“Ignore it,” he muttered, looking about the place.

Given the detritus strewn about the inside of the shuttle, it was clear Maybel had spent a fair amount of time here. Fortunately for him, it seemed that her amateur investigations into the shuttle’s function weren’t too invasive.Though he strongly believed the cupholder might never work again after what she’d done to it.

“You got the ignition switch?”

He smiled in triumph as the blue skinned woman produced the fob, which he promptly plugged into the main console. His smile only grew as the internal lights came on with barely a flicker.

While that didn’t necessarily mean the vehicle was in a fit shape to fly – he’d yet to turn on the grav-drive yet – it was a step in the right direction.

Slipping into the pilot’s seat, his eyes roamed over the shuttle’s controls.

Not too different from the one on the Whisker, he thought.

Which meant he could probably pilot it well enough for what he needed. Which wasn’t so much a running indictment of his talents as a pilot as it was the relative simplicity of flying a vehicle equipped with an anti-grav system. In many ways, it wasn’t totally unlike driving an automatic car, with only the added complication of an extra dimension to deal with.

Still, he wouldn’t have even been considering this if it weren’t for the fact that Rocket had snuck him aboard the Whisker’s shuttle for a go more than once – and that he was desperate.

Mostly desperate.

The knocking came from the front door again. Louder this time. Maybel glanced at him, but he shook his head. Hopefully whoever it was would go away if they ignored them long enough.

Of course, that was the moment he heard the front door being broken down.

“Well shit.” He turned to look up at the hatch. “Someone’s pretty eager to meet you.”

Maybel winced at the sound of movement from inside her house.

“You focus on getting the sky-ship flying,” she instructed, moving to clamber out of the top hatch. “I’ll go see what my visitors want.”

Before Jason could even think to argue, the Ufrian woman was gone. Seeing little recourse but to do what she asked, he started running through the Shuttle’s pre-flight checklist. Something Rocket had insisted on teaching him in laborious detail. A fact he might have attributed to her seriousness about flight safety were it not for the fact that she’d clearly just been using it as an excuse to lean over him and press her rather ample assets against the back of his head.

The memory made him smile, though that quickly turned into a frown as one of the check lights came back a ruddy yellow.

Well, I suppose that’s to be expected, he thought as he continued running through the checklist.

While the number of yellow lights accompanying the blue weren't great, they weren’t terrible either. It just meant the onboard computer system thought those systems weren’t functioning optimally, not that they wouldn’t function at all.

Again, not ideal for what he had planned, but given the shouting that had just started from the other room, it didn’t sound like he’d have an opportunity to resolve those issues.

“Klek, muk hel ghashtu!”

He winced at the sound of Maybel talking in rapid fire Ufrian echoed from the main house, occasionally answered by much more halting words in the same tongue. Words that came with a very strong accent. And despite the language barrier, it was clear that despite their unfamiliarity with the language, the words they were using were deadly serious.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out who had come knocking. It was just a shame he didn’t know why.Though he could think of a few options. Not the least of which was that he and Maybel had been spotted coming in. Though given that the Edixi patrolwomen hadn’t started their investigation with shooting, he figured it a pretty safe bet that that wasn’t it. The more likely option was that the Edixi were rounding up anyone of political significance within the settlement. Either to keep the Ufrians in line, or just to inform them of the change of management.

Neither of those options were good for him though, because it meant his chances at flying this floating rust bucket out of here without being spotted were now effectively nil. Though, to be fair, that had always likely been the case, but now it looked like he might end up doing it sans Maybel.

Because he sincerely doubted the Edixi were going to let her just ‘pop into the boatshed’ for a minute.

His finger hovered over the ignition switch. Something broke in the other room as the sound of scuffle broke out.

His finger continued to hover, even as the Edixi’s words took on a distinctly unfriendly tone.

What was he even hesitating over this? Maybel would be fine. The Edixi were here for the Imperials. Not her. She was also the Chief’s daughter. Even if she got caught aiding him, she’d probably get out of this with a slap on the wrist.

After all, the Edixi weren’t about to make an enemy of the local Ufrians. Not if they wanted them to keep quiet about their presence on the world.

Of course… they didn’t need to bother with good will if the plan was to get rid of all the witnesses to their presence on the planet.

But they wouldn’t do that, would they?They were supposed to be the ‘good guys’. A NATO like contrast to the Imperials. They wouldn’t just…

Jason sighed as he stood up, unholstering his pistol as he moved to the back hatch.

…Then his eyes landed on something that might prove useful.

------

Maybel was a big enough woman to admit that things weren’t going quite as well as she might have liked.

“Quit struggling!” The shark woman atop her shouted in badly mangled Ufrian, as her colleague kept her weapon trained on her.

“Then quit trying to snap my Skies damned arm!” Maybel snapped back.

“Then quit struggling!” This time it was the woman’s partner who spoke. “I don’t even know why you’re kicking up a fuss.”

“You said you were going to take my loot!”

The woman atop her gritted her teeth. “We said we were going to search your home for any contraband or items taken from our own supplies.”

“As I said, steal my shit!”

Of course, that wasn’t the real reason she’d been less than willing to let the two off-worlders search through her home. Even if she was admittedly – if entirely reasonably – protective of her stash of off-worlder tech, she wasn’t quite so foolish as to physically get into an altercation with two armed soldiers over it.

And given the way the woman atop her had so effortlessly pinned her, it was clear these two weren’t just any soldiers. They were skilled. Very skilled. Which she’d kind of already known, given that they were part of the group that had so effortlessly dismantled the Imperials who had so recently been the premiere power on Raknos.

That was over now, though.

So even as she continued to struggle, she found herself wondering why she’d ever thought it was smart to go against said group.

Oh yeah, because you’re a sucker for a pretty boy in a bad situation, she thought bitterly. And Jason was very pretty and in a very bad situation.

Never mind the fact that it was clear to all and sundry that he barely thought of her as anything but a precocious savage - and was just using her to get access to a means to save the real people.

Nope, all it had taken was one look at the defeated look on his pretty face and her vagina had demanded she do anything she could to fix things.

Which in this case, was essentially giving away the single most valuable item her clan owned.

Mom’s going to kill me, she thought. You know, if these two idiots don’t do it first.

While she’d had the thought mostly in jest, she felt her eyes widen as the woman atop her reached for something on her vest, speaking in that strange biting tongue of theirs to her partner. Said eyes only widened further as she laid eyes on a truly gigantic knife.

Holy shit, they were actually going to kill her!? She was the Chief’s daughter, they couldn’t just-

The door exploded open.

-------------

Jason took in the sight of the two shark-like women. One stood in the main hall, the other crouched over a very uncooperative looking Maybel.

Three sets of eyes turned to stare at him in surprise. That half second of surprise was all he needed to draw a bead on the one atop Maybel and pull the trigger. It wasn’t the world's most accurate shooting, as his pistol traced a line of shots across the Edixi. Still, it was enough, as something clearly failed in the armor and the alien jerked violently as she flew off Maybel’s prone form.

Of course, the moment he’d drawn a bead on the first alien, he knew it had been a mistake, as that had given the second one ample time to get over her surprise and level her weapon at him.

She didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger and Jason grunted in pain as a spine sprouted from his gut. The force of the shot knocked him back and slammed against the wall. He could feel a heated dampness forming around the bolt's entry point as he slumped to the floor, the breath driven from him by the blow. A sensation that only got worse as two more spines sprouted right next to the first, each shot feeling like someone was driving a hammer into his chest.

That was when the Edixi woman made her own mistake. She stopped there. Perhaps she assumed three shots to be enough? Perhaps him being a male attributed to that? He didn’t know – and he wasn’t inclined to ask.

Instead he simply lay there, blood pooling around him as it dribbled down from his stomach, soaking his borrowed cloak.

Then, and only then, did the Edixi spare a glance at her down comrade.

Which was when he shot her.

Fancy armor or not, at this range the woman’s armor fared no better than her allies. And perhaps, if Jason’s breath hadn’t already been driven from his lungs by being repeatedly shot in the abdomen, he’ have let out a sigh of relief as he heard her body drop to the floor.

Then he shot her again, just to be sure.

Silence reigned in the small cabin, broken only by his labored attempts to get air back into a set of lungs that seemed determined to be uncooperative.

“Holy shit!” Maybel finally cried, clambering out from under her captor's corpse and rushing over to him.

Of course, that was the moment she seemed to realize what a state he was in. Which wasn’t surprising, given that her prone position had likely given her a very poor vantage on the proceedings.

“Oh, oh, oh…” she said, hands awkwardly floating over the bolts perforating his chest. “I, uh, I… shit!” She looked frantically toward the door. “Stay here, I’ll go… get someone.”

He reached up to grab her before she could move.

“Don’t bother. No time and no point,” he coughed, finally getting some air into his lungs. That said, he finally clambered to his feet, despite Maybel’s best attempts to bid him to stay still. “We need to move now, before our friend’s friends notice they're gone.”

Which might have already happened if Edixi armor functioned anything like the Imperial equivalent. The local Alliance commander should definitely have been made aware of two of her soldiers flatlining.

Which was why they needed to move fast, before the entire garrison was on their ass.

“We can’t move, you’re hurt!” Maybel pointed out as he started limping toward the boat shed.

“Less than you think,” he responded, tugging on his cloak.

The compromised material tore easily enough, dropping away to reveal a set of incredibly battered looking Ufrian armor.

“My old armor!” She shouted. “It protected you.”

He nodded, even if he wanted to point out that he didn’t feel like a man that had been protected. Because while the bronze breastplate had managed to stop the bolts from penetrating deeply - they had penetrated.

He currently had three bolts stuck a few centimeters into his torso and he felt it. More to the point, he was pretty sure he was sporting a cracked rib – or two! – from where the armor had dented under the force of the blows it had endured. Which went some way to explaining why every breath he took felt like agony. It also went some way to explaining why he didn’t feel like explaining all of that to Maybel.

That was wasted air, and he had precious little of that as it was.

Glancing back, he found his eyes lingering on the downed forms of the Edixi as he realized, belatedly, that this was the first time he’d actually gotten to get a good look at the aliens in the flesh.

Grey skinned, sightless blue eyes open in death, the aliens had the same broad features as the Shil’vati. The key difference though was that where Shil’vati had a pair of tusks in the corner of their mouth, the Edixi had a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Also, what he’d originally assumed were dreadlocks, were in fact long tendrils that sprouted from their head like hair and ran all the way down to the midpoint of their back. It was strange to look at, as it didn’t look like flesh or hair. It instead looked like the spines of a sea urchin - if a sea urchin’s spines were floppy like hair.

He also noted that their mottled grey armor was a midpoint between that of the Imperium and Consortium. Where Imperial armor was entirely skintight fabric, and the Consortium’s was comprised of overlapping ceramic like plates, the Alliance seemed to use hard plates positioned over fabric. Around the chest. The forearms. The thighs. Any area that didn’t see a lot of flex.

Two dead aliens. Novel and new. In morphology, culture and technology. From a race he’d never even spoken to.

It made him feel tired.

“Just get in the shuttle,” he muttered as they stepped into the boat shed.

It was time to blow this popsicle stand.

-------------

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple.

The local Alliance commander had definitely become aware of the death of two of her soldiers and had responded with all the required alacrity to avenge them. Or perhaps she’d just noticed the giant mining shuttle exploding out of a nearby boatshed…

Either way, Jason was currently flying circles around the settlement trying to avoid laser fire.

Invisible laser fire.

“That one, there!” Maybel shouted from his co-pilot seat.

“Which!?” he shouted back, yanking hard on the control stick.

She leaned forward, wincing as a shower of sparks flew up around the windshield. “That- you missed it!”

He scowled. “Say it sooner next time then! All these tunnels look alike and this thing handles like an apartment complex!”

“I don’t know what that is!”

“It’s a-” he cut himself off as the craft suddenly stalled for a heart stopping few seconds. Fortunately, it righted itself again a moment later. “Big building!”

Perhaps he’d been a little over optimistic when he’d said that yellow only meant ‘less than optimal’ as opposed to ‘liable to fail’. Because every now and then a thruster suddenly seemed to remember that it had spent the last few months underwater and cut out momentarily.

Fortunately, that seemed to be happening less and less as time went by.

Which was good, because they’d successfully come around to what he hoped was the tunnel entrance Maybel had just pointed out.

He supposed he was about to find out either way. If Maybel started screaming in incoherent fear as he dove towards it, he’d know he picked the wrong one. Then again, the Ufrian woman had been screaming in near constant incoherent fear from the moment they’d taken off, so perhaps that wasn’t quite the indicator he’d thought it was.

Not that he blamed her. He was screaming too.

The tunnel he was aiming for looked like the maw of a giant beast as he dipped toward it – though not quite as giant as he might have liked as he attempted to metaphorically thread the needle.

“WE’RE GOING TO CRASH!”

He might have made some argument against Maybel’s assertion as to their imminent doom, but to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t entirely sure she was wrong.

Fortunately for him, he was either the luckiest son of a bitch in the universe, or Rocket was a better teacher than she gave herself credit for, because soon enough their rusty little mining shuttle was darting through the tunnel mouth with entire feet to spare.

“We made it. I can’t believe we made it,” the woman next to him breathed.

Truth be told, neither could he. Which was why he resisted the urge to point out that they hadn’t technically made it yet.

As evidenced by the loud crunch that rang through the hull of the craft when it demolished a low hanging stalagmite as they sped through the dark tunnels, hovering barely more than a few feet above the water.

Sure, the hardy little shuttle was only moving at about forty kilometers an hour as it zipped along the underground pathway, but given that they were underground, any speed above that of a casual jog ran pretty close to suicidal.

Fortunately for him, he had an able navigator in-

“Left. Left! LEFT!”

Jason jerked the ship to the left, angling it down another tunnel.

Exhaling a small sigh of relief, he glanced at Maybel.

“Just so we’re clear, you’re totally sure that this route will take us to the surface away from the Mining Nexus?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

“And you’re absolutely sure that this shuttle will fit?”

“Almost positive.”

“Almost-” He cut himself off before he said something unkind. Perhaps it was the blood pooling in his seat or the fact that breathing felt like gargling glass, but he decided almost positive would do.

He winced as the shuttle winged another low hanging stalagmite.

“Are you sure this shuttle will be ok?” Maybel asked, glancing at the myriad yellow lights that had lit up the console – many of which had been blue when they’d taken off.

If it weren’t for the fact that Jason’s entire focus was on keeping their unwieldy craft from scraping against the rock walls or plunging into the water below them, he would have turned to look her dead in the eye.

“Almost positive.”