they needed now was the signal.

A flash of red in one of the upper story windows, and Bruno was up and moving.

Smith, Carson, and Chesley had the explosives; they were closest to the structure and were setting the charges before the rest of the squad had covered 3\4ths of the distance. Once the rest of the squad had grouped up into the pre-determined breaching order, Bruno gave them a countdown from three on his fingers and all three of them detonated their charges simultaneously. Bruno frowned at Smith even as they breached the warehouse to a great deal of smoke and yelling. The man had been in charge of shaping the charges, and Bruno had felt the explosion all the way down into his feet; either the man had used too much C4, or the building was on less-stable ground than they’d thought.

The floor bucked under his feet, and Bruno staggered into Johnson, sending them both tumbling to the floor. Apparently Smith hadn’t screwed up the charges after all.

“Earthquake! Everyone out!” Bruno roared, voice rising above the din with years of long practice, and shoved Johnson toward the hole in the wall they’d just made to get in - a hole that was beginning to rapidly crumble around the edges. The shouting had ceased for an instant when Bruno had yelled, but now it was louder than ever. As the floor bucked and rolled in a way that was almost nauseating, Bruno turned and began crawling as best he could further into the warehouse.

A resounding crash behind him heralded the fall of one of the tall stacks of crates that made the interior of the warehouse into a rat’s maze, and more crashing further off lead to pained yelling in both English and Persian. Bruno gritted his teeth and kept moving; one of the top mission priorities was retrieving the infiltration team, and damn if he was going to let an earthquake get in the way of that now. Smoke was thick in the air as he moved, and he almost missed the still figure lying beneath a pile of collapsed crates - almost, except that he managed to accidentally plant a hand on their head as he crawled. A quick check revealed no dog tags and a distinctly non-regulation beard, and Bruno moved on. Whoever it was wasn’t a problem anymore - the crates had broken their neck.

The tremors were slowing now, and Bruno risked standing up. When he didn’t immediately end up on his can again, he pressed forward, heading for the last place he’d heard shouting in English from. Rounding a corner, he found one of the infiltration team - the inimitable Woolverly - cursing loudly and trying to get his leg out from underneath two heavy-looking crates. When Bruno took a deliberately heavy step he whipped around, gun out and face pinched, only to sag in relief when he saw who it was.

“Well, come on then. You damn oversized Yanks have to be good for something; be a good chap and give that crate a shove?”

“Right.” Bruno refrained from pointing out that Woolverly - when he wasn’t prone on the floor - was nearly the same height he was, and instead moved over to the two crates. One was leaning on the other somewhat precariously, and that was what was causing the pressure trapping Woolverly’s leg. He glanced down at the man.

“Get ready to pull,” he warned, and Woolverly nodded grimly.“

Bruno returned the nod. "On three. One…Two…Three!”

Bruno heaved on the crate and Woolverly hauled on his leg, and the twisted limb came free just before Bruno lost his grip and the crate came crashing down. Woolverly looked up at him with a pained smile.

“Thanks old chum, I - look out!”

The warning came too late, and Bruno barely felt the impact as the crates behind him shifted and came down on top of him.

Andi discreetly wiped her eyes for the fifth time that day, glad of the mostly ornamental half-apron that was part of the required uniform.

It’d been almost a month since her grandmother, her last living family member who had raised Andi ever since she was small, had died. She’d known for a while it was coming, had watched the cancer progress as the medical bills mounted ever higher, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt. The life insurance had been just enough to cover the funeral; it had been a small affair, with only Andi and a few members of her grandmother’s knitting circle attending. After that, Andi was left alone in a too-big apartment filled with far too many memories.

At least Joe had been understanding about the whole thing; when the owner of the coffee place she worked at had heard her teary voice over the phone saying she wouldn’t be in today, he’d told her to take as much time as she needed to get herself back together and that her job would be waiting for her when she returned. That had prompted a fresh bout of tears that he’d patiently waited on the line through before telling her in the gentlest voice that she’d ever heard him use that it would get better, no matter how bleak it seemed right now. She’d thanked him profusely before hanging up; for all Joe was never to her knowledge ever actually in the coffee shop that bore his name - Joe’s Diner - he seemed to have a finger on the pulse of it at all times. She suspected the head barista, a tall guy everyone called Hollywood, was a relative of his or something and told him everything, but it didn’t really matter.

It had taken her almost two weeks before the apartment had become unbearable; she still had some time left on the lease, but she used her grandmother’s passing as an excuse to break it early without a fee and found another, smaller place downtown. It was further from the coffee shop, but it was closer to the bars and other cafes that sometimes held open mic nights and she still clung to the idea of someday making it big as a musician. Plus it looked nothing like her old apartment and was far more affordable, so that was something. Going through her grandmother’s things had been the low point of the month, and she’d ended up taking several days to get through it all.

Still, by the end of a month she couldn’t take it anymore and had called Joe’s Diner to ask for some shifts. She suspected Joe had told Hollywood about what had happened, because when she got her schedule it was two weeks of easy mid-afternoon shifts that started just after the morning rush ended and went on for eight hours with a break clearly marked during the lunch peak. Andi could only be grateful for the kid gloves treatment; this was just her first day back and she’d nearly broken down several times already at stupid, stupid things. Someone wearing the same fragrance her grandmother used to, a turn of phrase that was so out of touch with the times, a shirt in her grandmother’s favorite shade of blue -

“Hey.”

Andi finished wiping her eyes and looked up. Standing at the counter with his hands jammed in his pockets was one of Joe’s regulars, a man by the name of Crash Jaxun. He’d come in around 11 in the morning and sit for hours nursing some disgustingly sweet confection at one of the back tables away from the windows. His sister always tipped generously when she arrived at around 2 to pick him up, and the two had continued the trend for as long as Andi had worked here. She didn’t know why they scheduled it like that, but every weekday like clockwork they’d show up and leave at exactly the same times.

Crash never looked anyone in the face if he could help it - though he always wore a huge pair of aviators so it was hard to tell - but Andi pasted on a smile for him anyway and returned to her spot by the register. “Hey, sorry, what can I get for you? Did you finish your drink?”

It only happened rarely, but if he did finish his drink before his sister arrived Crash would always order the exact same one again and make sure to finish it just as his sister walked in the door. Andi’s hands were already moving to the correct keys - fourteen pumps of caramel syrup, blegh - when Crash shook his head. Then he nodded, then shook his head again before looking for and fidgeting with a coffee stirrer he’d pulled from the mug of them that was always kept by the register.

“’M sorry,” he mumbled without looking up, and Andi blinked at him.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, enunciating each word carefully though his voice didn’t get any louder. He paused for a moment, and then continued. “For your loss.”

Andi’s breath caught in her throat and she blinked furiously to keep the tears out of her eyes. The sentiment had sounded trite coming from her grandmother’s knitting friends, Joe had said he’d keep her place for her, and Hollywood hadn’t said anything at all. She was struck momentarily speechless that one of the customers she’d only ever spoken to about his drink order would say it so sincerely.

He seemed to take her silence as a prompt to continue. “I remember, remember how bad it was, when Dad died. Tessa acted strong, but I heard her sniffling too when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.” He glanced up at her face once and immediately looked away again. “It was hard, for a while. I remember, it was hard. So. You know.” He shuffled his feet. “I’m sorry.”

Before Andi could say anything - though even she didn’t know if she was going to thank him or ask about his father - Crash turned and hurried back to his usual seat like he was afraid someone was going to take it in his absence, leaving Andi alone with her thoughts. She could feel tears welling up with gratitude at the sincerity of Crash’s simple statement, but before she could signal Hollywood to take over for her so she could go cry in the cold storage room the bell above the door tinkled to signal a customer entering. She hurriedly blinked the tears away and fixed up the smile that had slipped at some point during Crash’s speech.

“Hi! Welcome to Joe’s, what can I get for you?”

The black man in a police jacket who had just walked in didn’t even bother to look at the menu before ordering. “Coffee, large, black. What do you want, Eli?” he asked the somewhat younger man who’d come in with him. The teenager spent a long moment looking at the menus written in chalk above the cash register before replying.

“Large mocha with whipped cream.” The older man rolled his eyes at the order but didn’t say anything and Andi quickly tapped the keys to input it into the system.

“Will that be all?” She asked politely, and the two nodded before Mr. Police Jacket reached for his wallet to pay.

The two of the were the start of a mini-rush - nothing crazy like the lunch crowd, but over the next twenty minutes or so a steady stream of people went in and out of the door. The buff woman who worked at the gym down the street came in towing her little brother Mac, whom she dumped at the table next to Crash’s and admonished to stay there while she finished her shift; the haggard-looking psychologist who always ordered a cold brew with a shot of cherry; a tired-looking teacher who ordered a quadruple shot and then nearly fell asleep while drinking it; a very Southern woman who twanged her way through an order for a vanilla latte; and finally a very tall older man who was quite possibly the most menacing person Andi had ever seen wearing an actual suit (and not, you know, riot gear) ordered a small black coffee before taking a table not too far from Crash and Mac - who seemed to have hit it off and were now huddled at the same table.

After another ten minutes of no-one else coming through the door, Hollywood came out of wherever he’d been lurking in the back and tapped her on the shoulder. “Break time kiddo,” he said, and Andi nodded before stepping away from the register to let him sign on. Hollywood knew everyone’s names - he could name every customer that came in the door whether they’d been to the shop before or not and frankly Andi secretly suspected him of being a psychic - but if he knew you well he almost never called you by it. Crash was “kid,” Andi was “kiddo,” the guy who made the pastries and sandwiches for the counter was “cook,” and the tall dude who always came in wearing a real 1920s-style fedora was “roads.”

Andi shucked her apron obediently and went back to the little nook in the kitchen that was the designated break area. One of the other workers - a slightly cat-obsessed woman named Aquamarine - had at one point tried to cheer the place up with some throw pillows and a table cloth for the minuscule table crammed into it, but the pillows now lived in one of the nearby drawers until someone needed a nap and the tablecloth had acquired a number of mysterious stains that turned the cat print into some kind of weird abstract. Still, it was quiet and Cook always had a plate of ugly or burned food in the middle of the table so Andi helped herself to a very crunchy toasted sandwich and an undersized croissant as she could hear the sound of the lunch rush picking up.

Crash’s words still resonated with a strangely healing kind of hurt and her thoughts wandered towards the morose, but the food helped and by the time her half-hour was up the lunch rush was in full swing. Working meant she didn’t have to do much thinking, so going out and opening up the second register was a welcome distraction and for the next hour or so she managed to keep busy enough that she didn’t have to think about anything beyond getting an order and making it. By the time a quarter to 2 rolled around, things had quieted down again to the point where Hollywood had her close her register and move to his so he could go into the back and do…whatever he did in the back. Andi wasn’t sure she wanted to know; all that mattered was that if someone got rowdy or ornery he would pop up out of nowhere and threaten to hit them with his ordering book. That was usually enough to shut even the most offended Karen up, and he’d only ever had to follow through on the threat once that Andi could remember.

She busied herself with wiping down the counter and cleaning up what she could without using the really nasty solvents or taking the machines apart - the more she got done now, the less work they’d have to do when they closed at four. Most of the customers from earlier had left - Mac had been picked up at some point by his sister, the psychologist and the teacher had both left immediately after getting their drinks, and neither the cop nor the twanger were sitting at any of the tables - but the old man in the suit was still there. He’d pulled out reading glasses at some point, and appeared to be doing the crossword puzzle in one of the local newspapers. The small coffee cup in front of him was still half full, and Andi shrugged mentally. He wouldn’t be the first retiree they had taking up a table for most of the day - though certainly the most intimidating to ever do so - and as long as he still had a drink he was still a customer.

2 on the dot saw Tessa walk in, order her usual, and walk out with Crash in tow. More people drifted in and out but the old man stayed at the table he’d claimed until it was almost time to close. Andi was just beginning to consider politely asking him to leave - he was the last customer in the place, and she couldn’t really start the heavy-duty cleaning until he left - when he suddenly reached out, drained the last quarter-cup of coffee he’d had sitting in front of him, and stood up.

“Thanks,” he said, indicating the cup in front of him. His voice was low and a little gravelly, like he’d used to smoke or something.

He paused for a long moment before deflating slightly and nodding to her. “It’s good coffee,” he said at last before picking up his newspaper and walking swiftly out the door.

Andi blinked after him as the tinkling bell signaled his departure. She had the strangest feeling that wasn’t what he’d actually wanted to say, but for the life of her she didn’t know what that might have been. Shrugging to her herself, she turned and picked up the now-empty mug off the table. To her surprise, underneath it was a neatly-folded twenty. It was the biggest tip she’d gotten that day, but something about it - and the old man - just felt weird.

Shaking it off, she went and flipped the sign on the door to closed before beginning her cleaning routine. Whatever the old man’s deal was, it wasn’t her problem for now.

———————————————————————————————————-

Over the next week, Andi saw the old man four more times. He never stayed as long as the first time, but he always ordered the same thing and never came in on anybody else’s shift - she’d asked Aquamarine and Nathan, and both of them had denied seeing him whenever they were working. It creeped her out a little bit to think about, but the old man never did anything. He’d come in, order a small black coffee, and sit at the same table for a seemingly indeterminate amount of time. One day he stayed only stayed for ten minutes, the next day he took the table for three hours.

She’d considered asking Hollywood about it, but he hadn’t seemed to be bothered by the man - not like the time when some creepy neckbeard had decided Aquamarine should be the object of his affections. Andi hadn’t seen the guy do anything, but the third time he’d showed up Hollywood had stopped him, told him clearly that stalking the employees was not allowed and wouldn’t be tolerated, and added that if he ever showed up at Joe’s Diner again there would be Consequences that he would not enjoy. Neither Andi nor Aquamarine had ever seen the dude again, and the incident was only rarely discussed.

All of which basically amounted to if Hollywood wasn’t throwing this guy out then he probably wasn’t a pervert. Still, Andi didn’t know what to think of the fact that he only showed up when she was working. She’d almost decided to let it go another week and see what happened when the old man decided the whole issue for her.

He’d come in later than usual - a quarter til four, and he was the only one in the shop. Joe’s Diner only served coffee and pastries, and there wasn’t enough people who wanted that after four to warrant them staying open later. Andi had just decided to start the closing work early - the faster she got it done, the sooner she could go home - when the bell tinkled to signal a customer. She hurried out of the closet in the back where they kept the cleaning supplies and pasted a smile on her face.

“Hi! Welcome to Joe’s, what can I get for you?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment before finally blowing out a puff of air in a heavy sigh. “I need to speak with you.” He paused for another instant. “Privately.”

Andi felt her heart jump into her throat. The guy looked to be about 75, and dressed in a very nice suit to boot, but he was also built like a truck and the lines in his face didn’t look like they came from smiling.

“I, I don’t know, I - it’s nearly closing, and-”

“And I can take care of it for one evening,” Hollywood interjected smoothly, appearing like magic from the door to the kitchen. “Go ahead and punch out a little early, kiddo, I’ll make sure everything’s ready for opening tomorrow.”

The old man’s expression didn’t change even as Andi shot Hollywood a betrayed look. The taller barista simply smiled benignly and waved her off, and Andi begrudgingly went and got her things from the employee closet in the back. When she walked out, Hollywood was sweeping the floor while the old man stood stiff and tall next to the door. Andi didn’t exactly want to leave the protection of Hollywood, but she trusted the other man enough to the point where if he was letting her leave with the old dude, it was probably safe to do so.

The old man opened the door and stepped out first, scanning the area around them before stepping aside and letting Andi past. She raised an eyebrow - did he think Hollywood would let muggers lurk around Joe’s Diner? - but let it pass without comment as the big man fell in step beside her, matching his pace to hers. Which Andi was obscurely grateful for; she’d had tall friends in the past who weren’t as considerate and she’d had to jog to keep up with them at times.

The silence stretched between them, until Andi huffed, impatient. “Well, you said you wanted to talk to me where Hollywood couldn’t hear. So, talk.”

Maybe it was a little rude, but this guy was freaking her out a little. He just had this aura around him of danger that made her hair stand on end. If anyone but Hollywood had assured her the guy was safe, she’d’ve called them nuts. As it stood, she was less inclined to believe even Hollywood by the minute; if this guy didn’t start talking…

The man seemed to deflate with a sigh, suddenly looking older than the 75 she’d pegged him for before. He reached into his pocket and she immediately backed off a step, heart hammering, but all he pulled out was a slightly worn envelope. Wordlessly, he held it out to her. She looked at him suspiciously but took it, and nearly dropped it when she saw the familiar - if somewhat shaky - handwriting on the front. Her hands were shaking as she pulled the letter out of the envelope, but he didn’t reach for her until she’d gotten to the very end and big fat tears started rolling down her face.

He reached out then, one awkward hand on her shoulder, and that was all the invitation Andi needed. Throwing herself forward she flung her arms around the old man - the old man her grandmother had chosen to write to while she was dying. Andi still missed her grandmother like a phantom limb, and the letter so warmly recounting her exploits to someone Andi’d never met had been too much. Her grandmother had told her she loved her many times, but it was almost overwhelming to have tangible proof. The older man didn’t seem to know how to react, though he hadn’t even stumbled when she’d barreled into him. He was warm, and tall, and broad, and while there were some weird lumps under his clothing Andi clutched at him like a lifeline.

One broad hand gently settled itself between her shoulder blades while the other rescued the letter from being crumpled in her fist. He didn’t do more than pat her awkwardly on the back a few times, but his hand was nearly big enough for a full and proper hug to be unnecessary. They stayed that way for a long while, Andi sobbing into his suit coat and the much taller man holding her while she did so, but finally the tears tapered off to hiccupping breaths and he let her draw back from him shakily, still wiping her eyes.

She gave a small, watery smile. “I think you already know, but…Hi. I’m Andi Jaymes,” she took a shuddering breath, “and I’m your granddaughter.”

He gave her a small smile back. It looked odd on his face, like his face had been carved over the years in such a way as to make smiling nearly impossible, and there was a strange mixture of happiness and sorrow in his eyes.

“Hello, Andi Jaymes,” he replied. “I’m Bruno Hamilton. And I’m your grandfather.”

And they all lived happily ever after.

That’s how a story’s supposed to end, right? And they all lived happily ever after. That’s the way they always ended when I was a kid, anyway, when the great evil was defeated and the rightful king was restored to his throne and peace and prosperity echoed throughout the land. When the heroes found their families and lovers came together in ways you just knew would withstand the test of time. When the grand journey was over and everyone had found their way back to the place they loved best.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Covers a lot of ground, that phrase. And maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not, but it’s not how this story ended. I say ended, but that’s not wholly true either; they’ll keep adding records to this shelf - the same shelf that was practically groaning under the weight of all the records that were here before all this started - but we won’t be there for them. Not like we were here for these.

Monday wrote once that nobody read her stories - the reports she was asked to write on the events that happened. It so happens that she was wrong, but that’s alright because she was well-informed but not omniscient. You see, we read the stories. We probably weren’t supposed to, but Management never kicked us out so we continued to sneak in for a peek.

There’s a way into the archives, a little back way that doesn’t disturb the other chroniclers at their work. Someone showed it to me a while back, and I’ve used it pretty regularly ever since. And I wasn’t alone; there’s a dozen people I know in passing - most of them pretty cool folks - who used it too, and marks of what must be a hundred other people whom I’ve never met. All of us, together, reading the reports filed neatly and properly.

The reports are well-thumbed, edges soft with use, and people just haven’t been able to resist editorializing. Little notes written in the margins - are you sure about that, let’s make Nick rap again, THAT WAS SO EPIC, for #clarity’s sake… and so on and so forth. I’m actually kind of surprised nobody’s done any surreptitious editing - or maybe they have, but maybe it becomes the report after they’ve done. I don’t know. I do know there are pictures; someone drew basically the best megalodon I’ve ever seen on one of the pages, which managed to somehow swim ominously through the water stain where someone spilled their drink.

Lot of water stains in the early volumes, if I’m honest. Lot of doodles too - weird storm troopers, Donkey Kong, a strange academic-type wearing huge glasses, you name it it’s probably doodled in those earlier volumes. That’s where the reports start, as well; Monday’s little stories, integrated seamlessly into each volume like they were always meant to be there.

Other people have also added stories, loose leaf papers tucked into the softened pages of the proper volumes. Little scraps of notebook paper sticking out haphazardly of later volumes, covered in more stories.

I’m pretty sure Management knew we came here. There were always pens, you see, little pens that let you write the notes in the margins, but…those pens are gone today. I got here hoping to finish my doodle of the glasses-wearing nerd from the first book - the book where all the notes and stuff start - and the pens weren’t here. I tried using one of my own, but it doesn’t write on the pages. The ink just won’t come out.

Eight shelves worth of volumes, of little notes and excited whispers. ______ was here. I’m so glad that you did that. Who’s your favorite pilot? Man, you need to shape up and do better. Eight shelves worth of reports from Monday. Eight shelves of titanic triumphs and crushing defeats. Eight shelves of people doing their best because they are good people.

There are other shelves with pens, but none of those pens write in these books. I don’t think they ever will again, if I’m honest. I’ve made a lot of friends sitting at this shelf, reading these volumes. I’ve left them notes, I’ve made notes for them. I may even have spilled my own drink once or twice on the pages, I really can’t speak to that.

But now the pens are gone, and the whole shelf feels a little dimmer, somehow. The shine’s gone out of it, and the last of the other folks have packed up and left. I don’t want to go - the ending was so quiet and unsatisfying, there are so many loose threads to pull and unravel into new stories, they didn’t live happily ever after - but I know better than to linger. Management may have ignored us before, but the message is clear now: stop messing with this.

Maybe I’ll find another shelf to lose myself in for a while. Maybe I’ll come back to this one and tuck more notebook paper into already-filled volumes. Maybe I’ll meet new people here, thumbing through the volumes and delighting in the notes other people have left behind. That’s using your attributes! Go get your snark on, girl. So Dick can go down and up on a woman at the same time? Rocket boots away!

I don’t think I’ll ever regret the time I spent at this shelf. But the final volume is closed, and the only pens that write on these pages are gone. It’s time to step out into the world for a minute, even if only to remind myself why the archives are much preferable. It’s time to move on to other shelves in other sections, to find more places with their little stores of pens and pencils that let you write in the volumes there.

And, hopefully, I’ll find my friends at the new shelves along with me, and we can start writing in the new volumes together.

And we all lived happily ever after.

A gust of wind and a searing pain in his chest. The taste of iron on his lips. The desperate choking as the need for air eclipsed pain. Dizzying darkness at the edge of his vision. A last, convulsive movement as time slowed to a crawl. A look of mild surprise on his killer’s face.

Richard Ramsbottom’s eyes flew open, but the memories chased him into the waking world. He wheezed, choking on blood that wasn’t in his mouth. He gasped for breaths that came easily, and the darkness that played at the edge of his vision wasn’t sleep returning. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t taste anything beyond the blood in his mouth, he was dying-

“Dick?”

The sleep-muddled voice of Jane Blonde was distant in the roaring of his ears, but he focused on it even as he felt her hand trace the curve of his back.

“Dick, it’s all right. You’re fine, it’s March 1964, you’re here. With me. Not back there. You’re fine, you’re fine, it’s fine, shhhhhh, it’s fine, you can breathe…”

Her voice was soft and just a bit hoarse, and combined with her hand on his back it helped ground Dick in the present. They weren’t on Baron Bad’s island base, he wasn’t choking to death as his chest caved in. He was in their shared bed in the small house they’d acquired overlooking the warm, Mediterranean sea. The salt breeze blew in through the open window to give some relief to the otherwise oppressive Italian night, and he could breathe.

He could breathe.

He could feel his heart slowing as Jane kept up the mantra they’d developed over the months since the incident. That whirlwind day on Bad’s island seemed so fantastic and unlikely that it had felt like a dream even while he was being debriefed about it by Jane’s superiors, yet even the littlest thing could send Dick back there like he’d never left. A hiss of steam that sounded like the hiss of a snake, the wrong turn of phrase that put him in mind of Number Two’s villainous cadence - even a particularly strong breeze had been enough a few times, the breath of air moving past his face so much like the movement of the man who’d- who’d-

Dick shook his head violently to rid himself of the thought before standing up. Jane watched him go, the worry in her eyes tempered just a bit by the warmth of her regard. In the fine Italian climate neither one of them tended to bother wearing pajamas to bed, and while the too-real nightmare still left him cold at his core he could feel the heat of her gaze warming him up slightly as he began his preferred stretching routine. He had found that, while the memories tended to linger and catch at him at the worst moments, the exercises and stretches he’d learned at a young age and practiced for years could ground him back into his body in a way not even Jane could manage.

Plus it helped ease Jane’s worries when he put on a bit of a show.

Dick took a deep breath in and let it out slowly as he began rolling his neck. While some people liked to loosen their joints from floor to ceiling, he had always preferred a top-down approach. Neck and jaw first, working out the stiff tension brought on by the onslaught of bad memories. Shoulders next, a slow rolling motion that brought an interested hum from the bed behind him; Jane loved it when he used his not inconsiderable physique to give her back rubs - she claimed they were the best part about loving him.

Dick felt a faint smile touch his lips but didn’t stop, moving on to elbows next, then wrists and the more delicate joints in the hand. While not strictly speaking part of most contortion routines his teachers had been adamant that every joint got loosened before starting anything, and Dick had never seen a reason to stop doing it.

Besides, Jane certainly enjoyed the benefits of his hyper-flexible fingers.

Huffing out a breath that might have been a laugh if the memories weren’t still lurking at the edge of his vision, Dick twisted left and right as he felt the muscles anchored to his spine ease. For all Jane was watching him with silent interest, there was a pall over the room that put paid to any thoughts of something more interesting happening than just watching. They’d tried putting the bad memories behind them by seeking refuge in each other exactly once, back shortly after Dick had cut a deal with Jane’s superiors to stay out of jail as long as he gave them all the intelligence he had on several persons of interest and to stay under Jane’s supervision; just a little pressure on his chest had brought the memories back with such a vengeance that Dick had been left seizing while Jane held on to him and cried.

They hadn’t tried that again.

Some nights were easier than others, of course, and Dick knew now a thousand and one ways to make Jane scream - just as much as she knew every spot that would drive him crazy when she kissed it just so. There was a reason they’d chosen a somewhat remote little bungalow on the Italian coast as their habitation, and it wasn’t just the fact that there was a British Intelligence contingent operating out of the Italian naval yard not ten miles up the road.

Still, tonight was not an easy one and Dick sighed as he swung one leg up into a two-handed grip that let him stretch the full range of his hip. He didn’t know exactly what caused the memories to resurface the way they did; he’d never felt anything like it. They never faded or went away, and every time they came back he was always right there, standing in Baron Bad’s laboratory while a man moving faster than humanly possible punched him hard enough to cave in his rib cage. It was always raw, bloody, airless, and visceral in a way that none of his other memories were. He’d had unpleasant things happen to him before, of course - you didn’t spend years in the employ of men like Baron Bad and come out without at least a few things you wished you could forget - but none of them came back like feeling his heart stutter and stop in his chest.

Dick quashed that train of thought as he finished loosening the joints in his other leg. Fully warmed up, he took a deep breath and released it slowly as he bent over backwards into the first pose of his preferred contortion routine. Both hands and feet firmly on the floor, he pushed his hips up and felt the first twang of a good stretch deep in his abdomen. With his upside-down view of the bed, he could see Jane, silvered by the moonlight dappling in through the lazily wafting curtains. Her normally golden blonde hair shimmered almost white in the distant light, the perfect curves and dips of her face highlighted where the moonlight fell on them, and the darker pink of her perfect cupid’s-bow lips was an almost grey-blue in the strange way things became different at night. Her hair was mussed from sleeping, the normally precise and pinned hairdo let loose to fall around her face in a way he loved more than her daytime efforts; her carefully-done makeup and hair were an armor and a weapon all in one, another tool for her job, but this? This was something she shared with him alone and he loved her even more for it.

With a sigh he released the tension in his hips and stood back up straight slowly, controlling the motion with his abdomen like his teachers had shown him how to do. Contortion wasn’t easy, and taking momentum-based shortcuts was a great way to pull or even tear muscles not braced for a sudden change in position. Both feet firmly on the ground, he paused for a moment to take a deep breath before reaching for the next pose. Bringing one leg slowly up behind him, he leaned forward even as he reached back to grasp his foot with both hands, drawing an appreciate hum from Jane - the pose was one of her favorites that didn’t involve contact with her. The first time she’d seen him do it, she’d spent the next two weeks trying to convince him to model it for a painter she knew.

Nude.

He wasn’t opposed to the idea, especially since Jane seemed quite keen on it, but the memory episodes were too frequent and uncertain; the last thing he wanted to do was have one in the middle of holding a pose, especially a pose that required so much balance. Jane had reluctantly acquiesced to his concerns, but had finished the conversation by extracting a promise that when things got better - not if, when; Jane was very firm about that - he would do it and of course he’d agreed.

The rest of his routine went without incident, each form progressing naturally to the next and driving the aching, breathless memories further and further back away from the waking world. Jane remained quiet throughout, humming occasionally when he did something she particularly enjoyed. By the time he’d finished, a thin sheen of sweat covered his skin and when he went to go wipe it off, Jane stood to join him.

The tiny bathroom hardly had room for two to move around, but Jane solved the space issue by the simple expedient of grabbing the washcloth from him and beginning to wipe him down herself. Dick was content to let her; his muscles ached pleasantly and if her hands lingered in spots then he wasn’t going to deny her that. Additionally, this way he didn’t have to worry about accidentally elbowing her in the face - he wasn’t that much taller than her, but the bathroom really didn’t have much space in it.

She worked quietly for several long moments before speaking, keeping her attention on her hands and his body.

“They’re not getting better, are they.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Dick felt compelled to answer anyway.

“No.”

She was quiet again for a moment, hands never stopping.

“You know, your people - the Americans - they’ve started talking about something similar. The soldiers in Vietnam, possibly, with more than just shell shock.”

Dick blinked down at her, the peaceful night air taking the sting out of her looking into what was going on in his head. Besides, Jane had almost as much of a stake in this fight as he did; he couldn’t blame her for looking for solutions, especially given her contacts. Still, the idea that what had happened on that island being comparable to the terrors of the Vietnam War seemed almost absurd - he didn’t even have any lingering aches or pains. Whatever the Baron had done had been enough to erase all the physical evidence of what had happened.

Sometimes, on bad nights when Jane was out on a mission, he wished it had left a scar. He wished for some physical proof of what had happened, something tangible to ground the hideous choking of the memories in so he could work around them easier. He’d scared the hell out of Jane when she’d arrived home late from a mission one night to find him holding a knife in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. She’d taken the knife away and blacked his eye for him; the next morning she’d made him promise that he’d never act on those impulses. Not two days after that she’d hired a distinctly handsome young man to tend to the garden whenever she went on a mission, one who had a tendency to take his shirt off to work in the hot Italian sun.

The invitation was clear, but Dick hadn’t taken her up on it yet. They’d had a frank discussion of her work and their boundaries when he’d been released by British Intelligence, but he simply wasn’t in the mood while she was gone. The young man in question had already agreed to help him surprise Jane for her birthday, though, and Dick was certainly looking forward to that.

“I don’t think that really applies,” he said mildly. “I never went to war, after all.”

Now Jane did look him in the eye.

“You got hurt, Dick. Really, really badly. I don’t think it matters much where it happened.”

Dick reached down and gently pulled Jane up into a hug, pressing her chest into his like a promise.

“I’m fine,” he said, and she gave him a Look.

“I will be fine,” he amended, shifting his grip so they could speak more easily. “I’m fit as a fiddle, and once I kick the stupid nightmare habit we’ll be partners for real.”

She huffed and pinched him.

“It is not a stupid nightmare habit - it’s not like you want to have them. But,” she looked up at him with a mix of forced cheer and determined optimism shining in her eyes brighter than any moonlight, “we will work through it. Together.”

He smiled. He liked the sound of that.

“Together,” he agreed.

“Again,” Paul requested politely.

Their teammate and current test subject, a three-foot-tall humanoid named Princess Hedgehog, huffed a little but obliged them. As neither of the pair had been deemed necessary for the current mission by their team leader - the cyborg John Stone - Paul had taken the opportunity to request the Princess allow them to run some tests on her magic. Ever enamored of being the center of someone’s attention, the Princess had agreed.

Paul found their magic fascinating. They were not unfamiliar with other kinds of magic; while the gladiatorial arena was hardly a good place to conduct thorough scientific experiments, they had managed over the years to develop some rudimentary testing protocols that had given them fascinating insights into the other competitors’ various flavors of magic. Then, after being sent to the colony of Hope, they had managed to refine their process further and quantified all kinds of new and interesting magics. They were all fascinating, and while some of them were trickier to study then others, they’d managed to find at least one instrument or process for each.

The study of magic was not one they’d had any interest in before their unfortunate removal from their home plane, but it was one they found endlessly interesting now. Most of the ones they’d studied so far had been beautiful in their own ways, the higher-order energies a challenge to observe and yet infinitely satisfying in the insights they derived from them. It was, therefore, almost vexing that Princess Hedgehog’s magic continued to defy their attempts to study it.

“You know, back on my planet I was one of the best magic users we had. Most of us could cast a spell or two, of course, but only a few of my siblings could cast more spells than I could. They were closer to the throne, of course, so it was more important that they know more spells, but really when it came to average magical power most of us could at least fly - pretty important when you’re only three feet tall you know.”

The smaller being had been monologuing the entire time Paul had been running their tests, but this particular thread of conversation piqued a certain amount of interest. “Are you saying proximity to the throne increased magical potential on your world?” They asked as they reset the instruments in front of them for another run. The results of the last three tests had been largely negligible - while the Princess’ internal nervous systems did spike in activity a little when they cast, it wasn’t any more than was caused by non-magical hand motions - but they wanted a statistically significant sample size before they pursued another avenue of research.

The much smaller Princess blinked up at the much larger Paul as they settled to the ground from where they’d been hovering. “Well, not exactly. It’s more like, the closer you were to the throne the more time you had to study and the more opportunities you had to bring stronger magic into your line.” They paused. “Except, of course, if you actually got the throne or were appointed to do something for the throne because then you were crazy busy and never had time for anything except business.”

Paul nodded. “That makes sense,” they said agreeably as they reset their instruments. Other species, they’d found, liked the redundancy of both a verbal and physical response to whatever had been said. Their own people had tended more towards an economy of communication, but some of their studies in Hope had led them to amend their mannerisms; it was not, after all, that much more effort and it garnered more cooperation from their contemporaries.

Their current lab partner flashed a brilliant smile at them. “Of course it does. Makes me glad I wasn’t too terribly close to the throne. Of course, if I had ended up assuming the throne, I would have been the best ruler our kingdom had ever seen. The most magnanimous, the most beloved, the most attractive - well, you see what I mean.”

Paul nodded again. “You do have a number of striking aesthetic qualities,” they replied truthfully.

While they’d figured out early on that most organics they’d met could not perceive the full range that their eyes could manage or sense the subtle electromagnetic fields that made up their species’ main avenue of communication both verbal and emotive, that didn’t stop them from emitting on that spectrum. The organics they’d met and studied had had limited electromagnetic fields in their own rights. Most of it was contained under the skin, and could be obscured or diffused by varying amount of fur or other coverings, and traced predictable paths with small enough variances in both frequency and intensity.

Not so Princess Hedgehog; to their eyes, the smaller being lit up like a firework. Brilliant shifts of both frequency and intensity made an ever-shifting halo around and through her form, and every single change in mood was reflected in that brilliant display. It was, without doubt or reservation, the most aesthetically pleasing thing Paul had had the privilege of seeing for a very long time, and made their current round of experiments all the more enjoyable. They had yet to determine which patterns went with which emotions or other actions, but the thought of finding out was entirely satisfying.

Princess Hedgehog beamed at them as they tapped the queuing sequence into the instruments, but they forestalled any response by looking up and nodding politely. “Whenever you’re ready,” they said, and the Princess nodded back agreeably.

A quick gesture had the Princess floating off the ground once more, and Paul checked their instruments. All of them showed continuing anomalous spikes in gravitational fields in the lab, and Paul paused in surprise for the briefest moments before making some adjustments. “Hmmm,” they said as they did so, and Princess floated to look over their shoulder.

“What? What is it? Did you find something?” The Princess’ rapid-fire questions were likely more a symbol of her boredom than true interest, but Paul had never been one to dismiss even the idlest of curiousity.

“The gravitational forces in the lab appear to be exhibiting behaviours inconsistent with their previously recorded baselines that I accounted for before we started our current course of experiments. Since we were slated to remain stationary until the rest of the team returned from their mission, I did not enhance the stabilization protocols on my instruments to account for external changes in gravitational constraints.” Princess’ attention visibly waned as Paul spoke, their hands moving methodically across the interface they’d set up as they engaged motion protocols and the instruments ceased registering anything particularly unusual.

The little goblin sighed and flitted back over to the testing area. “You’re lucky you’re cute, I don’t spend this much magic for just anyone,” they told Paul in a tone the much taller humanoid had learned to identify as at least partially joking.

Paul elected to take the comment at face value. “My thanks for your patience. Your magic is an intriguing as it is inscrutable, and from what you’ve told me so far your culture sounds absolutely fascinating.”

None of their tests so far had given them any relevant details on how the magic worked. They’d been working for several hours, and they were no closer to quantifying what her magic was than when they’d started. Oh, they’d managed to eliminate a large number of things her magic wasn’t of course; their entire set of baseline magic tests had proven it wasn’t anything they’d encountered previously, or even anything remotely similar to anything they’d encountered previously. It wasn’t some erroneously named manipulation of natural forces, and it wasn’t the intervention of extradimensional beings. The mystery of it was engaging their entire attention in a way few things had since their liberation from the arenas, and the methodical work of the testing they’d done so far was almost soothing in its own way.

The fact that the Princess’ was highly gregarious and very willing to talk at length about their absolutely fascinating culture was an un-looked-for - but highly welcome - bonus.

The large ears on both sides of the Princess’ head perked up, their electromagnetic fields flaring to an even greater brightness than usual. “Oh, well, did I ever tell you about the time that no less than fifteen princes got ejected from the line of succession?”

Paul shook their head as they reset their scanners again, and proceeded to listen to the long and involved tale that ensued as they ran test after test, and the hours slipped away pleasantly until the team returned.

Reese watched with interest as the second-tallest person on the ship walked around him slowly and carefully with what they had described as a hand-held elecromagnetic imager.

Reese wasn’t quite certain how he’d gone from sitting in his robot form in his comfortable, well-supplied room in the Metaverse Taskforce headquarters to driving down a poorly-maintained road in a whole different metaverse in his stagecoach mode. On the other hand, he still wasn’t certain how he’d come to be in the first place either so perhaps that was more of the same stuff; it probably wasn’t that important. What had been important were the people who’d come running up to him that had felt like more of his people. Well, kind of like his people. They weren’t as much his people as his boy was, but they were much more so than anyone else he’d encountered in that metaverse. So he’d given them a lift, and they’d given him beer.

Moving through that metaverse had certainly been an experience; for once, it had been okay that he was a stagecoach. He’d actually seen other stagecoaches on the road there! Though none of them were quite as large as he was, or quite as fast. He also wasn’t certain why they’d needed real horses but he hadn’t gotten the chance to ask at the time and it seemed silly to now that they’d gone and left that place behind entirely.

He hadn’t quite been introduced to everyone when they’d come to that metaverse to pick him up (for reasons he was still unclear on, he couldn’t just stay). Four of them had been rather busy with the four who had been his people but weren’t any more - he still wasn’t 100% on their names yet. John Stone he’d already been familiar with, though the man hadn’t seemed particularly pleased to see him; Reese couldn’t imagine why, the man was the most his of all the people on board and Reese had carried him across the country and under the sea multiple times. The other person not involved in greeting the four humans who had and then hadn’t been his had introduced themselves as Paul.

Reese wasn’t quite sure what to make of Paul; on the one hand, the person hadn’t given him any shit for being a stagecoach, which put them several ranks above pretty much anyone else he’d met for the first time. On the other hand, they had refused to give him any booze or booze-adjacent beverages and even Patric had managed that courtesy a few times. Paul seemed more interested in what made Reese tick, which was uncomfortable given the amount of time Director Hamilton had spent preventing other people back at home from trying to determine that very same thing.

Still, at least Paul was polite about it and their methods were much less invasive than “pull all his screws out,” which Reese appreciated. Plus their lab was one of the few places onboard the ship with high enough ceilings that Reese could rest comfortably in his stagecoach form and not have to worry about John Stone yelling at him for damaging the ventilation with his luggage rack. It had only happened once, but when John Stone yelled it was a memorable experience and one that Reese was definitely not interested in being on the receiving end of again in the near future.

“Fascinating.”

Reese was pulled abruptly back to the present from his fond memories of the one time John Stone and Patric had gotten into a yelling match within his hearing. Patric was mean, but he was also stubborn and contrary and all of that added up to being one of the few people who wouldn’t automatically do something just because John Stone was yelling at them. Not unless Patric had independently decided that the thing was important to do, anyway. His boy had told him of a few other fights the two had had, but they’d only done it once where Reese could witness.

“What’s fascinating? I mean, I know I am but I think you’re being more specific.”

Reese was curious. He’d never figured out really where he’d come from or why he was alive; his memories started at a lonely gas station in the middle of Nowhere, North Carolina, and before that there was nothing. He had no idea why he could turn into a human-shape or a submarine-shape, or why some people where his to him, or why he could really do with a drink right now. Though, if Paul had something alcoholic, maybe -

“My scans show only those parts present as correspond to the provided diagrams of ‘stagecoaches’ that I found in the Reliance’s database,” Paul began, interrupting Reese’s inevitable train of thought. “And there’s no obvious mechanism for consciousness or indeed self-propulsion. Yet you manifestly do just that.”

Reese rocked on his wheels, the best approximation to a nod he could do in his stagecoach mode. “And turn into a person and a submarine,” he added helpfully, and Paul paused.

“A person and a…submarine?” They responded carefully, large hands still on controls of the imager.

Reese rocked again. “Yep. Makes drinkin’ much easier, and we had to get into an underwater base so I became a submarine, too.” He paused. “Not sure how that happened. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t turn into a submarine before then, but I could when they needed me to.”

Paul nodded thoughtfully, placing the imager on a nearby desk before fiddling with something that had large lenses. “Very interesting. Do you maintain your mass through your changes? Can you turn into anything else? Would you be willing to demonstrate one or both of your other forms here in the laboratory?”

They didn’t stop moving as they spoke, and Reese watched mesmerized as they calmly and unhurriedly adjusted instruments, changed settings, and re-positioned instruments all around him in a wide circle. It wasn’t until they paused and looked in his direction did he remember they’d asked him a question.

“Oh! Yeah, sure. I mean, I definitely change size when I change shape - I’m big enough to carry a crew when I’m a submarine, but only nine people as a stagecoach. Plus I get way taller when I stand up.”

Reese looked up at the ceiling and shifted on his axles a little.

“I’m too big to stand up in here, but maybe if I-”

Paul didn’t pressure him, instead choosing an instrument from one of the array set neatly on a nearby lab table and training it on him. Reese gauged the height of the room one more time - ten feet, maybe? - before taking a metaphorical breath and heaving himself over sideways.

Transforming into his robot form was a kind of relief - he had tension in servos he didn’t know he had and stretching them felt profoundly good - but doing it while basically lying down was supremely awkward. His wheel assembly scraped along the floor with a noise that set his wires on edge as it shifted to make room for his head and arms. He had to yank his leg-servos out the rest of the way as the mechanisms - designed to have the aid of gravity - stopped two-thirds of the way through. The wagon tongue detached with a CLANG as his head hit it at a weird angle, and he hissed out a word he’d heard Patric use the last time his supplier had been late.

The end result had him lying on his side on the floor, and he took a moment to contemplate Paul from the new angle. Seeing things in his stagecoach form wasn’t always clear; the angles got odd sometimes, and if he looked the right way he got a weird fish-eye effect that he was pretty sure none of his people had to deal with. Paul was taller than he’d given him credit for, and built sturdier. The rocky face was set in an expression of polite neutrality, and the hands looked less than a third as dexterous as he knew them to be. It was odd; Paul felt like one of his people, even if it was sort of a weak feeling, but none of his people had even looked like that before.

Still, Reese wasn’t really in a position to throw stones about looking weird, and while he did miss his beer terribly there was something refreshing to being out and about again. Director Hamilton never willingly let him leave the facility anymore, and it could get kinda boring day in and day out.

Paul tapped a few buttons on their chosen instrument and looked down at him.

“Fascinating.”

Reese grinned up at them.

He could work with that.

Paul had made a miscalculation.

Again.

It wasn’t that they were unaware of the body around them; the complex electrochemical processes that the body used to function were fascinating, even from this angle. It was, after all, one thing to know intellectually that human-type organic sentients operated by the transmission of electrical impulses along pathways of specialized cells via electrically-active chemicals, and quite another to experience it. Paul had spent a large portion of the first day in this metaverse content to simply watch as their avatar Gabe conducted his business - from the fear that the bully Chet inspired to the happiness of being with friends, all of it transmitted unique chemicals to the brain where they activated different portions depending on their makeup and quantity.

Then, too, had been the interactions between Gabe and his progenitors. They had asked him about his day, and the accessing of memories had meant even more chemicals. Paul was beginning to really grasp why his organic team members sometimes had trouble recalling things when they were low on chemicals of any kind, and they’d spent a portion of the night that their avatar was sleeping designing and refining formulas for various chemical mixes that their teammates could use in place of meals when they were in a hurry. Though the meal itself was quite pleasant; the foods were all ones that sparked an increase of pleasurable hormones in Gabe’s brain, which in turn lead to an increase in his creativity and energy levels and a good hour spent surreptitiously assembling another invention to be placed in his satchel.

Paul remained unconvinced that mastication was really a necessary first step in the process, however; it was remarkably inefficient energy use when chemicals could be obtained pre-ground and ready for ingestion.

No, Paul was extremely aware that they were not in their own body, it was simply that they’d pushed their analyses of the constant chemical processes to the back of their mind and forgotten that they themselves were not physically present in a laboratory setting. The constant inputs, the chemical inputs and outputs, the presence of their teammates in the other avatars - it had, quite honestly, slipped Paul’s mind that they were in the body of a pre-adolescent humanoid.

One with blood currently dripping down his knuckles.

“Dude! What?!”

“Gabe! Why!”

Their avatar’s friends and fellow pre-adolescent avatars were aghast, and Paul couldn’t blame them even as they inspected their avatar’s knuckles. The impact with the wall had bust a fair number of sub-dermal blood vessels as well as damaged the superficial dermal layer. A flex of the hand was enough to know that none of the bones had slipped out of joint and the tendons were working fine so they’d at least avoided doing permanent damage. It still radiated chemical pain signals, but not nearly so many as the damages from earlier had and were therefore easy to ignore.

That had been their other miscalculation. While statistically it had been unlikely they’d get all of the hostile adults with one set of gas bombs, Paul had thought they’d have more time to react. Chemical impulses were inefficient means of delivering information, after all, and the space between one heartbeat and the next was an eternity if you could perceive things quickly enough. Still, Paul had not accounted for the chemical impulses of Gabe’s body freezing upon being presented with the danger of a loaded gun pointed in their direction, and the shot had torn through Gabe’s chosen shirt and coat - and skin - without being much impeded at all.

The amount of chemical pain signals had been almost overwhelming, and a number of other alarming chemical shifts had also taken place almost immediately. A slowing of the heart rate, a 70% increase in respiration per second, and a constriction of blood vessels beyond a certain distance away from the heart; Paul had observed shock in others, but had never really experienced it firsthand. It was unpleasant, but then so was bleeding to death. They had at least retained enough presence of mind to ensure the older humans would find it difficult to follow the group, at least, and that had been sufficient.

Still, the other avatars were waiting for their response now.

“I got confused. Um.” Paul hesitated to outright state that they had forgotten they were not in their usual body. While they and Gabe maintained a cordial sort of communication as each of them waxed and waned in control of Gabe’s body, it seemed like the other avatars did not really remember their pilots when their pilots were not in partial control. It bore speculation, and possibly future experimentation, to see whether or not the full knowledge of Paul’s existence and mission could be passed along to their avatar and maintained even when Paul was relegated to the back of their shared conscious.

“It’s an id- we gotta figure out how to do it first. Not now. We’re not even there yet!” Judging by the cadence and vocal intonations, Larry Walker was somewhere between upset and annoyed. While he was unlikely to be aware of Paul’s full mistake, it still fell to them to take responsibility for their actions.

They just had to figure out the best way to do that in a fashion that would not upset Larry Walker further.

“I. I, uh, I messed up.” Acknowledgement of the error was step one. Step two was somewhat more difficult, as there were no immediately available remedies to the problem Paul had caused. The hand would heal with time, and was not worth wasting more of Princess Hedgehog’s magic on when they would likely need it more later.

“I have some bandages-” Larry Walker began, but was cut off by Glynn Ordoham - who, upon looking closer, was definitely sharing control with Princess Hedgehog. Interesting. Paul had to wonder how they maintained the balance; the two beings shared a penchant for chaos and going off on tangents, but Paul remained uncertain if that was the source of their balance, or the spite of it.

“Give me that. Monster bandaids,” they explained seriously as they placed on carefully on Gabe’s hand and Paul blinked. That did stop some of the chemical pain signals.

“Thanks.”

Of the many things Paul found interesting about sharing a body with a humanoid organism, pain wasn’t one them. They would have to be more careful in the future.

Vector hummed under his breath as he worked feverishly on connecting the mail coils of the salvaged gun to the internal controlling systems of the Reliance.

“Vector Raynes, fights woe and strife! Vector Raynes, he’ll save your life!” he sang quietly, the old tune echoing in his mind. He hadn’t been certain about the cartoon, when he’d first heard the pitch. All his adventures up until that point had been filmed live-action, and done astronomically well in sales. Animation, though, was a very different kettle of space whales - though they’d promised that they’d be able to use his voice samples to make sure he sounded right. He’d eventually ended up okaying it, and it had taken off like all his other works had. The kids loved The Space Adventures of Vector Raynes, and that had eventually ended up spawning an entire merchandising line that had put his face on every kid’s lunchbox in the Spinwise Drift.

Very lucrative, and the theme song was catchy as hell.

“Vector Raynes with his fine guns! Bring them up, two, one. Boom! Boom!” he continued under his breath as the spanner finally caught and the coil twisted tight. He’d always been good with his hands - all his partners would be more than willing to testify to that, though the majority of them were permanently unavailable for comment - but back home he’d left most of the mechanisms to Johnny Two Layer. He’d picked Johnny up not long after he’d gotten out of the army - well, more accurately he’d picked Johnny’s ship up and Johnny had come along for the ride. Johnny had been a good sport about the whole thing, remarking more than once that working for one man was just the same as working for another, as long as he kept his ship with him.

He hadn’t been so complimentary the first few times they’d to detonate the ship to keep pursuers off their tail, or had it blown out from under them by a lucky shot, but had eventually decided that as long as certain parts - critical components he’d yanked from the first ship before it had blown - were the same, then it was the same ship. Johnny’s ship had ended up with a dozen and more different “looks” over the years, but it was always Johnny’s ship and he’d taken good care of her until the day Vector himself had been taken away somewhere else.

Vector’s hands faltered for a moment as he wondered if Johnny had stayed with his ship until the very end, but then he shook his head. That kind of thinking about things that had already happened and couldn’t be changed helped no-one. He’d be the first to recount tales of his heroic deeds to anyone who’d listen - especially movie producers - but that kind of memory didn’t sell tickets. It wasn’t glorious, or heroic, and it hurt more to think about than it helped, so he simply shoved the memory away. Johnny Two Layer would always be with his ship in Vector’s stories, and that was that.

Plus he had new teammates now. Rhonda was a decent person, whatever reservations Vector himself had about what was actually between her ears. Paul and Princess Hedgehog were useful, and not too grating, and Jonomox would do better once he’d found his footing. Once the team was his, the character dynamics would even out nicely for Vector Raynes and the Reliables.

The only thing that stood in the way of that successful venture was current team leader, John Stone. Vector had to shake his head as he repositioned his tool; John Stone was competent, it was true, but he’d never met a more cheerless, mission-driven bastard - and he’d known his old first mate Sergio back in his lawman days. Stone was a good operative, but he was far from ready for the silver screen and aside from his history with the Council, Vector wasn’t quite sure why they’d chosen Stone for this team’s leader. Still, all he had to do was prove exactly how much better suited he was for the role - and step one was getting the Reliance armed and ready for whatever was coming next.

Vector resumed his humming as he fine-tuned the tension in the coils. The design of the alien gun was, well, alien to him, but in the end a gun was a gun. Whether you used a projectile weapon, a regulated stream of energy, a compressed squirt of some kind of liquid, or emitted some kind of plasma or gas, a gun was a gun was a gun - and Vector knew them all. His preferred guns were on his hips even now, not that he ever let Calamity and Hickock out of his sight if he could help it, but he’d used innumerable guns over the years. The one that had left the biggest impression was the station-mounted magnetic acceleration cannon he’d once used to remove a rogue asteroid from existence - the memory of that kind of power with his thumb on the trigger had kept him warm many a lonely night - but this one he’d salvaged was possibly the strangest.

For one thing, he’d had to jerry-rig a control mechanism. The thing hadn’t had one when he’d gotten his hands on it, almost as if its makers had trusted it to know when to fire itself. Which, given what he’d seen of the weird not-robots, wasn’t that far outside the realm of possibility when he thought about it. Still, he’d scavenged one from a system that he was about 86% certain was a redundant back-up system that controlled the shower pressures in the cabins and made it work. Fine aiming would probably have to be done on manual, but as long as he was at the controls that wouldn’t be a problem.

Another weird thing had been the energy distribution system. The thing had come horribly unbalanced, which he would have suspected as being part and parcel with their salvaging of it except that there hadn’t been a place for the coils to go elsewhere. All the other systems he’d seen had had the coils spread out some to make for more efficient heat dissipation and maintenance cycles, but this one had simply folded back in on itself nearly endlessly. It had taken him hours to comb through each circuit and pace it out, but he had it now and the diagnostics confirmed that it appeared to be working - when the diagnostic computers were on anyway, they seemed to be having trouble with power.

Still it was here, it was controllable and now - Vector grunted as he turned the spanner one last time and the coils sparked for a moment with life - it was integrated with the power grid on the ship. If those robot-energy-whatevers showed up again, Vector would primed and ready to show them what he could really do.

The lights went out.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Vector Raynes! It’s Vector Raynes!”

Vector smiled widely and nodded at the innumerable small children all screaming his name. When he’d first floated the idea to his publicist to make the premiere of his latest feature film - Vector Raynes vs Spider Robots from the Hellverge! - a matinee, and invite a large number of underprivileged youth, the man had been somewhat resistant to the idea. Underprivileged children were not the ones who spent money to see films, after all. Still, with the latest adventure having resulted in heavy damage to a lot of public buildings - Vector Raynes Saves Earthbase Colony II, coming to theaters next March - he’d eventually been swayed by the argument that they needed some good press to offset that debacle.

Not that Vector would have ever accepted another outcome, of course, but the publicist was the sort of man who needed to think things were his idea before he went along with them. It was annoying, but the man was the best at his job and Vector was willing to tolerate a lot for competence - especially when he didn’t have to live the other man in the confines of the ship.

Sergio had declined to come, of course, as had Johnny Two Layer - though the latter had been a lot more reluctant about the decision. The Golden Fleece had suffered almost as much damage as the buildings had during the last mission, and Johnny was always loath to leave the old girl busted up for long when he had the money and parts on hand to fix her. Most of the rest of the crew had sided with Sergio; their last adventure had been exhausting, and none of the others particularly wanted to deal with uncountable numbers of extremely loud and adoring fans.

As it stood, Vector was flanked on one side by the enormous four-armed presence of Sir Edmund “Hotpot” Lagrosse and on the other by the much more subtle one of Mobius, The Blind Man, and the children seemed delighted for the most part. There were a few clutching memorabilia of other members of his crew and looking disappointed, but they were quickly supplanted by more enthusiastic fans.

A path had been laid out for them through the throng with red carpeting, velvet ropes keeping the worst of the crowd at bay. Most of the shorter children were held back by larger, older children who were wise enough to know what the ropes meant, and the few that escaped their handlers were scooped up by someone else with reasonable speed. Many of them sported official Vector Raynes brand merchandise, Vector’s own face flashing and winking at him from hundreds if not thousands of different directions - though there were a smattering of kids wearing merch with his teammates. Sergio was surprisingly the second most popular, but there were gaggles and pockets of fans wearing the others’ merch as well.

Hotpot seemed quite take with a small gaggle of screaming 8-year-olds, all of them wearing shirts with his name blazoned across the shoulders and little fake extra arms hanging down, and veered away from Vector and Mobius as the kids went absolutely wild. Hotpot wasn’t a quiet being, sounding like a cross between a bullfrog and a bullhorn at the best of times, but the cloud of shrieking children that coalesced around him faster than buzzards on drek-meat was more than enough to drown him out. Mobius flashed an 8-bit laughing face on his helm, and Vector had to join him in enjoying the hilarity of the sight of Hotpot trying to keep kids from climbing him like a jungle gym. Hotpot looked like he was trying desperately to get the kids to quiet down, but they all seemed to take it as a cue to scream louder than ever.

“Vector Raynes! Vector Raynes! Over here!”

A particularly piercing shriek had Vector wincing a little as he turned to see what the commotion was. A small boy, probably no more than 9, was hanging off the ropes that hung beside the red carpet and looking adorably determined. Vector could see a woman - probably a relative, given the resigned-yet-fond look on her face - hanging on to the back of the kid’s coat and probably the sole reason he hadn’t actually come running up to Vector like he so clearly wanted. Vector felt a subtle shove on his shoulder in the kid’s direction, but when he looked around Mobius was doing his extremely-innocent-I-wasn’t-even-there posture and entertaining another part of the crowd by flashing fight scenes on his visor.

Vector shrugged internally and headed over to the kid, who stopped trying to drag himself over the rope and instead started jumping up and down in excitement.

“Mom! Mom! It’s Vector Raynes!”

Vector grinned down at the kid, charmed in spite of himself at the enthusiasm.

“Well well well, what do we have here?” he asked, unsurprised when the kid took his somewhat rhetorical question at face value.

“Vector Raynes! Hello Mr. Raynes, my name is Sam, and I’m your biggest fan!”

The kid puffed out his chest as much as any nine-year-old kid could, and Vector’s own face winked charmingly back from under the tagline for the Vector Raynes cartoon. Vector Raynes Fights Woe And Strife! The t-shirt proudly proclaimed, and Vector could feel a warm glow in his chest. He loved adventure, loved finding out secrets and mysteries and fighting bad guys with his crew at his back, but it was nice to be reminded every now and again that there was more to it than the desires of one man and his crew. The things he did had real, tangible benefits for society - most of the time - and it wasn’t just the editors making him look good on film (and other mediums).

“I can certainly see that,” he replied kindly, and the kid nodded so vigorously Vector wasn’t sure his head wouldn’t fall off.

“Yeah! All my t-shirts are Vector Raynes t-shirts, an’ I have all the trading cards, an’ I have all your hologames, an’ I have the sweet hologram lunchbox!” he enthused, and Vector threw his head back to laugh.

“Well! I’m glad your parents approve of me enough to get all that for you.” He spoke mostly to the kid, but spared a quick questioning look at Sam’s mother - who still had her hand clenched in the back of Sam’s light Vector Raynes branded coat. She looked tired, but returned his glance with a nod and a shy smile - and a quick flash of a Vector Raynes charm bracelet - and he felt his own grow. It was nice to see a family sticking together in an enthusiasm.

“Mr. Raynes, would you sign my baseball bat? It’d be real swell if you did, all the other kids back home would be so jealous!” Sam didn’t wait to finish speaking before pawing at the bag at his feet and disinterring a Vector Raynes Junior Slugger from its depths. Vector Raynes hadn’t actually had the chance to look over the new line of sports merchandise yet - samples had been sent to the ship, and Johnny had okayed their quality, but they’d been pulled into a mission involving illegal animal smuggling across planetary bounds and Vector simply hadn’t had the time since to check. They’d gone into production very recently, and the one in the kid’s hands looked to be one of the first thousand in the run.

Silently he held his hands out, and the kid deposited the baseball bat into them with a shriek of delight. Vector weighed the bat in his hands as he looked along its length. The Vector Raynes logo was burned crisply into the wood of the widest end, lines running from it and along the grain to grip. Each line was interrupted in smooth sequence by the name of one of Vector’s teammates, and his own name was embroidered on the smooth, comfortable wrapping on the grip. He took a few experimental swings with it and found Johnny had been right; the thing - while much too short for him - was beautifully balanced for a smaller frame and was a high quality of craftsmanship.

He grinned down at Sam, who had stars in his eyes at the sight of Vector Raynes swinging his bat. Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out the one thing he never went to one of these events without - a bold permanent marker. He’d learned early on that when people requested his signature they liked it best when it was easily visible, and that almost nobody had the best writing utensil for it when they asked him. Making sure to mark between the lines, he signed his name with a bold flourish along the grain and held the bat back out to the kid - who now looked to be on the verge of hyperventilating. The kid’s mother seemed to sense how close Sam was to passing out, because she switched her grip from the back of his coat to around the kid’s shoulders and flashed Vector a brilliant smile before nodding at him.

“Very generous of you, Mr. Raynes. What do we say, Sam?”

Sam looked up from where he’d been staring at the bat with honest-to-goodness tears in his eyes, and Vector felt a little thrill of alarm shoot through him.

“Th-thank you, Mr. Raynes,” the kid managed to stutter out before bursting into tears.

Sam’s mother scooped him up with the ease of long practice before nodding to Vector an melting away in the crowd. Vector shrugged; he hadn’t meant to make the kid cry, but apparently most of his dreams coming true all at once had been overwhelming. More kids stepped up to fill the gap Sam had left, and Vector spent the next several minutes autographing everything from posters to t-shirts to a baby blanket held out to him by a desperately hopeful-looking man in his early twenties, whose kid was sound asleep on his shoulder.

He didn’t know how long it had been before he felt an authoritative tap on his shoulder, and he turned to find Mobius flashing a digital time display at him from his helmet, with a slightly disheveled Hotpot looming up behind him. Less than twenty minutes to the premiere, and they still needed to get inside. Vector nodded to his teammates before turning to the crowd.

“Alright folks! Let’s get moving inside! It’s almost time for the worlds premiere of Vector Raynes vs Spider Robots from the Hellverge!” His voice, trained to shout over explosions and blasterfire, carried easily over the hubbub of the crowd and people began shuffling obediently away. Satisfied, Vector gestured for his team to follow him as he began making his way down the red carpet.

As he walked, the details of the world around him got fuzzier; Hotpot walked companionably along beside him one moment, then it was Sergio trooping quietly down the red carpet. The bright flashes of light from the paparazzi drones faded into one large mass of brightness, and his legs seemed to get heavier with each step. There was something, he just had to- it was the premiere was starting, he was sitting in the theater. Leaned back and reclining in his chair, his teammates around - funny, the crowd was still talking-

Vector’s eyes flew open to a cold, blank ceiling, the hubbub of his many fans replaced in an instant by the hum of machines and the somewhat snarky voice of Jonomox.

“Welcome back to the land of the waking, Vector, glad you could join us. Now let’s get the hell out of here before they come looking and find you gone.”

Doctor Archibald Creed looked on with barely-contained impatience as two brawny soldiers sweated and grunted their way through transferring a very heavy crate from the cart they’d pushed it in on to the examination table Dr. Creed had prepared.

It wasn’t often that Creed got the chance to be the first to examine a newly-found piece of Martian technology, but die Kommandeure had been very impressed with his work on integrating Martian energy-weapon technology into the latest round of gun upgrades. So impressed, in fact, that Creed had been granted his choice of the next three shipments of technology found on Mars with the promise that if his research bore additional useful fruit, he would get his choice indefinitely.

Creed didn’t really care whether or not die Kommandeure were impressed with his findings, but he had chosen his first research subject carefully when word had come that a new cache had been discovered on Mars. The specimen in question was encased in a roughly rectangular chunk of rock; the excavators had identified it by the smooth half-dome of metal protruding from one side and had deemed it unwise to try and remove more stone in the precarious conditions of the Martian mines. What had piqued Creed’s interest in it was the tag that it had come from the same mine that the energy projectors he had worked on previously had come from. The work on the energy projectors had been revelatory, but a single data point did not a theory make and he wanted to test his theories again before bringing them to his fellow scientists.

The files on the xenotech cache had been thorough, if extremely preliminary. Once it was determined that a section of rock did indeed contain the technology the Reich so desperately wanted, mining operations in that spur would cease as scanning teams were sent in to document the find and determine the best way to extract it. Pictures would be taken of any exposed machinery, and small charges would be used and recorded to form an incomplete picture of what lay inside the wall. The survey team would them mark the specific places for the miners to dig out and around, and the workers would be brought back into the spur to do the actual labor of removal.

What had caught Creed’s attention for this particular item was the exposed surface; while it wasn’t an unusual material for Martian technology, other items that had been found with active energy sources had had similar rounded covers over the energetic portions. While the survey team hadn’t reported any of the usual symptoms of finding a Martian energy source, that did not necessarily rule it out. None of the other artifacts in the shipment had been recorded as having even the slightest possibility of energy cores, and so Creed had made the most logical decision possible with the data available to him.

With one final - and, in Creed’s opinion, completely unnecessary - grunt, the two soldiers placed their burden on the brightly-lit metal surface and stepped back, mopping their faces. Dismissing them with a wave to their more usual positions on either side of the door, Creed surged forward to reveal his prize. His quick hands made short work of the crate that hid the large, irregularly shaped object even as his assistant began methodically laying out the tools he would use to excavate the Martian relics concealed inside the stone. And plaster, he noted as the sides of the crate fell away to reveal an expanse of white broken only by the neat lettering of the time, date, and location of the artifact’s discovery. While Creed could appreciate the caution that extended to the additional protective measures, it was just one more thing he would need to remove before his studies could begin in earnest.

Without looking, he held his dominant hand towards the assistant. “Rotary,” he requested almost absently, his whole attention focused on the plaster-covered monolith before him. While the saw would remove the plaster just fine, it would do little to nothing against the rock underneath - and would almost certainly destroy the rotary blade in the process. He would have to cut very precisely to avoid the rock and exposed Martian tech; fortunately, the files had included sufficient pictures to give him a good idea of what lay where beneath the smooth plaster surface. He simply needed the right tool for the job.

As soon as the rotary cutter was in his hand Creed began cutting along the lines he’d identified in his preliminary inspections, eager to get to the more important objects lurking beneath it. White dust filled the air as the hand-held saw chewed busily through the plaster, the high whining that accompanied it grating but within acceptable aural limits given what it heralded. Four cuts yielded a large section of plaster that Creed carefully lifted and discarded, only vaguely aware of his assistant taking the large, irregularly-shaped white chunk and removing it from the lab entirely. Creed’s eyes were glued on the sight before him.

Rising approximately four centimeters out of the dull grey stone was a hemisphere of what appeared to be some form of brass; if it was anything like the rest of the Martian tech recovered, that appearance would be only the most superficial resemblance. Martian technology had, so far, been made exclusively of a proprietary alloy of common Earth metals and mined asteroid metals that gave it the same approximate color of brass and both a durability and a melting point much in the excess of common steel. A fact which Creed was well-prepared to take advantage of.

“Laser stylet,” he ordered, setting aside the rotary and holding out his hand for the next tool.

His assistant wasted no time in handing him the long, tapered wand of the Martian-based laser cutter. Too unwieldy to use in the field, the laser cutter had been reverse-engineered by a Dr. Hans von Kemseke several years ago. The original prototype had proven sufficient to melt through several inches of solid steel, and even cut into relatively thin portions of Martian plating. Creed had made his own adjustments to the model stored in his lab, including an extensible connection to the large canister of xenon gas that the tool required for use, and it boasted several times the accuracy and radial control of even the most cutting-edge model currently in manufacture.

Adjusting the dial at the top of the wand, Creed bent slightly to get a better look at the rock surrounding the xenotech. While he had set the stylet to a precise, if low-power, range - and it was consequently unlikely to damage the technology encased below the rock’s outer layers - it would be better if there was an absolute minimum of interaction between laser and Martian technology. While there had never been a previously recorded case of the lasers provoking any kind of reaction from - or, more importantly, doing any damage to - this kind of xenotech, that was no guarantee of future events.

Narrowing his eyes, Creed flicked the switch at the top of the wand and a thin blue line lanced out from the tip to the surface of the rock some 12.1 centimeters from the exposed portion of technology. While the initial ultrasounds of the object, taken in the mine, had revealed only another 8 centimeters of denser matter in this direction, it was a better idea to leave a margin for error and work closer with a less potentially damaging tool. The laser struck the surface of the rock with a tone only just within the range of hearing; Creed set his jaw and drew the laser down smoothly in the first of several cuts.

While the noises the laser produced were only just on the edge of his tolerance, it was the best tool for the job and within a few minutes Creed had managed to remove most of the rocky detritus that had been surrounding the Martian tech. Shutting the laser off with a sub-vocalised sigh of relief, he carefully set it to one side. It was unlikely but not impossible that he would require it again, and his driving need to get his hands on the xenotech as soon as possible suggested that it was better to have the stylet on hand and ready than to wait for his assistant to set it up.

While much of the laboratory was now covered in a fine layer of rock dust, the irregular shape on the examination table was much reduced in size. As Creed had suspected, over 45% of the material in the container had simply been entrapping rock - though it wasn’t hard to see how the techs on the ground had been mistaken about the object’s size. Cursory examination was enough to reveal a layer of dark, mineral-rich rock in the excised debris near the object; while lacking in the smooth lines of the xenotech, it would have reflected enough of the ultrasonics to confuse the sensors. It had meant that Creed was able to remove a much greater amount of material than he had first anticipated with the stylet, and the resultant lump of rock and technology was approximately 20 centimeters wide and almost 40 long, with a more regular shape beginning to emerge from under the stone.

With a pick, chisel, and brush alternately held and handed to him by his assistant, Creed set about removing the rest of the stone from the technology. While it had taken less than half an hour for the rough shape of the xenotech to become clear, it took more than three to remove the stone encasing it in its entirety. A series of regular protrusions approximately .16 centimeters wide by 5 centimeters tall marched along both sides of the object up until the midway point, where it held almost a hinged shape - the outermost portion of which had formed the raised hemisphere above the rock’s surface. It appeared that perhaps the protrusions were meant to slot together in some fashion, pivoting on the hinge, but Creed refused to start formulating theories based entirely on visual inspection. More often than not, Martian technology proved to defy its first appearances rather than validate them.

Finally the last of the rock was gone, and Creed stepped back from the table for a moment to clean his most important tools; his hands. Long, with a wiry deftness to them that spoke of much practice and familiarity, Creed preferred to make preliminary examinations with the sensitive pads of his fingers whenever possible. More than once, he had discovered some small but crucial detail that was dismissed as sensor error by other scientists, and he was always certain to clean his hands thoroughly before examinations began to ensure a minimum of contamination by his own sweat and oils.

Reaching for the recorder resting near the washing station, Creed flipped it on before beginning to cleanse the rock dust and grit from his hands.

“Day one. Preliminary scans sent in the dossier from the survey team estimated a piece of xenotechnology approximately 75 centimeters in length and 26 centimeters across, however upon detailed excavation of the subject those projections proved to be false. Dark rock of a density in excess of 2900 kilograms per cubic meter and a hardness exceeding 7 was found in close proximity, and may hinder further search efforts in the region by disguising internal material signatures to most basic scanning equipment. Note to forward findings to the geological survey teams. Furthermore - ”

The sound of metal scraping on metal punctuated by a hysterical shriek interrupted him, and Creed spun to find out what the source of the noise was.

The sight that met his eyes was not one he would have predicted. His assistant had begun taking the precise measurements of every portion of the technology as was necessary for proper documentation - measurements Creed himself would have of course double-checked - and had apparently inadvertently activated a mechanical portion of the object. The center point that was the section that Creed had identified earlier as possibly some sort of hinge had apparently been exactly that, and whatever the assistant had pushed or brushed had brought the two halves up in an attempt close together and instead had driven the .16 centimeter protrusions deep into his assistant’s hand and arm.

Creed stepped forward swiftly, ignoring the screaming of the assistant and the shocked oaths from both the guards standing by the door. Grabbing the punctured hand he swiftly twisted it first one way, then the other, ignoring the pained squeals the motion elicited; while the blood made it difficult to judge things precisely, it seemed like whatever mechanism the assistant had inadvertently triggered was not one that would be easily disabled.

“What happened?” he demanded, words cutting crisply and calmly through the pained gibbering of the assistant.

One of the guards, face paler than his platinum-blonde hair, stepped forward and swallowed visibly. “Herr Doktor, I could not see clearly from my station - the assistant was turned away - it-”

Creed waved him away in irritation. Whatever his assistant had done, clearly there would be no getting a coherent explanation while the Martian technology was buried in the offending hand. Additionally, while it did not on cursory glance appear to have taken any damage from being exposed to the chemical cocktail that was human blood, he didn’t like to think of the contamination his experiments would suffer at this lapse. And he was loathe the damage the mechanism simply for some half-trained idiot who clearly should not have been allowed into a laboratory setting without further instruction.

His eyes fell on one of the tools on the table, and instantly, the solution was simple. It was a work of a moment to pull the stylet wand off the table and flick it on. A wordless shout echoed from the closest guard, but Creed had already drawn a precise line across the assistant’s arm approximately 2 centimeters above the embedded Martian technology. There was sizzling sound and the somewhat unpleasant smell of burning flesh and uniform, and the Martian technology fell back onto the examination table with a heavy thunk.

“Gott in Himmel!”

Which of the guards actually shouted and which of them rushed forward to catch the assistant slowly crumpling towards the floor, Creed couldn’t tell; his attention was wholly fixed on the technology now safely back on his examination station. The flow of blood had largely stopped, now that the arm was disconnected from its source, but removing the .16 centimeter protrusions from the soft tissues remained something of a problem.

“Herr Doktor! Was machen wir!?”

Creed didn’t spare glance from the important work before him.

“Take them to the either the prosthesis lab or the anatomists,” he replied disinterestedly. If the assistant lived, he had spaced his cut quite carefully and the prosthesis lab would likely be able to find a suitable replacement that needed field testing. If the shock proved to be too much to survive, then the anatomists could use the corpse for student dissection. Either way was an efficient use of an available resource and, more importantly, somewhere where Creed would not have to deal with the problem.

“Jawohl, Herr Doktor.” He could hear scraping and shuffling behind him, but Creed didn’t bother to look. He had far more work ahead of him, extricating the delicate mechanism from its current fleshy prison. Which would, of course, be easier with another set of hands.

“Please inform Hauptmann Dietrich that I require another assistant,” he said, raising his voice to a precisely calculated degree.

Approximately 3.2 seconds of silence met his request.

“Ja…Jawohl, Herr Doktor.”

Creed nodded to himself, and set to work.

None of the desperados lounging around the fire even batted an eye when Beaumont Morningstar stepped into the firelight. It had been a long, hard day of riding, and all of them were streaked with mud and sweat. At least, most of it was sweat and if any of it wasn’t nobody was complaining about it.

Beaumont stepped around the fire to one particularly louche figure, pausing for the briefest of instants before settling down beside them. Bright eyes slid over to him for a long moment before turning back to the fire, and the figure shifted so their legs knocked into his.

“What took y'so long? If you got digestive problems again, reckon’ the doc’s probably got something that’d clean you out.”

Shane Masters’ voice was quiet but carried the lilt of amusement, and Beaumont snorted as he kicked them none-too-gently in the ankle.

“What Doc’s got’s as like to set me on fire as it is to cure any ails I do not have,” he responded with as much dignity as he could muster, and Masters rolled their eyes.

“Well, then, if you ain’t sick what took you so long? I was gettin’ lonesome.”

Masters winked and it was Beaumont’s turn to roll his eyes.

“A horse looked like it was about to come up lame. Figured we ain’t got time for a lame horse, so I took a couple minutes pickin’ th’ stone out.”

Masters raised an eyebrow.

“Never took you for a horse-lover, Beaumont. And that nag a’ yours was ridin’ fine earlier.”

Beaumont shifted uncomfortably and looked back to the fire.

“Never said it was my horse, did I? Anyways, it’s Morningstar.”

Masters snorted.

“Sure it is, Beaumont - to someone who don’t take as good care a you as I do, maybe.”

Masters winked again and Beaumont had to shift around to make room and get comfortable.

“The desert gets cold at night, sure. Anyways, what do you think about this next job? Always said robbing the coaches was a sucker’s bet, ‘specially them that run through the Mojave.”

Masters gestured vaguely with one hand.

“McCloud’s mad, maybe, but she ain’t exactly wrong about the haul. If one of Hellstrom’s blueprints is really on that coach, it’s worth a railcar of ghost rock to the right fellas.”

They gestured to a tall figure on the other side of the fire who appeared intensely interested in something the firelight didn’t quite illuminate.

“After the doc’s had a go with it, anyway. Though if he gets too riled up over it McCloud might just shoot his dick off. She was mighty mad the last time he ruined somethin’ important doing that.”

Beaumont snorted in agreement and didn’t move away as Masters shifted to sit shoulder to shoulder.

“Might even be enough to take it easy for a while,” they said, looking determinedly into the fire.

Beaumont hummed noncommittally. “Might be.”

Masters smiled softly, lips gleaming in the firelight between the softer reflections of beard and mustache.

“Might be best to split up the gang for a bit, 'til the law cools down.”

“Might be. Wouldn’t be the first time we’d had to.”

Masters sighed and leaned more heavily on Beaumont, who bore the weight without complaining.

“I ever tell you about a little farm I saw out Kansas way? Darn thing had a windmill, if you c'n believe it. Ain’t never seen a farm with a windmill afore.”

Beaumont cocked his head.

“Ain’t farms supposed to have windmills?”

Masters shrugged.

“I ain’t never seen just one farm to a windmill. Usually you find 'em in clusters. But this one was there all by its lonesome, just waving at the clouds going by.”

Silence reigned for a short while as the fire slowly died down to the embers it would remain through the night. As the light faded, Doc Vandall stowed whatever he’d been working on inside of his coat and settled down against his saddle; it didn’t take long before his buzz-saw snores rattled through the camp.

Beaumont sighed wearily, relaxing a bit into Masters as he did so.

“See Doc brought along some laudanum.”

Masters nodded, the motion rubbing their head against Beaumont’s shoulder.

“Seems so. Leastwise he ain’t brought that gravedigger juice, the snorin’s better than the farts. Like to kill small animals when he drinks the stuff, and he always sleeps upwind.”

Beaumont hummed in agreement and shifted to let Masters lay a little easier against him. It wasn’t long before Doc’s snores lulled them both into as deep a sleep as the desert ever brought.

Shane Masters hissed through their teeth as they pulled their shirt up to inspect a long gash along their side. The wound was crusted with blood and caliche dust and surrounded by heavy bruising, and they winced as a poke drew fresh blood to ooze slowly down their side.

“Here now, none a’ that,”

Beaumont Morningstar heaved himself over the lip of rock and down into the narrow arroyo Shane had chosen to lick their wounds in. He dropped heavily down onto the sandy bottom and stomped over to the patch of shade they stood in, a frown firmly embedded in his face. He batted their hand away and framed the gash with his own, his thunderous expression at odds with the gentle motion he used to turn the wound more towards the light.

Shane shifted at the touch, leaning into Beaumont’s hands just a little.

“Aw c'mon Beaumont, ain’t nothin’ but a scratch.”

“I’ll be the judge a’ that,” Beaumont retorted, hands lingering on Shane’s hip for a long moment before diving into a pouch on his hip to pull out a canteen and some bandages.

Shane’s eyebrows crawled towards their hairline.

“Ain’t no thing, Beaumont. Doc’ll have me right as the mail afore you know it.”

“Doc’s busy with Hallyer. ‘Fraid you’ll just have to live with whatever I can do.”

Shane snorted, earning them a poke in one of the less-bruised portions of exposed flesh.

“Can’t imagine Hallyer’s too pleased with that. Doc’s had it in for him since that crack about his knowin’ not bein’ worth a damn.”

Beaumont gave them a dry look as he wetted a handkerchief he’d pulled from somewhere and began to clean the dirt away from the edges of the gash.

“Don’t rightly think he’s in a position to complain. The rattler caught him after I…after it let you go and if Talley wasn’t the luckiest son of a bitch with a rifle Hallyer’d be worm food. If anybody but Doc was workin’ on him, I’d be diggin’ a hole right now.”

Shane was quiet for a long moment before reaching out and thwacking Beaumont on the back of the head.

Beaumont dropped his handkerchief and staggered, grabbing onto Shane to keep from falling.

“Ow! The hell did you do that for!”

“The hell were you thinkin’, gettin’ that close to a rattler?”

Shane’s hiss was quiet, but real anger sparked in their eyes, and Beaumont pulled away as he straightened up.

“The hell was I thinkin’, the hell were you thinkin’! You like to run up into its mouth!”

“I’m Shane Masters and there ain’t a thing I can’t kill. Just had to-”

“Just had to get yourself ate, ’s what it looked like to me.”

The two of them glared at each other silently for a few moments before Shane looked away. Beaumont stayed still for a few moments longer before slowly reaching down to pick up the fallen handkerchief and tuck it back into his pocket.

“Reckon that’s as clean as it gets anyway. Hold still so’s I don’t put this on crooked-like.”

Beaumont stuck a piece of clean linen on the wound before beginning to unroll the wad of bandages.

“How’d this happen, anyways? Thought I shot the thing afore it got you to its teeth.”

Shane held still as he began to wrap the bandages around their middle, but rolled their eyes.

“Mah hero. Anyways, thing was draggin’ me right where I wanted to be 'cept it did it over a big rock.”

“Draggin’ you into its belly more like,” Beaumont muttered.

A measured silence lasted for a long moment, broken only by the wind whistling down the arroyo.

“Thanks.”

Beaumont’s hands stilled.

“For pullin’ my bacon out a the fire. You’re supposed to stay the hell back and let me get up close, not the other way around. Idiot.”

Beaumont didn’t look up as he began wrapping the bandages once more.

“Couldn’t stand by and let a partner die, is all.”

Shane smirked.

“Just a partner?”

Beaumont still didn’t look up.

“Just a partner.”

Shane’s smile disappeared as Beaumont finished wrapping and tied the bandage off.

“You saying you woulda done that for Vandall? Hallyer? Talley? McCloud? You woulda run into the maw of a rattler just for a partner?”

Beaumont’s silence spoke volumes. Shane shoved him away hard enough to dump him on his ass and knock his hat clean off.

“Thanks for the patch job, partner,” they spat, and turned to stalk down the arroyo in the vague direction of camp.

Beaumont stayed frozen for a long few moments before climbing to his feet and grabbing his hat. He looked down at the offending article for a long moment, seemingly uncaring of the fact that it was crumpling in his grip, before slamming it hard against his thigh with a puff of dust.

“Damn it.”

He shoved his hat on his head and began slowly making his way back to camp, shoulders slumped.

Beaumont Morningstar looked up at the gallows in front of him, face set in a blank mask, and didn’t blink.

There was no crowd around the scaffold, though it was in the center of town and plenty of hangings were still treated like impromptu county fairs. People would bring their children, vendors would set up wheelbarrows of apples or carry trays of sweets and drinks. Some more industrious fellows might be selling their services to secure better views for a few pennies; others would be standing by with sharp knives, ready to tear down the scaffold and rope and sell the pieces for whatever people would pay for them. Some people might bet on how long the hanging would last, whether or not the hangman’d get it right or whether the head would come off if he got it wrong.

But not here. Not today. Not for him.

Instead, there was the Marshal, the sheriff, six deputies, and a preacher. The Marshal was sitting on a handsome bay horse, face shadowed by the sun, while the sheriff stood beside the preacher and twitched every time the deputies jerked at Beaumont’s arms. The preacher was thumbing through his bible, mumbling snatches of Revelations and sweating bullets though the sun had only just cleared the horizon. The deputies were silent, grips white-knuckled and every push hard enough to make Beaumont stagger.

Ther sheriff broke the silence, hand resting on the dully gleaming six-gun in his holster.

“Beaumont Morningstar, you are a lyin’, cheatin’, murderous whoreson, and you have been convicted for robbin’ and killin’ across every state and territory west of the Mississippi. Judge Dixon has ordered you to be hanged by the neck until dead, though personally I’d rather shootcha in the head and have done with it.”

The man used his free hand to clap the preacher on the shoulder, who responded by ducking even further down behind his bible as if trying to hide from everyone’s gaze.

“Father Todd here will give you your last rites, if you’d like to unburden your soul afore we hang you.”

Beaumont looked at Father Todd with blank eyes.

“No-”

Abruptly, Beaumont was sitting in a darkened saloon. The only light came from a single flickering lamp hanging over the green felt table, and the details beyond its light were lost in the gloom. A glass of amber liquid sat at his gun hand, the bottle exactly halfway along the table. It was quiet, in a way that saloons never were; no wood creaked in the wind, no voices murmured just beyond hearing, no half-tuned upright plonked out the same old tunes that played in every bar and saloon across the continent. The only sound was that of a deck being shuffled.

A rugged man in a clean and uncreased white shirt sat across the table from Beaumont. His hat was coal black, save for the silver pentagram on the band, and his teeth were as even as a row of military tombstones. Flat, sulfur-yellow eyes looked at him unblinkingly as the man continued to shuffle, a glass of amber liquid sitting at his elbow in a mirror of Beaumont’s.

“Well, Beau my boy, seems like this might be it. Care to play one more hand for old time’s sake?”

The man’s teeth flashed in an unsettling grin, and his eyes never wavered.

Neither did Beaumont’s.

“I think we both know that ain’t enough. Not this time.”

The other man’s grin widened.

“See, that’s why I like you Beaumont. You deal straight and take what you’re dealt. I’ve known some other fellas who think that if they just get a little extra somethin’, they’ll come out on top.”

He chuckled.

“Can’t say as any of ‘em do. Tryin’ to card sharp the devil? The house always wins. But of course, you knew that already Mister Morningstar.”

Beaumont simply looked ahead steadily, and didn’t respond.

The other man nodded anyway, and dealt five cards face-up on the table.

Two of clubs. Three of diamonds. Six of clubs. Seven of clubs. Jack of diamonds.

“Then again, seems like luck simply ain’t on your side. Seems like it hasn’t been since Arizona. The law catchin’ up to Beaumont Morningstar on account a’ he’s too drunk to aim his gun?”

The yellow eyed man shook his head, swept the cards back up into the deck, and began to shuffle them again.

“Bad business, Arizona. Job gone wrong, and a posse after you so quick, it’s like they almost knew what you was plannin’. How many of the gang died that day? Ten? Twelve?”

“Fifteen.”

The yellow-eyed man’s eyebrows rose.

“Fifteen! But you managed to slip away clean.”

He dealt five more cards face-up on the table.

Jack of diamonds. Ten of hearts. Queen of spades. King of clubs.

Ace of hearts.

Beaumont’s gaze snapped from the cards on the table to the grinning man sitting across from him. The ace of hearts lay on the table between them, with the face of a person grinning up at the ceiling instead of the usual center marking.

“They’re out of your reach.”

The other man spread his hands, grin firmly back in place.

“Oh, I don’t know that that’s true. In fact, a little birdie told me that they’re alive.”

Beaumont twitched involuntarily, and the other man’s grinned impossibly widened.

“Oh yes. They managed to make their own, special way out of the debacle in Arizona. But then, what should it matter to you? You were just partners after all.”

The grin had a malicious edge now, and the yellow eyes reflected the lamp light oddly.

“And of course, your road ends here Beaumont. A short drop with a sudden stop, and the end of Beaumont Morningstar. You won’t have to worry about someone with more guns than sense shooting down one of the finest fighters in the West before they can get close. Don’t have to worry about them drinking themselves to death in some nameless town . Don’t have to live with any regrets you might have about what happened between the two of you. Just you, the law, and a rope.”

The man with yellow eyes reached forward and began to sweep the spread back into the deck.

When his hand touched the ace, Beaumont’s hand flashed out faster than the eye could follow and caught his wrist in what would have been a bruising grip.

“Wait.”

The man paused, his hand still on the cards.

Beaumont looked him dead in his yellow, yellow eyes.

“I want to make a deal.”

“Well now, that’s what I like to hear.”

Beaumont let him go and the man straightened, sweeping the other four cards back into the deck but leaving the ace on the table.

“You know the price of course.”

“My soul.”

The man nodded and tapped the ace.

“I can give them to you on a silver platter, they’ll be begging for your presence-”

“They are not part of this deal or any others.”

Beaumont cut across the man’s offer with a voice colder than a midwinter moon. The man raised an eyebrow.

“Then what do you want?”

The outlaw swept his hand across the table, palming the ace and tucking it up his sleeve before holding up an arm that somehow managed to still have the ropes the deputies had bound him with on the wrist.

“I want out. After that I can take care of things my own damn self, but I can’t do it if they hang me.”

The man smirked.

“As if you’ve done such a grand job so far.”

Beaumont said nothing, and simply stared across the green felt table with his hand outstretched.

The Devil looked at Beaumont for a long second before dealing out five more cards.

Ace of spades. Ace of diamonds. Ace of clubs. Ace of hearts.

Joker.

The Devil grinned, and held out his hand.

“We have a deal, Beaumont Morningstar.”

Beaumont clasped the outstretched hand and shook it once, firmly.

The saloon and Devil disappeared, returning to the hot sun and high gallows between one blink and the next.

“-that won’t be necessary,” Beaumont finished to the preacher, the sun glinting ominously off an unfamiliar gun filling his hand where none had been before.

He raised the gun and fired once.

The town dissolved into fire, blood, and a pair of sulfur-yellow eyes.

The wind whistled sharply around Beaumont as he checked that the last of four heavy ropes were tight across the pulleys in front of him.

Far below, far enough that the sparkling blue of their eyes was lost to the distance, Shane stood at the other end of the rope. It had taken nearly the whole previous week to get the tower scaffolds in place and sturdy enough that the wind wouldn’t blow them over. Neither one of them were particularly good about figurin’ out how to put it all together, but they’d promised Doc they’d build him his shack next and he’d agreed to show them how to read and follow the instructions that had come with the thing. He had declined to help actually execute the instructions, and was currently only-just-visible on the top of a nearby rise.

There was nobody else for miles, and the endless yellow grass bowed in waves before the breeze. The scaffold was the tallest thing around, and the wind rattled it as it rushed through. Beaumont gripped the support beam closest to him until the gust had passed, then cupped his hands and leaned over to yell down to Shane.

“All set! Start hauling!”

Any reply Shane might have made was blown away in another swirl of the ever-present breeze, but less than ten seconds later the rope went taught and the pulleys groaned. Slowly, ever so slowly at first but speeding up with every pull, the rope began to make its way through the set of heavy pulleys. Beaumont leaned over and looked down to watch the large head assembly start to slowly inch its way off the ground. It sped up a little before settling into a slow and easy pace, each tug of the rope bringing it about six inches. It wasn’t as heavy as the gearbox they’d hauled up first, but it was more awkward and the wind pushed it around far more.

There was nothing Beaumont could do from the top aid in the lifting; the job he’d been given was to make sure the ropes didn’t jump from the wooden wheels of the pulleys, and he didn’t give it too much of his attention. Instead, much of the time his gaze was focused downward towards the deceptively slight figure at the other end of the rope with a smile stretching the corners of his lips. Even from a distance, Shane was unmistakable. Their reddish-brown hair framed a face marred by sunburn and highlighted by two ice-blue eyes - though the eyes were difficult to make out at a height of nearly eighty feet.

Whatever he could or could not see, Beaumont kept his gaze locked on the form of Shane as the machinery moved closer and closer. It was only when the assembly was level with the platform he was sitting on that he reluctantly switched to looking at the spinner in front of him and set to work with the gaff Doc had put together out of some things Beaumont neither inquired about nor inspected very closely. He swung it out and tried to hook one of the many arms, and missed. He tried again, and missed again; a sharp whistle from below had him looking down to see Shane making a motion that was clear even from a distance.

Setting himself carefully, Beaumont tried again - this time, taking Shane’s advice. Sure enough, the gaff hooked what he was aiming at and he managed to pull the heavy wheel into place. Four bolts more akin to railroad spikes were dropped into four connecting slots, anchoring the head to the structure. One large rod went through the gearbox they’d put up earlier and pushed through til it fit with a clunk into the center of the head assembly, and Beaumont grunted as it went no further. One more bolt went into that at the front, to keep it from slipping out and then he released the ropes that held it in place.

The wood around him creaked and groaned as it took up the strain, but not dangerously so. He reached out and tied a rock with a note on it to the loose end of the rope and let it go, watching as the rope slid through the pulleys freely. Several minutes later, there was another whistle from below and he looked over to see Shane make a very explicit gesture. Beaumont grinned and gave a broad wave back, then settled in to watch as Shane took the rope and began tying it around the large bundle of blades that had been sitting at the base of the tower.

It didn’t take long, and soon the bundle began making its slow way up on the ropes. Even more than the head assembly, the wind grabbed at the bundle of blades and twisted them this way and that. Beaumont did the best he could to keep the ropes in front of him from tangling, but eventually his luck ran out and the blades stopped three-quarters of the way up the tower as the lowest pulley spun in the breeze.

“Goddammit.”

Beaumont began maneuvering his way down from the platform he’d been sitting on; the lowest pulley was six feet beyond his reach. A shrill whistle echoed up from below but he did not turn away from his task. One particular slip nearly turned into a long fall, but he caught himself on a cross-brace and the whistling from below cut off abruptly. Regaining his feet, he held onto the brace and stretched out with the gaff. One swing, two, and the pulley spun back to the correct orientation. Unhooking the gaff was the work of a moment, and Beaumont headed back up to the platform with the gearbox.

Once he made it up, he looked down to see the ropes tied off and a small figure more than fifteen feet off the ground on the scaffolding. He waved, large and slow, at the figure, and they made a gesture back that was unmistakable. They climbed down, and made their way back over to where the rope had been tied off to the base of the tower.

The blades didn’t resume their ascent until more than a minute after he’d made it back up, but resume they did. Faster, this time, the rope ran through the pulleys in great heaving jerks instead of the more reasonable pace it had taken before. Beaumont frowned as dust and scraps flew off the rope where it passed through the pulleys, and reached out. Before he could do anything, however, the bundle of blades was level with the platform he was resting on. The rope creaked as he hauled the bundle towards himself with the gaff, but held; soon enough he had the bundle firmly on the platform.

Beaumont made quick work of the knots and let the rope fall. The first blade had a notch and two holes in one end, and he lined it up with the matching notch on the nearest arm of the spinner. Two screws to hold the blade in place, and he moved on to the next blade. The next five blades went on smoothly, and he turned his attention to the last piece. A short piece of wood with a triangular sail attached to it, it fit neatly into the back of the head assembly. Two pins held the sail in place, and a bolt held the tail solidly against the back of the head assembly.

Beaumont checked each connection point a second time, then reached over and pulled the two pins that had been holding the whole thing still against the wind. At first, nothing happened and he moved towards the blades with a frown. A gust of wind nearly pulled his hat off before he could reach out to check them, however, and with a groan the head slowly began to turn. The gearbox clanked, and the triangular sail whipped as the head turned to face the wind more fully.

Beaumont nodded to himself, pausing to look out over the rolling acres of yellow grass. Whatever he saw, he nodded again and turned to begin making his way down the structure. It took him several minutes, and he ended up dropping the last ten feet to land somewhat heavily on the ground.

He hadn’t even finished dusting himself off before Shane came storming over, covered in sweat and blue eyes blazing out from over red-splashed cheeks.

“Beaumont Morningstar, don’t you dare do that again. The devil might own your soul but like hell he’s gonna get it until I’m good and done with it, d’you hear? Why I oughta-”

“I do.”

Shane blinked at Beaumont’s interruption, but he steamrollered on before they could begin yelling again.

“Shane Masters, I have been an outlaw, a fool, a drunk, a gambler, and most importantly a coward for nearly all my life. I was too afraid a’ what might happen to reach out for the things that could have made my life better. I’m still a drunk and a gambler, but I saw what I was missin’ at the end of a rope and I don’t intend to let fear keep me from what I want any longer.”

He paused to take a breath, but Shane remained quiet, blue eyes wide and mouth half-open.

“So I came, and I found you again, and I made you a promise.”

He reached out and with the barest hesitation, took Shane’s hands in his own, rubbing his gun-callused thumb across the scars and many-times-healed knuckles.

“Shane Masters, I promised you that we’d finally get a damn windmill, and here we are. All I’m askin’ is that you stay. For as long as this windmill is tall, you stay.”

Shane looked at Beaumont, then up at the windmill, then down at their joined hands.

“You damn fool.”

Their voice wobbled with emotion.

“Do you really have to ask?”

Before Beaumont could answer, they pulled him in for a kiss. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around the slight figure that was strong enough to support them both. The air around them was still for this one timeless moment.

The windmill slowed in the slack air, before the mechanism groaned again. Slowly, ponderously, the wheel turned and faced the new wind as it settled into a strong, unwavering course. The blades turned, faster and faster until they, too, settled into a new pace.

Around the two small figures, and through the enormous windmill, the wind blew a steady course from yesterday towards tomorrow.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s a terrible idea, really; Management would never allow any of this. In fact, if They find out I’m probably getting fired and that’ll really be the end of me.

But.

Well.

If I don’t do anything, then it all goes pear-shaped anyway. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t sort of situation.

The worst part is, it’s easy. So, so easy to just walk into the Archives. Well, easy for someone who works here; I’m in and out all the time to file my reports. As far as the guards are concerned, I’m just here to put one more piece of history in its proper place. I’m not, of course; I’m here to steal some from its proper place.

Well, not steal. Not really. There are all sorts of edicts and safeguards around the records themselves, you can’t remove the actual reports from the premises. At least, there are a lot of strictures and rules saying not to and I’m pretty sure there are things attached to the actual record to make sure they don’t go anywhere. And I mean, I can sort of see why; my personal theory is is that while history can be changed, the records take longer to update so you can fix mistakes in the time it takes. If you change a record in the Archive, that’s a direct change to the timeline - basically, it would always have been that way, because that’s what the records show. I would shudder to think of what some unscrupulous person could do with access to the Archive, if I could shudder.

Of course, I could be wrong. My job is to write things down, not to speculate about the function of the Metaverse. In fact, critical thinking - especially editorializing - is discouraged by Management. You get a history stream, you write it down, you file the report in the Archive. Still, I have to think that what I’m doing now kinda supersedes that, so - in for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well get my critical thinking out of the way while I’m robbing the Archive.

I wince and make my way through the stacks. Okay, not robbing, exactly. Like I said, you can’t take the actual reports out of the Archive itself. And, to be frank, the people I’m planning on giving this to? I wouldn’t trust them with a real Report anyway. I borrowed - with intent to return! - two handy little devices from a metaverse where hopefully they won’t be missed before I can get them back. One to make a hard copy of what I hope are relevant reports, and one to make a searchable digital copy. I’m hoping that copies won’t set off the same alerts that reports do.

The stacks are - not empty, never empty, no matter what the hour - but less populated than peak times. There’s never not someone going through and filing their latest report in the proper area; the stacks are infinitely tall, of course, but the spot you need is usually right at eye-height for convenience’s sake. It’s not like the public is wandering through and, Management forbid, reading things. The only people here are the other Chroniclers and some people who might be Archivists? Might be guards? Might not be people? I’ve never seen them up close and I am damn sure I never want to.

Fortunately, the stacks with Monday’s reports are empty. Not that I really expected them to be any different; the other Chroniclers try and stay away from this area. Monday was…Monday was her own person - or became so, at least - and nobody’s really sure what happened to her. It’s not like there’s a water cooler to gather up and gossip around, but people will talk to each other no matter what. Personally, I’ve heard that she fell in love, or that she started writing editorials, or that she stepped through whatever it is that separates Chroniclers from the things they’re Chronicling, or a dozen other ludicrous things. There’s only a few things everybody agrees on; she broke the Rules, and nobody’s seen her since.

Not knowing is almost worse than knowing. If it was just dying, well, I wouldn’t be okay with that because I kind of enjoyed living but if I don’t get these files then everyone dies anyway. If I take these files to the people who could use them, and then immediately have to start legging it away from Rhodes? Well, at least I could plan an escape route or something.

But I don’t know what happened to Monday.

Nobody does.

At least the little devices are easy to use. I’m not one of the Chroniclers who prefers a high-tech iteration of their Chronicling tools, but I’m also not one of those who prefers to see their tools as a wooden stick and cuneiform-ready clay tablet. Using things that actually came from Reality is the hardest part of this - physically anyway. The Archives aren’t really on the same plane of existence, and the small devices are not resonating at the right frequency - or something like that - to really work well here. Still, they work long enough that I can get copies of the relevant reports and that’s all that matters.

Of course, using non-approved devices in the Archive draws attention. I have no idea how much time it actually took, but given that I had just exactly enough time to get all the copies I needed, I’m guessing that Something approves of what I’m doing. Fortunately, re-filing a Report is just as simple as putting it back on the shelf or I’d really have been in trouble. As it stands, I don’t think I’ll be going back to those shelves for a long time - if ever.

Getting out of the Archive is just as easy as getting in to the Archive. After all, we have to go to our designated parts of history to write the reports. Employees walk in and out of the Archive all the time. I don’t know if it’s my imagination about the eyes following me as I leave with what I came for, though. It’s not like I know everything about the building or the security systems.

Still, I made it this far and only broke like, half a dozen rules. Now I just have to figure out a way to get the reports to the people working on this problem, and break one of the Rules by giving it to them.

Yeah.

No problem.

…

Just what the hell happened to Monday?

Vector Raynes looked up in mild surprise when Paul walked into the Reliance’s galley.

It was late at night in the Reliance’s time-cycle - a little shorter than what Vector was used to, but nothing he couldn’t handle - and nearly everyone who could sleep was asleep. Princess Hedgehog had retreated to their nook, which they had filled with soft mosses and strange fungi, and Jonomox had disappeared off to whichever room he had claimed for himself. Vector was pretty sure it wasn’t the same room he himself had claimed, but with Jonomox it was hard to be certain. Rhonda’s door and room were always immediately obvious; she kept both immaculate and the reflection off said door was hell on the mornings Vector woke even mildly hung over.

Vector had spent several sleepless hours in his own room before retreating to the safety of the galley. His room aboard the Reliance wasn’t anything like the room he’d had aboard the Golden Fleece, and yet in the depths of the night-cycle his thoughts had turned to his old shipmates. What Jonny would have thought of whatever the hell was going on in the engine room, what Sergio would have made of the crew schedules, the image of Mobius manning the comms station on the bridge, the thought of what Sasrael would have had to say about the jerry-rigged weapons systems.

It had been - much. Too much to let him get to sleep, though he would tear his own arm off before he let himself forget his crew. However many of them had survived the raid that had taken Vector to ARENA had died when that metaverse fell to pieces; now, only he remained to remember them and lift a glass in their honor.

Still, there was remembering - grieving - and there was wallowing, and that Vector refused to do. Every person who’d been a part of his crew had known when they signed on that they might not come back, that every mission could be their last, and they had accepted that risk gladly to stand beside him. To live now to anything less than the fullest extent he had with them would do them a disservice.

But such resolves were not always easy, and tonight hadn’t been good. So Vector had found himself alone in the tiny galley with a mug of hot chocolate cradled between his hands, fragrant steam rising into the slightly chilly air, at an hour when the ship was quiet and most of the people on board were asleep. They weren’t a crew - his crew - yet; they’d seen some action together, true, but the camaraderie was lacking and Vector felt its absence keenly. Whatever qualifications John Stone had, they didn’t include making a bunch of people into a crew. Vector could see it now, how the six of them could be one of the greatest crews the Metaverse had ever seen - how they could come together and form bonds tighter than family, more than blood.

Bonds that Vector missed like he had a hole in his soul.

Vector took a slurp of his chocolate and watched as Paul walked purposefully over to one of the tightly-latched cabinets and began inspecting the contents. The taller humanoid had been a bit of a mystery to him. While they were affable enough and perfectly willing to talk at length about the scientific underpinnings of nearly any subject matter, he still couldn’t quite figure them out. They claimed that a wish for scientific advancement was what drove them to join the team, but beyond that Vector couldn’t cudgel his tired mind into bringing up anything particularly interesting or personal about them.

Vector stood, set his mug down, and took the two steps required to put him right beside the larger humanoid.

“Evening, Paul. What brings you to the galley?”

Paul paused in their slow perusal of the contents of the cabinet - one of the ones reserved for baking, from what Vector could see. Rhonda had a tendency to stress-bake and while what she made was somewhat hit or miss when it came to flavors, whatever she did end up making was usually at least filling if not tasty and nobody had objected when she’d made the cabinet her own.

And Vector wouldn’t speak to what would happen if she found Paul had been raiding it.

“I require additional sodium aluminum phosphate to provide a catalyst for my most recent experiment. Reese has been good enough to provide me with samples of both his wood finish and the leather parts of his interior, and I wish to run some tests.”

Vector blinked, then looked into the cabinet. He pointed to a small glass jar.

“Is that it?”

Paul reached out and turned it so they could see the label.

“No.”

“Hmm.”

Vector looked closer at the interior of the cabinet.

“Is that it?”

This time, he pointed to a small metal canister. Paul reached out and turned the label towards themselves.

“No.”

Vector looked at them with a raised eyebrow.

“And you’re sure it’s in here?”

Paul tilted their head.

“My research indicates it is a common element in human-type cuisine. I had thought my odds of finding it in this cabinet outweighed the possibilities of the other cabinets.”

They paused, then shut the cabinet.

“Clearly I was mistaken.”

Vector clapped them on the mid-back and immediately regretted the gesture. While Paul could move around with perfect - if ponderous - fluidity, they were still made of rock-type materials and Vector was pretty sure he’d broken a knuckle with that back slap.

Turning, he took two steps back to the kitchen table - blinking the automatic tears out of his eyes while he did so. The warmth of the mug was soothing to his abused fingers, and he took a sip before turning his attention back to Paul - who was now rooting around in a different cabinet.

The fact that he knew so little about the taller being bothered him. He didn’t know if Paul had any family, whether or not they were the last of their metaverse or just didn’t have a place to go back to, what exactly Paul wanted out of their little voyage. The lack of information made him edgy, and he knew from experience how easily that edginess could turn into fear and distrust. If he wanted these people to become his new crew, he had to make a start of it himself.

“So, Paul,” Vector said, trying for a casual tone and possibly succeeding. “What are you? Where are you from?”

Paul paused in their perusal of the cabinets and turned to look at Vector with smoky-blue quartz eyes.

“I am a Sodian, from a metaverse which no longer exists. I could still give you the numerical designation it used to occupy, though that data is not very useful at this point in time.”

Paul’s voice was steady and polite, like they hadn’t just told Vector that they were the last of their species.

Vector saluted them with his mug.

“Cheers, I’ll drink to that. Haven’t got a metaverse to go back to either.”

Paul simply watched him steadily as he took a too-big gulp, chocolate filling in the corners of his mustache. They waited politely for him to finish before asking a question of their own.

“Why do you ask?”

Vector gestured at the Reliance around them with his mug.

“Because I’ve seen what we could be - this team could be a real crew, ready to face down the whole world. We just have to establish connections first, and that means reaching out. So,” he waved to himself, encompassing everything from the shine of his head to the softness of his boots “ask away if you have any questions.”

Paul slowly cocked their head, what Vector took to be a pensive look shadowing their face.

“Have you worked with nonhuman species before? How did your metaverse handle spaceflight? Did anyone in your metaverse use magic? Were there any elements that-”

Vector held up a hand in a slightly desperate attempt to staunch the slow and inexorable avalanche of questions.

“Woah woah woah. This works both ways - it helps us get to know one another better so we can work together better. While I know my way around a relentless interview, I think we might have a better time playing tit for tat.”

Paul didn’t really have any eyebrows in the traditional sense, but Vector could hear them raising it in their voice.

“Tit…for…tat?”

Vector nodded.

“I ask a question and you answer, then you ask me a question and I answer. Deal?”

Paul considered for a long moment before nodding.

“Deal.”

Vector nodded again and settled back in his chair.

“To answer one of your questions - yes, yes I did. Sir Edmund Lagrosse; everyone called him "Hotpot” but that was his full name. He had four arms and could make a mean stir-fry while also wielding a pump action shotgun. Came in handy more than you’d think.“

Paul nodded, and paused.

"I believe it is now your turn to ask a question,” they said, and Vector leaned back.

“Ah. Thinking a little slowly this evening.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Well, let’s ask something basic. Do you have siblings?”

Paul paused again, longer this time. Vector held on to his slowly cooling mug, and waited.

“Technically, all Sodians are siblings. Each Sodian grows from the crust of our planet until such a time as we choose to break off and become our own beings. However, in the most literal sense i.e. the sharing of genetics or other species-specific material that can be passed from generation to generation, no I did not have any siblings.”

Vector choked mid-sip, hot liquid burning his sinuses as he snorted it inelegantly into his nose.

“Wait wait wait,” he sputtered, wiping his face on his sleeve. “Are you telling me that your species just grows out of a planet? That you all are basically planetary pimples?”

Paul cocked their head in the other direction, taking a long moment to think while Vector wiped up the worst of his spill.

“That is not an inaccurate way to describe it, though it is a far more nuanced process. Additionally, young Sodians have a deal of sharp points and rough edges when they first break away from the planet’s crust while pimples - from what information I’ve gathered - tend to be much smoother.”

Vector could only nod dumbly and continue to scrub at the chocolate rapidly setting in to stain his sleeping shirt. Paul seemed to contemplate the scene for a few moments before turning back to their search of the cabinets.

“Now, I believe that it is my turn to inquire about you. What, exactly, can you tell me about the means by which you and your crew traveled across space. Did you use a hydrodynonymous system or…”