Yael hated princess costumes. The best ones were posh, and ornate and made her look like a dazzling beauty. Not one part of that matched who she felt she was though.

In her mind, Yael wasn’t a broken nosed brawler but neither was she a delicate royal flower. Her Guardian robes were just about the right level of formality for her. Simple, functional and appropriate for a wide variety of situations. Sadly, mingling with the elite of a non-aligned world was not one of those appropriate situations. Especially not when she wanted to keep any hint of Imperial involvement in their affairs a secret.

“Did you hear they were debating closing down the arenas?” said a nearby woman who was drinking from a long stemmed wine glass.

The viewing lounge at the Silver Saucer was packed, as Yael had expected, with various politician and their hanger-ons who were prominent in the local government. It was the sort of establishment where the local elite could enjoy “common recreations” while remaining above and apart from the general rabble. On the floor below the balcony Yael was on, a crowd of the less wealthy were milling about and at the center of it all, behind glass-steel walls, was the fighting pit where the night’s action would take place.

“It’s well past time, but what sort of plan do they have for the displaced fighters?” a woman standing beside the first said.

“A plan? Do they ever think these things through that far?” the first woman asked.

“I suppose not,” the second woman said. “Perhaps I should speak with the Commissioner of Education about allocating some additional funds for our Adult Education programs.”

“That wouldn’t hurt,” the first woman said. “I’ve been looking into a variety of competitive sports leagues they could transfer into, but so far none have shown an interest in developing a franchise here.”

Yael didn’t envy the two women the dilemma that faced them. Uronos had a large number of arena-style combat theaters. The gladiators who fought in them ranged from commoners hoping to score a lucky victory to the seasoned professionals who were minor celebrities in their own right. Transitioning all of them to a different career could involve more bloodshed and pain than the arena fights produced in a year.

Yael leaned back and tuned in to a different conversation. She wasn’t at the Silver Saucer to eavesdrop. At least not on purely local matters. She was hunting for a bigger catch than that, but to lure it in she had to be careful not to give herself away. So she sipped from a suitably exotic beverage, as was expected of an off-world princess, and appeared to be waiting for an official entourage to come and collect her. That she was positioned at the proper spot to overhear a wide variety of conversations throughout the nearby area had nothing whatsoever to do with luck though.

“Is the buyer here yet?” Zyla asked on their telepathic link.

“I believe so,” Yael said. “There’s no contact on the Aether thread leading back to our arms dealer but it’s suspiciously blurred.”

“That’s sloppy,” Zyla said. “Did they even try to tie the thread to someone else?”

“Not from what I can see,” Yael said. “This is pure obfuscation.”

“Not quite pure,” Zyla said. “If they were serious about it, they would have obfuscated the thread back at the corpse, just like they did with the murder site.”

“You raise a good point there,” Yael said. “How are preparations for your Arena bout going?”

“Well enough,” Zyla said. “I’m through the qualifying matches and have a place in the real show.”

“Your opponents are all still breathing I hope?” Yael asked.

“Yes. Unfortunately,” Zyla said. “I may not enjoy the Empire’s strictures against killing but I can control myself, even when my foes so richly deserve a less kind fate.”

“Thank you,” Yael said. “Has the new arms supplier made an appearance yet?”

“They’re here and meeting with the ring manager now,” Zyla said. “They should be calling me in to speak with them in just a few minutes.”

“Which weapon system will they offer you?” Yael asked.

“I’m an off-worlder,” Zyla said, “So I’ve set it up that they’ll sell me one of their competitor’s ‘fine’ products.”

“While  the actually working models are all going to the locals right?” Yael asked.

“Right,” Zyla said. “And I’ve already got a contact lock spell on the sellers. When the deal falls through and they try to inform their home office we’ll have a solid path back to the people who are behind this.”

“On one side anyways,” Yael said. “The local angle here is just as important.”

“Yes, but I’m not the one stuck dealing with people I’m not allowed to punch in the face now am I?” Zyla said. The emotional layer of joy and teasing that underlay her words had no problem coming through on the telepathic link.

“It’s going to be best two out of three next time,” Yael said.

“They’re calling me in to offer me my ‘special advantage’,” Zyla said. “Good luck with the locals.”

Yael sighed. It wasn’t that she particularly enjoyed fighting, but she had to admit that between the two of them, Zyla had nabbed the better job. Frowning, she began delicately knitting out a tiny, almost inconsequential, fate spell.

“Pardon me, but it looks as though you are waiting for someone,” a tall man in plain suit said.

Yael turned to look at him. One of the loops from her tiny spell had snared the man around the shoulders. More incriminating though was the small curl of connection that she saw leading away from him into a quickly blurred haze.

“I am,” Yael said. “Though I have to confess I expected him to be older and more wrinkly.”

“I see, this is your invitation then I take it?” the man asked, gesturing to the micro-fine thread from Yael’s spell.

“I’m impressed that you noticed it,” Yael said and let the spell dissipate into pure Aether again.

“it was a fine piece of workmanship,” the man said. “Did you suppose that no one here would be able to appreciate that?”

“Let’s say instead that I am delighted to find a fellow practitioner of the subtle arts who has spent the time required to master the discipline,” Yael said. She spoke in her “princess voice”, which she was admittedly rusty at using, but given that her training as a Crystal Guardian had included a several month stint where she served as a real princess in the Court of the Autumn Throne, it was a role she was reasonably sure was she could play with some authority.

“I’m sure our schooling here is but a shadow of the royal academy you trained at,” the man said. “Ours focus too long on the practical aspects of magic I am afraid.”

“I’ve always found the practical aspects of the non-tangible fascinating,” Yael said.

“And is that what you’ve come to observe tonight?” the man asked.

“In a sense, yes,” Yael said.

“There may be little to see,” the man said. “Our fighters are not generally gifted in anything but the physical arts.”

“Is it not customary here to augment the combatants?” Yael asked.

“Yes, to a limited extent,” the man said.

“Perhaps there will be less call for my attention to these exhibitions then,” Yael said.

“It would be a mistake to think of these contests as mere exhibitions,” the man said. “These are serious matches intended to try the competitors skills to the utmost.”

“My apologies for misspeaking then,” Yael said. “I was referring to the exhibition of the augmentation gear.”

“You have a keen eye,” the man said.

“Not for all things,” Yael said. “Just those which intersect my areas of interest.”

“Are you an aficionado of material enchanting as well?” the man asked.

“No, my interest is more financial in nature,” Yael said. She watched as the connections began to shift around the man.

He was tied to the government on Uronos, but only indirectly, which was a surprise. Yael had expected him to be one of the minor functionaries doing the bidding of a more empowered master.

There were threads that suggested he had power and obscured backers, but from the direction and resonance of the harmonies on those threads, Yael guessed that the man sitting beside her was more than a minion or a catspaw. To some extent he was the architect and shaper of the plan that was unfolding on Uronos.

“And what sort of concern do you represent?” the man asked.

“At the moment, none, as I have no contracts on Uronos,” Yael said. “I am, at present, merely observing the competition.”

“Are you sure there is an opportunity for competition here?” the man asked. “All of the enchanted material in the area is donated.”

“So I gather,” Yael said. “And I am not interested in charity work at present.”

“It seems a shame that your evening will be wasted then,” the man said.

“Not wasted, at the least my curiosity will be assuaged,” Yael said. “I’ve lost a few opportunities now to less reputable sorts who promise quality they can’t deliver. I am most interested to see how your contestants fare given that you’ve set an even playing field for them to fight on.”

“It seems you won’t have to wait long,” the man said. “The first match is beginning now.”

Yael watched Zyla enter the ring from one side while man at least half again as tall as she was entered from the other direction.

“As you see they both are outfitted with standard quality armor, shields and bolt casters,” the man said.

“And yet, the gear carried by the male contestant has been modified to include a more sleek appearance. It certainly appears to be higher quality than what his opponent is forced to work with,” Yael said.

“I guess that might yield some psychological advantage,” the man said.

“But not a material advantage,” Yael said.

“What do you mean by that?” the man asked.

“Watch how he moves, compared to his opponent. I’ve seen this sort of bait and switch before,” Yael said. “The seller claims that an enchanted piece has all manner of properties, but once it is in the field the thin veneer wears off the actual performance of the object is exposed as woefully inadequate..”

“You will forgive me for believing that you might be a somewhat biased source for those claims?” the man asked.

“Of course, but you needn’t take my word for it,” Yael said. “The proof is in the performance.”

“I fear this performance will not be so telling,” the man said. “This seems like a decidedly uneven match.”

“That is the first sign I would point you towards,” Yael said. “The fight program says that the woman is a first time fighter in this arena. That seems to be a poor match-up with the reigning champion for the past three weeks. The only reason I can see for it would be to show off the shiny new gear the champion is wearing on a stage where the odds are stacked in their favor.”

“There will be other matches,” the man said. “Perhaps they’ve reserved the more interesting line ups for later in the evening.”

“Perhaps, but see how the woman moves?” Yael said. “She’s avoiding all of his blows and she’s not even accelerating much. That’s a classic sign that the targeting enhancement in the fighter’s armor is failing. My competitors always did have problems with that spell. The real thing to watch for however is all of the weak spots the armor displays.”

“Such as?” the man asked.

“The arm for instance,” Yael said. “It looks like a minor blow caused it to seize up. Unless I miss my guess the knees will lock up next, more or less on their own.”

As Yael spoke, Zyla laid a smackdown on her opponent, locking his leg joints with the barest casting of a physical spell, to make it look like she’d disabled him with nothing more than a series of weak strikes.

One final blow from Zyla caused the armor her foes was encased in to shatter into it’s component pieces and drop off him leaving the fighter in little more than a loin cloth.

“It’s nice to see people who test the products they plan to invest in,” Yael said.

“It can certainly prevent troubling surprises later,” the man said.

“If you should know anyone who is in the market for somewhat higher quality merchandise, you’ll know how to contact me,” Yael said and spun a thicker more obvious loop around the man letting it settle on his shoulders like a mantle.

Or a noose that hadn’t yet been contracted.

Yael Clearborn, Guardian of the Crystal Empire and Arch-Mage class Aetherial spell caster glared at the mouse that stood in the grime covered bathroom with her.

“I’m not getting out of this tub until you leave,” she told the non-magical, non-sapient rodent.

It froze in place and twitched it whiskers at her.

Even naked and unarmed, Yael knew she was more than a match for the mouse, but she wasn’t interested in killing the small creature, and her more subtle abilities weren’t worth using on so small an adversary.

If only it saw itself like that.

It wasn’t a question of the mouse being trapped. The tiny creature had plenty of bolt holes to scamper into. The hotel room Yael and Zyla had rented might have earned a one-star rating at some point in the past but it had long ago sold that star and anything else it could pawn. Where the money the hotel took in went was a mystery, with the only clear answer being that none of it was invested in upkeep or accommodations for the guests. The base boards showed that neglect clearer than a building inspector’s condemnation order. Or at least clearer than the order which somehow always wound up buried under a small pile of money before it could be officially served to the hotel owners.

“Seriously, you need to go,” Yael told the mouse and loomed over it, careful to stay on the far side of the tub’s small wall as she did so.

She wasn’t scared of the mouse. She’d wrestled rodents the size of small houses and survived swarms of creatures that covered entire mountain ranges. She just didn’t want to squish the little thing. It was kind of cute. And it probably had a variety of plagues or whatever that would be a hassle to be treated for. And she was finally clean after a week of trudging through slimy streets and meeting with slimier people.

But mostly it was that the little thing was cute. With it’s big black eyes and pale violet fur. It’s little hands rubbed over each other like it was waiting to speak but had to fight crippling shyness to do so. Yael imagined it asking why a giant monster was in it’s home and had to concede that she was more the interloper than the mouse.

“We’re only here for a little while longer,” she said. “Just put up with us and I’ll leave you some food when we go.”

The mouse glanced away, reviewing its exit options, but stayed frozen in place.

At least until Zyla came in a moment later.

Zyla saw her partner standing in tub, below the dripping shower head, with a towel wrapped around her, and a small mouse sitting in the middle of the small bathroom blocking Yael’s escape.

The rodent turned to look at the new arrival and Zyla locked eyes with it.

“Leave,” she said. Her voice held the annoyance of a royal command and just enough heat to unfreeze the mouse. It flinched in surprise and bolted into the nearest hole in the wall boards it could find.

“My hero,” Yael said, stepping out of the bathtub at last.

Zyla shook her head.

“Truly a fearsome beast to have held you at bay.”

Zyla started to undress, being careful to place her clothes on what few surfaces were both off the floor and relatively clean.

“Did you have any luck tracking down the arms merchant or the ship contractor?” Yael asked as she toweled herself dry.

“Yes and no,” Zyla said, adjusting the water to her preferred, near freezing, temperature. Frosty but clean water gushed from the aging faucet into the tub. “The arms dealer was easy to find. He’s in the city morgue, currently occupying collection bins five through thirteen and awaiting processing. Our ship contractor has fled the planet, for perhaps understandable reasons.”

“And just so I can report on this honestly,” Yael said. “The arms merchant was at the morgue before you found him correct?”

“He hadn’t made any threats against you,” Zyla said. “So yes, that’s an accurate guess on your part.”

Yael wrapped her towel around Zyla and drew her in close.

“What would I do without you to protect me?” she said.

“A lot more damage,” Zyla replied and kissed her on the nose. “Let me get clean though. Morgues aren’t nice places to visit and I can feel the preservatives still clinging to my hair.”

Yael breathed in, inhaling the scent of Zyla’s hair. After a second she wrinkled her nose.

“Yeah, that could use a little shampoo,” she said and released Zyla from the towel grapple.

“We’ll want to hit the Silver Saucer tonight,” Zyla said. “There’s a thread leading back there that resonates with both of our revolutionaries.”

“That’s what I expected,” Yael said. “We tracked them this far separately, but there had to be somewhere their paths crossed.”

“Oh, and one other thing,” Zyla said and beckoned Yael closer.

Given that they could fall back on telepathic communication for secure communication, Yael was puzzled over the need to whisper anything. Puzzled until Zyla pulled her in for a kiss that is.

“Thank you for getting the water running,” Zyla said and pulled away to step into the tub. A series of fortunate (read: Aetherial magic sponsored) accidents had occurred which ensured the delivery of nice fresh water to the otherwise dilapidated hotel. This despite the fact that neither Yael nor Zyla could afford to alert anyone that a new Aetherial caster had arrived on the planet. In Aetherial battles it was often the caster who used the least magic who won, but clean showers were worth the risk of detection.

Yael smiled and touched her lips which buzzed with a pleasant energy. Zyla was still reserved, still quiet and shy in her stern and stoic way, but little by little she was starting to trust the commitment they’d made to each other and take advantage of what that meant.

Yael stepped out of the bathroom before she could let herself be lured into the icy blizzard that Zyla called a shower.

By the time she was done with dressing and a simple set of her daily anima exercises, Zyla was out of the shower too and ready to go over the casefile they’d spent the better part of two weeks assembling.

“This is starting to paint the kind of picture we didn’t want to see,” Zyla said, spreading the key documents out over the spare bed in the small apartment.

“It is but something still feels off,” Yael said. “We’ve got proof of not only mass weapon sales but also capital ships being requisitioned and parked out of system.”

“More that out of the system,” Zyla said. “In direct striking range of two of the neighboring systems.”

“We’re missing a ‘why’ though,” Yael said.

“There’s an obvious answer to that,” Zyla said.

“Yeah. Conquest,” Yael said. “But does that feel right?”

“Consider who you’re asking,” Zyla said. “Do you want the answer I’d like to believe, or that one I was trained to believe from birth?”

“Both,” Yael said.

Zyla looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m serious,” Yael said. “You don’t have to throw your old life away. It gives you a lot of skills I don’t have, and it made you who you are today.”

“In other words someone I’m trying not to be anymore,” Zyla said.

“As in someone amazing, who’s a lot better than she gives herself credit for,” Yael said, laying her hand on Zyla’s.

There was a time when Yael would never dared to speak so intimately with Zyla. There was a time when Zyla would have instinctively jerked her hand away from the gesture. Yael smiled when Zyla didn’t flinch. The old days were fading away, as old days always do, and Yael liked what the new days were bringing.

“A warlord would find being confined to a single world unbearable,” Zyla said. “Having all of your holdings on one world makes them too vulnerable. Conquest was a necessity for a secure reign.”

“But Uronos has been at peace for close to a century,” Yael said. “Well before the Crystal Empire appeared.”

“That’s true,” Zyla said. “But it’s an unaligned world. The Empire’s rules don’t apply here.”

“Not here, but Barstow Sigma is the closest system and that is Imperial territory,” Yael said.

“Which means an attack there would definitely draw an Imperial response,” Zyla said. “So that won’t be their target. The strong do not attack the stronger.”

“Kremkin’s Reach is the next nearest system and that’s unaligned too,” Yael said.

“A viable target then, except Kremkin’s has a defense treaty with the Empire as well,” Zyla said, finding the dossier on the solar system in question. “Could they think the Empire won’t honor the treaty?”

“Maybe, but that’s a large bet to make and Kremkin’s seems like a poor system to make it for,” Yael said.

“Perhaps not,” Zyla said. “A good warlord doesn’t look at a conquest solely for its own sake. They look for the position it can put them in.”

“And what would conquering Kremkin’s get Uronos?” Yael asked.

“By itself very little,” Zyla said. “Some slaves if the civilians survived, some resources too, but Uronos still has plenty of those to mine from the asteroids and planets of its own system. On it’s own there’s not much reason to move against Kremkin’s, or there wasn’t until half a year ago.”

Zyla passed a folder over to Yael. It was one of the documents that Imperial data analysis techs had forwarded to them this morning so the contents were new to the Crystal Guardian.

“What am I looking for here?” she asked.

“A set of celestial ley lines were discovered recently in near orbit to Kremkin’s,” Zyla said. “They’re long routes but they open up dozens of new ‘neighbor’ systems.”

“So Uronos wants to build an empire of their own and now they’ve got the portals to do it with?” Yael asked.

“Maybe,” Zyla said. “It is a possible motive, but I think you’re right. Something feels ‘off’ about that.”

“For Uronos’ sake, I hope the feeling is correct,” Yael said.

“We can’t let them attack anyone can we?” Zyla asked.

“No,” Yael said. “And worse than that, if they do try to attack Kremkin’s, we’ll have to step in and place them under Imperial censure.”

“Or in other words, conquer them,” Zyla said.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Yael said. “Revoking the government of any planet, independent or otherwise, is considered a cataclysm level event. They’ll lose their independence and there’ll be teams of Imperial Auditors and socio-engineers working on the planet for years after that.”

“I thought the Empire revoked millions of governments though when the Empress swept into control of the galaxy?” Zyla asked.

“That’s the ultra-simplified version of the story,” Yael said. “The reality was much more complex than that. The Empress and her forces didn’t ‘conquer’ most of the worlds in the Empire. There were military actions but those were mostly limited to the most aggressive of the Galactic Warlords and their supporters. Peaceful systems like Uronos were approached diplomatically.”

“The Empire took over systems with diplomacy?” Zyla asked.

“In many cases, yes,” Yael said. “The Empresses forces had, and still have, a tremendous amount to offer member worlds. Especially for relatively poor worlds, becoming a member of the Crystal Empire meant receiving celestial infrastructure they could never have afforded on their own and they were given a voice in galactic affairs when otherwise they would have been ignored.”

“And the ones that refused to join?” Zyla asked.

“They stayed unaligned like Uronos,” Yael said. “The Empresses goal wasn’t to unite the galaxy. She just wanted to stop the stellar scale bloodshed that kept knocking planets back into the galactic dark ages.”

“My father claimed she’d overextended herself and had to pull back to delay the Empire crumbling through her fingers,” Zyla said.

“That sounds like the kind of story a defeated warlord would cling to,” Yael said. “You’ve seen the range that we can patrol though. And that’s with spell casting on a human level still.”

“Well, mostly human,” Zyla said. “They’re still worshipping you on Drexden as the Grand Harvest Goddess.”

“That was such a mistake,” Yael said, shaking her head. “My fake divinity aside though, the Empress and the Prime Guardians are on a whole different level than we are.”

“You’re saying they could subjugate the entire galaxy if they wanted to?” Zyla asked.

“Not subjugate,” Yael said. “From what I’ve seen, the Empress does have limits and removing free will from another seems to be definitely beyond her abilities.”

“That’s inconvenient for a ruler,” Zyla said.

“I’m not sure it’s even fair to call her a ruler,” Yael said. “She’s more a living symbol of the Empire, but when you look at who makes the real decisions, that’s all done by the Galactic Parliament.”

“How does that help us here?” Zyla said.

“It doesn’t,” Yael said. “If anything it puts us back to questioning what the motive for the military build up here could be.”

“With how well this was obfuscated by Aetherial anima, I think we’re left with only one option,” Zyla said.

“The Silver Saucer,” Yael agreed.

Zyla reached for her anima blade and flicked it to life. The deadly red brand hummed in her hands and illuminated her face as she spoke.

“So that means we get to fight it out to see who gets to be the visiting princess and who has to brave the gladiator pits.”

Yael called her blade into her hand from across the room, but the fight had already begun.

Darius looked at the rainbow array of crystals on the flight control panel before him. He’d been rated as “Flight Capable” since he was six years old. Originally it had been flight under his own power, thanks to his natural talent at Energetic Anima. Being able to soar through the air like that was an awesome experience but not without its downsides.

Bugs, for example, were not tremendously fun to fly through at a few hundred miles an hour. The same was true of rain storms. And, with rare exceptions (one of which was snuggled up next to him taking an unplanned but much needed nap), flying like that with others involved a lot more lifting and carrying than Darius was comfortable with.

That was why he’d learned to operate as many different sorts of flying craft as he could, an interest which had led to his current role as the team’s warp space pilot.

For a normal flying craft, you needed to worry about only three dimensions. There were controls for pitch, and yaw and while the experience of moving through the air wasn’t one humans had an inherent talent at, it was something they could learn with practice.

Warp flight was a rather different story. The benefit of warp space was that it was both cotangent with regular space but not co-equal. That meant distances in regular space which were measured in light years were sometimes measured in miles in warp space. And sometimes not.

In general, the less mass there was present in an area in regular space, the more condensed the area was in warp space. Or in other words, big empty distances became tiny little gaps.

The problem was they didn’t become tiny little gaps consistently and they didn’t stay tiny all of the time either. In some cases the changes were predictable, in others a potential traveler simply had to react to changes as they occurred.

That was why Darius had dozens of controls in front of him, rather than the handful he would have needed for a flight in regular space. Each smooth polished wooden lever and cool gleaming crystal button controlled a different aspect of the ship’s trajectory. They offered an unbelievable amount of control but at the price of being more than a single human could keep track of.

In that sense, Darius was lucky. He couldn’t have flown the ship alone, and thanks to Fari he didn’t have to. She supplied the navigation and signal processing that a full team was usually required to perform. He, in turn, supplied the physical conduit to the ship and the moment to moment reflexive adjustments while they were in flight.

Together they made a good team.

“How’s it going?” he asked the translucent blue girl, keeping the communication purely on their telepathic link to avoid waking Mel.

“We’re making excellent time,” she said. “We’ve almost entirely around the event horizon for the black hole in the Velar system and after that it’s clear sailing till we reach the spaceport on Nova Helios.”

Blackholes, despite being singularities in regular space, cast huge shadows in warp space and were an inordinately common problem to stumble across (at least compared to the chance of running into one in regular space). Fortunately for travelers they also tended to stabilize warp space in their vicinity, so while they were dangerous to encounter, venturing near them was often safer than following other paths.

“And how about this trip in general?” he asked. “You seemed a bit reluctant when Mel was dragging you out of the planning room, and I can’t imagine the Frog God made this any more appealing.”

“It wasn’t so bad for me,” Fari said. “I didn’t have to deal with getting slimed after all.”

“That sounds like you’re coming around to enjoy this little vacation,” Darius said.

“I have to admit it’s got its appealing points,” Fari said.

“You’ve got holos recorded of the whole frog-thing don’t you?” Darius asked.

“Don’t worry, my blackmail rates are very low,” Fari said.

“Is it wrong that I’m tempted to get into a bidding war with Mel so that Black Team can see the frog holos of her?” Darius asked.

“Only if you win and can’t make your payments,” Fari said.

“I suppose I might have trouble with that,” Darius said. “What with Mel killing me before the holos could get out.”

“Then I’d have a bidding war over who gets to help hide the body,” Fari said.

“I’ll claim a posthumous cut of the proceeds,” Darius said.

“That’s the worst get rich quick scheme I’ve ever heard of,” Fari said.

“I’d say I was a prodigy at making bad plans, but I think this one here,” he nodded at the still sleeping Mel who was slumped against his left arm, “she’d probably try to contest that.”

“Funny how her terrible ideas tend to work out well so often though isn’t it?” Fari asked.

“Yeah, I may be part of ‘Team Engineering’ but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the cleverest brain on this ship,” Darius said.

“You’re brilliant though!” Fari said.

“So all of my test scores claim,” Darius said. “But what you and Mel can do is scary smart.”

“I think I’d rather I wasn’t so scary,” Fari said.

“Is that why Mel dragged us out here?” Darius asked. “Still worried you’re not a real girl?”

“No,” Fari said. “Maybe.”

“You’ve struggled with that for a while haven’t you?” Darius asked.

“It’s a hard question to answer,” Fari said. “There’s so much I can do, but so many things I can’t do too.”

“Do any of them matter?” Darius asked. “I mean who you are isn’t defined by your capabilities.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m defined by the function I was created to fulfill more than anything else though,” Fari said.

“I see why we’re out here then,” Darius said. “And why Captain Hanq was so eager to have us leave.”

“He thought we were a danger to the ship?” Fari asked.

“He thought the ship was a danger to us,” Darius said. “Or at least to you and Mel, and he knew I’d be miserable without you two around.”

“We tend to get in a lot more trouble away from the Horizon Breaker than we do when we’re on it though,” Fari said.

“Yeah, this is more the danger of burning out,” Darius said. “Neither of you have had a break in years, you’re long overdue for one.”

“That makes sense, but I have to confess, I kind of feel like we’re still on a mission,” Fari said.

“I guess we are, somewhat,” Darius said. “So maybe it’s important that we define the mission parameters well.”

“The original plan was to learn about festivals through first hand experience,” Fari said. “And we’re only a few hours away from the next one Mel had on her list.”

“On a scale of one to ten, and bearing the Frog God in mind, how much are you really up for going to another festival?” Darius asked.

“Honestly?” Fari asked. “Maybe a one, or a one and half.”

“Kind of what I thought,” Darius said. “New destination then.”

“What? Where are you taking us?” Fari asked.

“Do you trust me?” Darius asked. “Because there’s still time for me to get back on the original course if not.”

Fari started to speak, caught herself and then sighed.

“You know, for better or worse, I do,” she said.

“I’m glad,” Darius said. “I spend so much time focused on Mel, that I think I forget to tell you how much you mean to me too.”

“That’s ok,” Fari said. “Sometimes I think I siphon away too much of her time, especially on crazy quests like this.”

“There’s nothing crazy about that taking care of you,” Darius said. “And you know, I’ve never minded the time you two spend together.”

“Why is that?” Fari asked. “I mean, I feel the same way with her and you, but I wasn’t sure if that was just more of my programming.”

“Well, for me it’s pretty simple,” Darius said. “She loves you. Being with you makes her happy. You’re family to her and that’s something she’s needed all her life I think.”

“But you’re her guy,” Fari said. “You’re the one she really loves.”

“The one she ‘really’ loves?” Darius asked. “Have you met Mel? Do you think she’s really only capable of loving one person in the whole galaxy?”

“I don’t think there’s much of anything that’s beyond her,” Fari said. “In the thousands of years I’ve been…whatever I am, I’ve never known anyone like her.”

“Maybe that’s why you two are so well matched,” Darius said. “Because I don’t think there’s anyone as amazing as either of you. And not because of what you can do. There’s lots of people with phenomenal amounts of power. You both have something more than that though. Even without any of your powers, I’d still be blessed beyond measure to have you in my life.”

“What if I’m just a reflection of her though?” Fari asked. “Before I met Mel, I wasn’t…kind.”

“Before you met Mel, you were literally bound in terms of what you could think and do,” Darius said. “I’ve read the reports, even the classified ones.”

“How did you get those?” Fari asked.

“I’m not the brains of this team, but I’m not exactly slow either,” Darius said. “Remember, I grew up on a war planet where slicing into the other sides protected files was considered required subject matter for five year olds.”

“Then you know the kind of things I did,” Fari said.

“And I know the kind of things you’ve done since you gained the ability to chose for yourself,” Darius said. “So I stand behind my assessment. You’re as wonderful as Mel is, and neither of you is a copy of the other.”

“Thank you,” Fari said. “I don’t know why, but that means a lot somehow.”

“You’re welcome,” Darius said.

“But that still leaves one question open,” Fari said. “Where are you taking us?”

“I have no idea!” Darius said.

“How can you have no idea?” Fari asked. “We’re drifting back towards the event horizon of the black hole!”

“That does seem to be the case,” Darius said. He slid an amber crystal a quarter turn clockwise, increasing their displacement from the real space gravitational plane. The ship rumbled in response as it’s hold on warp space grew more tenuous. On his shoulder, Mel grumbled and stirred as well.

With the choice of waking up his beloved when she was likely to be in a cranky state or risking being devoured by an inescapable singularity, Darius made the choice that experience and wisdom agreed was the only viable option.

“We’re closing into a peek slingshot orbit,” Fari said. “I don’t have enough data to plot where we’re going to wind up except to assure you it’s going to be at least halfway across the galaxy.”

“Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?” Darius asked. He wanted to keep the mischievous smile off his face but that it was too hard to fight that and the blackhole’s devouring maw at the same time.

It took a mad genius to handle warp space navigation under most circumstances. The one exception to that rule was when you didn’t care where you ended it. In that case all you needed to be was mad.

“How is being lost somewhere random in the galaxy perfect?” Fari asked.

“Because then we definitely won’t have any missions to work on!” Darius said.

Fari started to object and then paused. Outside the window of the ship, the weird swirls of warp space contracted into impossibly dense coils with the paths beyond them unpredictable by any science, magic or math that she knew. A slow smile spread across her face as a sense of freedom spread through her.

“You know, you just might be on to something,” she said as their ship passed the slingshot point and was hurled away, across the light years, to a place they’d never planned to go.

The rain that fell on Targrav carried carried both the cold touch of the day’s misery and the warm memories of past delights. Underneath his gloved fingers, black sand glittered like each grain held a nebula of stars. The faintly shining beach ran down to brilliant azure waves that lit the stormy night with a magical glow that had nothing to do with any spell cast by a sapient.

Targrav had never been to a beach like the one he lay broken on. Across the million, or billion, worlds in the galaxy, he doubted another like it even existed. Despite that, the serenity of that barren stretch called back memories from his earliest childhood.

Midnight swims on a far less lustrous beach with Mera, his best friend and earliest love. Thanks to her, even those early memories sparkled with a light to match the luminance of the otherworldly shore before him.

The rain did nothing to dim the glow of the ocean, or the sparkle of the sands, just as a far distant rain, long before, had done nothing to dim the time he and Mera had spent together. He couldn’t help thinking about her as the warmth in his body faded and a darkness with no connection to the night closed ever inwards around him.

She was above him, above the clouds, above even the night itself, safe and jetting across the vast reaches of warp space. That thought filled him with a fierce heat that the cold rain and the puncture wounds could never touch. It was a heat that could carry his spirit on forever, but unfortunately it offered no support to his body.

The crash had been terrible. They’d hit a storm in warp space that was born from no natural source. Their ship had been forced back to normal space at the perfect spot for the ambush. A distant system, a warp gate close in to a planetary moon. Optimal conditions for attackers to lay in wait for passerby.

Targrav shuddered at the memory of their first sighting of the pirate fleet. Three ships. Broad beamed and running under pure Anima power. No celestial sails for these vessels, just iron plates and engines of fire. Atop the decks of the marauders lay a motley collection of guns and shields that had been scavenged off a dozen better vessels. In place of proper enchanted runes, the pirates had carved crude sayings and blasphemies, as much to inspire themselves as to shock their prey.

Targrav flinched as the storm turned violent. Lightning crashed down from the heavens and split the sea, darkening the waters where it struck them. Thunder followed, booming over the beach and rumbling through Targrav’s flesh to shake his bones. The rage of the clouds was right above him, the storm seeming incensed that he clung to life, despite his injuries and exposure to the elements.

The pirates had screamed in a similar rage. The craft Mera and Targrav flew couldn’t out match even one of the pirate ships, much less three of them. It was a comfortable little bubble boat meant to float on the seas of space and convey the couple to their destination. Mera’s curses couldn’t make it fly faster or dodge more nimbly, but her skills as a pilot almost pushed the little craft’s performance far enough.

As an enchanting engineer, Targrav had known the moment his wife had run to her limit. There were too many bolts, too many beam attacks, too much in the sky to avoid and not enough shielding to cover them. The cascading failure of their meager defenses had left him with only an instant to act and only a single path that he could see.

Warp engines store a tremendous amount of anima. Even for little bubble boats. Without the proper constraining circles, it was still possible to open a portal to warp space but the results were volatile at best. Targrav didn’t have any functional constraining circles to rely on but he also didn’t care if the end result of the transit spells that he cast yielded “energetic” results. All that mattered to him was that the ship’s piloting platform be left in a state where it was capable of acting as a life pod.

In terms of that, every hour of practice he put in, every boring book he ever studied, and every miserable test he ever prepared for finally paid off. The warp portal formed flawlessly. Inside its volume the storm of enemy fire died away, whisked into the aether by the warp portal’s exposed skin.

For a brief moment Targrav felt hope flair that he might reach the flight deck in time but before he could take even a single step in that direction, the warp spell failed cataclysmically, as unbounded warp spells always do.

The explosion rent the bubble ship in half, with the flight deck and what was left of the engines rocketing into warp space and far beyond the reach of the pirates when the engineering deck and the rest of the ship were shot in the other direction, down to the surface of the moon the pirates had made their base on.

It was not an easy descent or an easy landing. The remains of the ship included too many small, sharp objects moving at too high a velocity. Even with the protection of his enviro-suit, Targrav had not been spared.

But neither had the pirates.

The damage the exploding warp portal did to the bubble boat was trivial compared to the effect it had on the three warships.

The pirates were greedy, where proper military tactics were to engage warp capable targets at range, they’d all raced towards the bubble boat, eager to be the first to board, and the first to claim the spoils of plunder.

All three of the warcraft paid for that. Their shields were woefully inadequate to repel a blast of the magnitude that hit them and each popped like a soap bubble. The iron plating they were armored with didn’t fare any better, crumpling to foil and shattered slivers of metal which would have been a danger if any of the pirates had survived being popped and crumpled and shattered themselves.

In the wake of the warp portal’s silent explosion in normal space, there had been only isolation. The remains of the bubble boat had fallen to the surface of the moon, inertial dampening spells struggling to retain their coherency until the impact with the surface dissipated them in one final burst.

The spell burst had saved Targrav from the trauma of the crash landing, a fact for which he would gratefully write a long and heartfelt endorsement for the bubble boat’s manufacturer, except that he could tell from the pain in his side and the numbness in his legs that he wasn’t likely to write anything for anyone again.

All in all though, he felt good. The pain was there but as long as he lay still and let the rain wash over him, the cold helped numb it away. He could picture drifting off to sleep under the rolling, roaring drone of the cloud choked sky. Sleep seemed peaceful and eternal sleep even more so. All he had to do was close his eyes, listen to the thunder and rest peaceful in knowing that Mera was safe.

Pushing himself to a sitting position was agony. Sheer, pointless agony. He was stranded with no ship, no food, no anything on an unexplored moon that was off the standard warp lines and unlikely ever be visited again.

He tried to stand and fell over, fresh waves of pain radiating from the stabbing pain in his side. From his new position, helmet down in the sand, Targrav noticed the faint scent of ozone mixed with the salty tang of the ocean.

The pain was bad but the scents were much worse. The enviro-suit was supposed to be sealed.

Targrav held his breath and looked for the hole but there wasn’t “one” to find. The suit was ripped in a hundred places and the helmet’s visor was missing more pieces than it retained.

On a more positive note, he decided, the air hadn’t killed him in a single breath. Under the circumstances, that didn’t seem to leave him much choice, so Targrav drew in another lungful of air. If the pirates lived here, Targrav hoped the moon’s atmosphere wouldn’t contain anything too toxic. When he didn’t immediately start coughing or choking, he counted the gamble as a victory.

In a few moments, the pain became more manageable and Targrav rolled onto his side. The black nebula sand spread softly beneath him, forming a welcoming bed.

Or a grave.

The thought pushed Targrav back to his knees.

However comfortable the beach was, he couldn’t stay out in the rain.

Strewn around him were pieces of the bubble boat. Bits of glass-steel and fragments of wood. Each was valuable even in their present state, but the thing that caught Targrav’s eye was the smooth and almost intact observation dome from the bubble boat that lay half buried in the sand.

He and Mera had spent many nights together in that tiny space, watching the stars and planning for their future. The cold space outside had done nothing to steal away the warm words they shared or cool the heat of their touch.

Targrav rose again, slower this time, but even more determined. The transparent dome would be cool, the warmth it once held forgotten in destruction of the bubble boat. Even if it was as cold as the rain though, it could protect him. Provide shelter from the wind. Hold in what little body temperature he had left.

The trek across the sands was no more than fifty feet, but it felt like a journey of hours.

With each step, Targrav asked himself what the point of continuing was. Each moment he bought himself was another moment of pain. He knew if the end came like this, if he struggled against it, he’d leave nothing but a messier corpse.

The wind confirmed that belief by spearing through the rents in his enviro-suit and chilling him to the point where he was left trembling.

So much easier to lay down in the soft, inviting sands.

With one wobbling step after another he pushed on though.

The observation dome called to him. It held more than the promise of warmth. It held memories of the future. The one he planned to see with Mera.

Searing pain so bright it eclipsed Targrav’s vision burned through him. He was not all right. Not by any stretch.

But he was alive.

Step by step, faltering, weakening, but always advancing he continued until he rested his hand on the glass-steel dome and discovered it was warm enough to almost burn him through the enviro-suit’s glove.

The ship’s heat had been lost, but the fire of re-entry still lingered in the durable material.

Heartened by that stroke of luck, Targrav eased himself to the ground gently and pulled himself into the dome.

It was shelter. It was all that he had left of home. It was enough for moment.

He rested, blackness sweeping over him for the blink of an eye that lasted either a few seconds or a few hours. However long it was, Targrav felt some of his anima had been restored by the time he opened his eyes. His wounds had worsened, but with the energy he’d recovered and his minimal training in healing magics, he was able to halt the degradation and temporarily deal with the worst of the injuries. Even that small exertion though drained him to the point where sleep overwhelmed him again.

In his dreams, he saw himself, alone on a tiny, forgotten pebble. His struggles for life condemning him to an eternity of loneliness and isolation. Without Mera, he wasn’t sure why he’d fought so hard to continue on.

The storm was raging when he woke next. And the sun was shining.

Targrav took several seconds to fit those two things together in his drained and pain-addled mind before successfully reframing the first of those impressions.

The storm wasn’t raging.

A ship was descending with full thrusters blaring as it screamed into a landing position.

Targrav thought about the pirates and tried to rise. He might have to fight them off.

The ship was on the ground when he regained his senses from falling again and people were running towards him. He struggled to stand once more, but before he could there were reassuring voices and soft hands turning him over so that he could breath more easily.

“This is him,” a woman said. “The enviro-suit matches the description Mera gave us.”

At the mention of his wife’s name Targrav felt new life stir in him. It was either that or the influx of healing anima that the woman sent surging through his body.

“My name is Ilya,” the woman said. “I’m a healer from the Imperial fast response ship Horizon Breaker and we’re here to rescue you.”

“How did you know?” Targrav asked, his voice rough with the damage from sand and wind and rain.

“We got your wife’s rescue beacon signal,” Ilya said. “She jury-rigged it to transmit back both of your locations. Crazy thing I guess. Rescue beacons are the last thing in the world you want to mess around with.”

“Is she safe?” Targrav asked.

“Sort of,” Ilya said.

“What do you mean?” Targrav asked.

“Well, she kind of kidnapped the rescue party we sent for her,” Ilya said. “And stole their ship. She’s about an hour behind us and we’d like you to help us talk her into not breaking any more galactic laws in trying to rescue you.”

Randos Ovalamech ran faster than he had ever run before. He ran faster than any Ovalamech had ever run in fact. He just didn’t run fast enough.

Not fast enough to reach the escape shuttle that was always prepared to rocket him off the planet. (The bridge leading to it collapsed while he was still a hundred yards away or more.) Not fast enough to reach the communications control room where he could send a call for help. (It exploded when he was a dozen yards away, flinging him to the ground and allowing the invisible beasts that pursued him to gain precious ground.)

He didn’t even run fast enough to make it to grand arch that lead from the Ovalamech estate to the rest of the Ovlopoli, the family’s ancestral capital city. Dark fire roared across the connecting span and drove Randos and his body guards back from the last open path of escape.

“What are these things!” one of the bodyguards screamed.

Randos made a mental note to fire the coward, or better yet, use him as some form of expandable bait. Death benefits could be revoked in the case of gross incompetence on the part of the deceased and as far as Randos was concerned all of his security forces were grossly incompetent for letting an attacking force get the upper hand on them.

“Back to the mansion,” Randos said and waited for his men to proceed him. Leadership was about making decisions. Risk taking maneuvers like venturing first into dangerous territory were for lesser men who could be easily replaced.

“The armory would be more defensible sir,” one of the senior bodyguards pointed out.

Randos made a note to fire him as well. He wasn’t paying the guards to think. Not when he was in command. They were meant to listen and obey. Anything other than that caused delays.

“Back to the mansion,” Randos said, the words issuing from a jaw set tight enough to grind out sparks of rage.

The bodyguards fell into position around him and made haste towards the temporary safety of the mansion. None of them believed they could withstand the attacking force there but even putting up a decent fight might count for something.

“Why has our surveillance not identified the intruders?” Randos asked.

“We can’t pierce their invisibility spells sir,” a bodyguard said.

“And our surveillance was the first area they hit,” another said.

“How is that possible!” Randos clenched his hands and looked to be desperate need of a throat to crush. “Central surveillance is in the heart of the estate.”

“If we can’t see them, maybe they’re fighting us from the inside out?” one of the body guards on the left flank said.

“That would mean going into the mansion would be a really stupid move,” one of the rearguards said.

Randos whipped around, ready to shoot the idiot who dared defy his commands at a time like this. The two men behind him were looking behind themselves. Covering the rear quadrant of the squad as they were supposed too. Except there were supposed to be three men acting as rearguards.

“Who said that?” Randos asked.

“Symmans sir,” one of the rearguard said.

“Where is he?” Random asked.

“I don’t know, he was here a second ago,” the guard said.

“They’re here. Run. Now,” Randos said.

He spared a glance to his left and saw two men running beside him. There were supposed to be three there as well.

“Shields!” he said.

The bodyguard directly ahead of him raised a bubble shield. He was clearly spooked though. The guards were supposed to raise one large shield together, not smaller, individual shields.

In the end it didn’t matter however. One moment Randos watched as a glittering silver bubble sparkled around the lead bodyguard. The next the bubble was wrapped in a shroud of billowing nightsky that seemed to swallow it like a giant maw.

A single scream penetrated the dark cloak and then everything vanished, cloak, shield bubble and the bodyguard.

The bodyguards started firing but that didn’t improve their conditions at all. In the wake of the bolt caster fire, a high, horrific laughter sounded, echoing from around and even within them. Randos flinched when the laughter came from a spot just an inch behind his left ear and he felt a cold hand brush down his spine.

Ovalamech’s don’t scream, they are not unmanned by terror, and they do not beg for mercy. If any of Randos bodyguards tried to deny that, he would have them executed to silence their lying tongues. It was thanks to the courage of the Ovalamech’s in fact, that Randos was able to reach the mansion well ahead of his more fit bodyguards.

Doors, Randos decided, are a convenience accessory for a house. It is perfectly reasonable to forego their use and instead crash directly through the large stained glass windows to the side of a door. The stained glass was, after all, clearly out of fashion and in need of replacement. Also opening the door would take a precious fraction of a second which Randos was not sure he had to spare.

Glass windows are a funny thing though. On the entertainment holos, heroes crash through them all the time and continue pursuing their quarry with nary a pause. From the depictions in the videos, no particular shielding was required to do so safely. Glass, from everything Randos knew, was a mostly harmless substance, meant for decoration and some of the more obscure forms of casting support that the Ovalamech corporation specialized in.

In that sense the stained glass window was an excellent instructor. Its primary lesson was on the difference between “candy glass” and “real glass”. Candy glass, as seen in the holos, breaks into highly photogenic chunks with reasonably blunt edges. Real glass, on the other hand, breaks into a shower of razor sharp spikes that thirst for the blood of the fool who shattered them.

Randos had expected to burst through the window and finally win a race by making it to the hidden room that lead to the subterranean safehold his family had prepared generations before. Instead of that happy day dream though, he found himself faced with the nightmare of skidding across the floor on his face as his legs mysteriously gave out on him.

The mystery was explained a split second later when his body’s pain blockers failed and he was hit by the agony of all the cuts he’d suffered going through the window.

He waited for a pair of breaths for his guards to catch up with him. The prospect of running any further was beyond imagining but they could carry him. He could still be safe!

Any moment.

When his guards arrived.

They would carry him away from this insanity.

And then he would fire them all. Or execute them. Or both. No Ovalamech should ever experience this sort of suffering and it clearly had to be their fault.

But his guards didn’t seem to be coming.

There weren’t any screams.

But there wasn’t any other noise either.

No sound of men running. No sound of weapon fire. No sound of anything except the wind blowing and insects chirping their night calls, unconcerned with the calamity that was befalling Randos Ovalamech.

The door wasn’t far away. It was hidden in the paneling at the other side of the entrance hall that Randos lay in. He’d found it as a child, when he played there with his brother and sister. He wished they were with him still. Mostly so that they could be the ones laying on the floor, shredded by broken glass. But his brother had been too ambitious and too much of a threat not to sell to a cult willing to pay top dollar for royal blood and body parts.

Randos wished he could have done the same with his sister but she was ambitious and intelligent. She had taken over control of the Overmaster Cult the Ovalamechs had used to build their shadow empire. With her power base, Randos couldn’t afford to move against her and with the arrangements they had for sharing power, he had little reason to wish to, aside from ego (so, of course, doing so was always a priority in his mind).

Since she was unfortunately off-world and had been for the better part of the last ten years, Randos decided that hoping to swap places with her wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

Crawling on his hands and knees through the broken glass wasn’t accomplishing much either, but in slow, agonizing increments he drew closer to the wall. As he came within arms reach of the wall, hope surged within him.

He was going to make it.

And then he was going to plot his revenge.

He laughed as a thought occurred to him. He’d never known how horrible broken glass was. He could draw on this experience to punish those who defied him more properly in the future.

As he reached the hidden door, Randos found himself tensing, not in pain, but in anticipation. His guards were removed. Every other avenue of escape had been denied him. It seemed impossible that he would escape at this point.

But then the door opened, its security spells confirming his identity with ease. And he was inside. Safe at last!

“I thought you might have a hidey hole like this,” a woman he’d never seen before said as she literally stepped out of a shadow.

Randos didn’t scream. He definitely did not scream till his was out of breath.

“Are you done?” the woman asked.

Randos nodded. Defiantly. He wouldn’t let this woman make him talk.

“Good,” she said. “Because you’re going to answer some questions for me. Starting with the names of all your sister’s little followers.”

“You want my sister?” Randos asked. “Is she responsible for this?”

“You’re both responsible for this,” the woman said. “She’s been assaulting Abyz and you’ve been supplying her with the weapons and personnel to do so. I want to know why.”

“It was all her idea!” Randos said.

“That doesn’t tell me what I want to know,” Bo said.

“I don’t know why she wanted to do that!” Randos said. “She’s a loose cannon, a pariah, we haven’t met in years!”

“Then why is she using Ovalamech supplies and casters in her assaults,” Bo asked.

“She must have been stealing them!” Randos said.

“Stealing them? From you?” Bo asked. “Ovalamech, do you have any idea how thoroughly we’ve penetrated your operation? We’ve read your entire spell web.”

“That’s impossible!” Randos said. “And…and unimportant. All of our operations are completely above board. We have nothing to hide!”

“Ovalamech, you have Ghost Bombs on these premises with only your bio-signature  set for command access. Those alone are so illegal that I can have you arrested and put away for multiple life times and your trial would take roughly ten minutes to complete,” Bo said. “And we both know that ghost bombs are the least of your crimes.”

“You can’t prove that!” Randos said. “I have people who will testify that you must have falsified the controls! I have lawyers who will eat you for lunch! You can’t touch me!”

Dark mist rose around him, not as a cloud but as dozens of wispy, curling tendrils. The mist didn’t make contact with him but whenever it drew near Randos felt a soul searing cold as his anima was teased out from his control.

“You mistake me Ovalamech,” Bo said. “I could take you to the Imperial courts, but I’m not going to do that. You assaulted my world. You’re never going to get to do that again.”

“You can’t kill me!” Randos said. “I have powerful allies. They’ll destroy you! They’re destroy your whole planet.”

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you either Ovalamech,” Bo said. “I’m going to leave you just like this. Very much alive. Very much in control of your organization. After all this devastation, after being reduced to this state, you’re going to make a full recovery and be left with all the power you had before.”

“What? Why?” Randos asked.

“Because I want your sister to wonder,” Bo said. “I want her to question why someone would go to this much trouble, and then leave you be. I want her thinking about that as we take her cult apart piece by piece, just like we did here.”

“You’ll never manage that!” Randos said.

Nalasi appeared at Bo’s side holding a scroll from deep with the safehold.

“Looks like we’ve got all their names here,” Nalasi said. “Great that this guy showed us where their best bolt hole was.”

“You tricked me!” Randos said. “All of this destruction, it was all so I would come here!”

“Not all of it,” Bo said. “Some of it was to convince your sister that you really had your back up against the wall and had no other choices open to you.”

“She’s going to think I turned on her,” Randos said, horror dawning slowly across his face.

“Not just her,” Bo said. “Everyone in her cult. From the groundling fanatics to your cronies in the inner circle who reap all the rewards from the murder and mayhem you cause. Unless I miss my guess, that scroll has all of their names doesn’t it?”

Randos saw his doom played out clearly before his eyes. The only question in his mind was who would be the one to take him down. No one in the Overmasters would let him live for a betrayal like that, but he had to guess it would be his sister who did the deed. She always preferred the personal touch. Made it easier to be sure the target was eliminated properly.

“You can’t leave me like this!” Randos said. “What can I do?”

“Well, we’re certainly not going to protect you,” Bo said. “But you might try turning yourself into the Imperials. Anyone you provide evidence against will be someone they can arrest for you.”

“But that would destroy my entire organization!” Randos said.

“Or you can let your entire organization destroy you,” Bo said. “Have fun making that choice!”

Bo Riverstone had conquered many demons in her life, some figurative but some quite solidly literal. Standing in the ruins of an evacuated office building, she found herself struggling to both catch her breath and remember why she’d ever thought her present line of work was a sane one.

“That was the toughest one we’ve encountered so far,” her Mom said. Her mother was spared the necessity of catching her breath due to the fact that she had no body to breathe with in the first place. Echo, as her daughters had taken to calling her, wasn’t unique in the galaxy but as an incarnate spirit bound to a Jewel of Endless Night, she was more than a little unusual.

“They’re appearing quicker too,” Bo said. “At this rate, I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep up.”

“Mel’s one warp space communique away,” Echo said.

“The last time my sister was here, everyone on the planet died,” Bo said.

“They got better,” Echo said.

“Yes, but we don’t have a trio of arch-mage class Aetherial casters to pick up the pieces at the moment,” Bo said. “And anyways with as fast as these malefic spirits are arriving, one more Void caster isn’t going to be enough. We need to fix the problem at its source.”

Bo started to pick a path out of the crumbled building. She kept an eye out for survivors as she climbed from the pit of the buildings sub-basements but from all the reports she’d gotten the building had been fully cleared before she took the fight to it.

Moving through the rubble proved to be a lot harder than creating it had been. The building was one of the old, squat, solid offices with plenty of basement levels excavated for storage. The builders had stayed within the city’s construction codes, so it wasn’t their fault the lowest levels were dug deep enough to allow for an easy transition of a spirit from Beyond Space into the physical world. Bo made a mental note to tell someone in zoning and planning that they needed to update their building codes and check any existing structures that ran as deep as the destroyed office building had.

“I’m sorry, I’ll keep trying,” Echo said. There was tension and regret in her voice. Not all of the incursions had been dealt with as well as this one. With Bo’s early arrival, only a building had been lost this time.

“It’s not your fault Mom,” Bo said. “No one else has been able to find the summoner responsible for these attacks either.”

“No one else has my power,” Echo said. “I should be able to do this.”

“You shouldn’t need too,” Bo said. “The fate weave is supposed to make things like this impossible.”

“It’s not as powerful as it was,” Echo said.

“I know,” Bo said. In part that was her fault. If she’d disagreed with her sister more, if she’d gone all out in her fight against Mel, Bo might have been able to preserve the old form of the fate weave. The stronger form. The one that kept them completely safe at the cost of consuming the lives of those society didn’t see.

Bo climbed out of the last of the wreckage and found her support crew waiting for her. When the Imperial Auditors arrived, they’d been careful with their assessments of the Royal Agents. In a sense the two groups were kindred souls, where the Imperial Auditors were charged with protecting the Crystal Empire though, the Royal Agents held a more limited scope of responsibility; they only needed to worry about the safety of everyone on Abyz.

In the end, the auditors arrested only a small number of the Royal Agents. The rest were placed under the direct command of the Prime Minister and, for the most part, continued working to protect the citizens they had served for years.

“No other incursions reported boss,” Nalasi, Bo’s senior lieutenant, said.

“Or we just haven’t found it yet,” Harios, Bo’s other senior lieutenant, said.

The other casters on Bo’s squad were handling to crowd control and and tending to the people who’d been wounded by the demons initial attack.

“We’ve got enough of a presence here that the caster may be holding back their second for the moment,” Bo said. “Alert Minister Alinaki. If I’m right, another major attack is going to come a lot sooner than we’re ready for.”

“Or a lot farther away,” Echo said.

“What do you mean?” Bo asked.

“We shouldn’t have been able to reach this demon before it tore up most of the city,” Echo said. “I plotted out our incursion points and they’re not random.”

“Why haven’t we seen a pattern to it before this?” Bo asked.

“We’ve been mapping them in two dimensions on a map of the planetary surface,” Echo said. “I don’t think that’s how our summoner is looking at their targets though.”

“They’re picking the spots to attack in three dimensions?” Bo asked.

“Four actually,” Echo said. “They’ve been spaced around the Royal Capital at varying distances and directions, but each incursion has been when one of the three moons is at perigee.”

“Why would the distance to a moon matter?” Harois asked.

“Because interplanetary teleportation is extremely difficult,” Bo said.

“Wait, these monsters are teleporting in from the moons?” Nalasi asked.

“Not by themselves,” Echo said. “If they had the capability to do that, they would flee once the fights turned against them, and all of the invaders have fought the bitter end.”

“Yeah, because they’re spirits and destroying their bodies here doesn’t actually kill them,” Harois said.

“It doesn’t kill them, but it does leave them drained, and banished back to their home plane,” Echo said. “If you think about the kind of place they come from, you can see why that might be a fate worse than death.”

“If the summoner is conducting the spell from the moon that would explain why the fate weave isn’t able to stop them,” Bo said.

“It’s trying its best,” Echo said. “The fact that we were in the vicinity at all, is probably due to its manipulations. If we were deployed based around the suggested pattern of the other attacks, we would have been a hundred miles to the east of the capital.”

“We need to do a couple of things then,” Bo said. “Harios, start interviewing the people who work here. Everyone we evacuated.”

“Sure thing boss,” Harios said. “What am I looking for?”

“Any reason why they might have been targeted by our demon summoner,” Bo said. “If they violated their pattern they were after someone or something. Focus on teleportation detection or prevention research, and ask Minister Alinaki to crank up as many teleportation area denial fields as she can manage for the next few hours.”

“You said we needed to do a couple of things boss,” Nalasi said. “Should I be getting a shuttle prepped for a lunar expedition?”

“Yep, work with Echo on the transit route,” Bo said. “We need to be at their base in under an hour.”

Fifty five minutes later the Royal Space Yacht “Light Tripper” slammed through the walls of a previously undetected structure on the Abyzal moon of Dridos.

“You’re under arrest,” Nalasi called out from inside her space-suit. With the moon, and the base they’d crashed into, being an airless environment, Nalasi’s words carried to the edge of her visor and then to the other space suits she was linked to.

“I think they’ve figured that out,” Bo said.

The Light Tripper had approached under the cover of an invisibility spell. No one inside should have had any warning of their arrival, or of the instantaneous exposure to hard vacuum that accompanied their crash into the building. It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings, but Bo wasn’t feeling in a particular friendly mood.

“Assuming they’re still here,” Echo said. “I’m not detecting any active anima in the building.”

“Stay sharp,” Bo said. “They might be cloaked.”

“Shouldn’t we be too then?” Nalasi asked.

“We’d make terrible bait if they couldn’t see us,” Bo said.

“Aww, this is another bait mission?” Nalasi said. “Why did I draw the short straw this time?”

“It’s the cost of being talented and clever,” Bo said. “People start relying on you and trusting you to have their backs.”

“Note to self; learn to suck more,” Nalasi said.

“Don’t worry,” Bo said as she entered the enemy base. “If a demon eats you, I’ll make sure not to take you along on any more bait missions.”

“You are all heart boss,” Nalasi said, following Bo into the darkened, empty building.

The base showed signs of recent use, but there was a disturbing absence of inhabitants. Bo lead them up to the top of a tall summoning spire which reached out like a vulture’s talon towards the planet far above them. The top floor was entirely crafted from etched glass, walls, ceiling and floors. In the center of the room, a triangle was scored into the floor so deeply that regular runs of it were open to the vast shaft that was burrowed into the moon’s interior. The center of the triangle was an empty circle that was surrounded by etchings inlaid with the bodies of millions of tiny insects. From a distance they formed what looked like a solid black cord that ringed the empty summoning circle and held back the creatures which passed through it.

“Why is there a pit under a glass floor?” Nalasi asked.

“Because this isn’t a tower,” Echo said. “It’s the barrel of a very peculiar gun.”

“They’ve been shooting the demons at us?” Nalasi asked.

“No,” Bo said. “Or not exactly. Look at the roof, there’s the first part of a targeting lens but there’s no armature to hold the other redirection crystal.”

“That’s how they got the demons to appear in places like a basement,” Echo said. “They only need someone to carry the final piece of the lens to their target destination and this spire can form a link to that location.”

“There must be similar structures on the other two moons then,” Bo said.

“I’m already calling it in boss,” Nalasi said. “I’ll have the Royal Navy sweep them clean.”

“Why would someone do this?” Echo asked.

“Because they think they can get Abyz back,” Bo said, pointing to the great sigil carved into the glass floor. “Before the Queen’s reign, before the original fate weave, Abyz threw off the rule of a fanatic Warlord family that called themselves the Overmasters. That’s their symbol.”

“That was a very long time ago. Is it them or someone who’s borrowing their insignia?” Echo asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bo said. “If they have the resources to build a place like this, then they’re a threat in either case.”

“Speaking of threats,” Nalasi said. “I think there’s one that we need to turn our attention to sooner than later.”

“You’re thinking about what’s at the bottom of the pit?” Bo asked.

“If the top of the spire is the transport mechanism, then the bottom will be where the portal to the demon’s home realm is,” Echo said.

“Yeah, the question is just how secure is that portal?” Nalasi asked.

From deep below them the answer rose in the sound of the beating of hundreds of wings.

“They don’t really have a good sense of who their dealing with,” Bo said. “Mom, would you like to handle this?”

“Certainly,” Echo said.

The black lightning that lashed down onto the surface of the Moon lancing through the building and the land around it. Mind anima directed the lightning to seek out each of the thousand demons that were rising up the barrel of the summoning spire. Void anima moved the lighting through the shadows of solid matter to so that the monsters couldn’t hide from Echo’s wrath. Physical anima and Energetic anima ripped apart everything the lightning sought out and Aetherial anima ensured that none of the demons escaped its touch.

“That’s not what that Jewel used to do is it?” Nalasi asked.

“I’ve modified it some,” Echo said.

“That’s good,” Nalasi said and inched away from Echo. “What’s our next move?”

“First we close the portal below us for good, then we track down the Overmasters,” Bo said.

“They’ve almost certainly left the system by now,” Echo said.

“I know, and it’s a big galaxy to hide in, but I know some clever and talented people who haven’t been eaten by demons yet, so I think we’re going to find them and give them a reminder on why they want to leave us alone,” Bo said.

With “a million worlds” in the Crystal Empire, there were more than a few major celebrations going on at any particular time. When Fari, Darius and Mel warped into the Pledes system therefor they found they had their choice of over a dozen “full city” sized celebrations.

“How can an entire city have a festival based around frogs?” Darius asked.

“There’s really only one method to discover the answer to that don’t you think?” Mel said.

“Read a local history book?” Fari said.

“No, in fact you’re forbidden from accessing anything on the local spellweb,” Mel said. “The whole point of this trip is to immerse you in what real festivals are like.”

“I thought the whole point of the trip was that Captain Hanq kicked us off the ship for a month and we needed somewhere to go?” Darius asked.

“Are you complaining?” Mel asked.

“They were going to shoot us, I think I can complain a little about that,” Darius said.

“They weren’t going to shoot us,” Mel said. “We never gave them sufficient line of sight to setup the portable ship weapons.”

“I should be comforted by that, but all I can think is that I’m going to have to give Blue Team demerits for it on their next performance review and that somehow seems terribly, terribly unfair,” Darius said.

“You know, I bet if we asked really nicely Captain Hanq would let us back on board the ship,” Fari said. “Especially if some global level catastrophe were to arise.”

“You are not going to spark a global catastrophe to get out of going on vacation,” Mel said.

“But I’m good at those,” Fari said.

“Yes, and that’s the problem,” Mel said. “I’ve spent the last several years dragging you two from one calamity to the next. None of us have had a chance to relax and practice being regular people, so of course we’re terrible at it.”

“Hey, I had a lot of practice being regular people before you came along,” Darius said.

“Yeah, you were so regular that your first thought on finding an injured girl in the woods was to hold her at sword point until a full team of commandos could scramble to back you up,” Mel said.

“I’m never going to live that down am I?” Darius asked.

“Not if you keep blushing like that,” Mel said.

“I’m not sure how going to a festival is going to help me much,” Fari said. “It’s not like I can eat any of the foods or go on any of the rides.”

“That’s true, but neither of those are the best part of going to a festival,” Mel said. “The real reason to go to a festival is for the people-watching.”

“People are different at festivals?” Fari asked. “All I remember is the delicious junk food and then throwing up the delicious junk food on the rides.”

“Ah, festival vomit, a galaxy-wide tradition,” Darius said and winced. “We did that on Hellsreach too.”

“All the more reason to go to something nice and safe like a cultural festival themed around frogs,” Mel said.

“We’re not going to talk her out of this are we?” Fari asked.

“She does have that look in her eye,” Darius said.

“Hey, if you really don’t want to go, I’m sure I can find something else,” Mel said.

“And that’s the look that says she thinks she can find something even worse without too much effort,” Darius said.

“We’ll go! We’ll go!” Fari said.

The Apala City Frog Festival was a tradition dating back hundreds of years. Originally organized in celebration of the local ruling family whose seal featured the frog emblem from their heraldic arms, the festival had managed to outlive them by virtue of the fact that people actually liked the festival while the same could never have been said of the royal family.

Over time the festival had drifted from its origins to completely expunge any mention of the nobles from its celebration. Also, where frogs had been a near mythic creature in the area, and hence suitable for a coat of arms, so many different types had been imported over the years for the festival that Apala City had become, quite legitimately, the “Frog Capital” of the Pledes system. Thanks to that designation people came from far and wide, literally light years away in some cases, to witness the various frog-related spectacles that the town put on as part of its largest tourism (and revenue) generating event.

“Is it even legal for the Space Dock Controllers to speak in ribbits?” Darius asked.

“I really think I should check the spell web to find out more about this festival,” Fari said. “What if there’s some cultural taboo that we’re violating?”

“It’s a major tourism event,” Mel said. “They can’t be too fussy about taboos or no one would come.”

“But seriously? Ribbits?” Darius asked.

“They’re not even ribbits from people either,” Fari said. “It’s all automated messages.”

“The Galactic Common translation spells can handle it though, so it’s not really a big deal is it?” Mel asked.

“Not technically,” Fari said. “But it might be dangerous if we had an accident.”

“Hmmm,” Mel said and rubbed her chin.

“For the record, I am not crashing Captain Hanq’s new space skiff so that you can test their emergency response systems,” Darius said.

“I wasn’t thinking of crashing it,” Mel said. “That would be dangerous.”

“She was going to blow it up,” Fari said.

“How is that not dangerous?” Darius asked.

“Half the time I land on a planet, my ship is shot out from under me,” Mel said. “I was just thinking it might be nice to start a re-entry dive on my own terms for a change.”

“I’ll get the ship down in one piece,” Darius said. “If you want to Space Dive we can do that after we get some of the Frog food and have a rental no one will mind losing.”

“I can’t decide if that’s arguing effectively, or aiding and abetting,” Fari said.

“There’s no reason it can’t be both my little co-conspirators,” Mel said.

“We’re only co-conspirators if we don’t offer to act as material witnesses against you,” Darius said.

“You’d sell me out?” Mel asked.

“What did you think our retirement plan is?” Fari asked.

“I’m going to write a book on you,” Darius said.

“And I’ve got thousands of hours of documentary footage,” Fari said.

“But we’re going to collaborate on the movie,” Darius said.

“That’s where the big money’s at,” Fari said.

“It’s a shame Captain Hanq called dibs on the merchandising rights,” Darius said.

“And Black Team’s got the soundtrack rights,” Fari said.

“Do I get a cut of any of this?” Mel asked.

“Of course,” Darius said.

“10% of net profit,” Fari said.

“Do any of those things ever make a net profit?” Mel asked.

“Sure,” Fari said. “Mostly the one’s that don’t have someone with a 10% clause linked to net profit, but the Auditors assured us it’s all technically legal.”

“You’ve already sold me out to the Imperial Auditors?” Mel asked. “How much are they getting?”

“Only 5%”, Darius said.

“Of the gross,” Fari said.

“You two are so mean!” Mel said.

“Yeah, imagine what kind of lousy Aetherial karma someone would have to be toting around to get stuck with both of us?” Darius said.

The space skiff touched down for a smooth and gentle landing as he finished speaking.

“You were distracting me from the descent?” Mel asked.

“It seemed like the safest play,” Darius said.

“We have a theory that you’re more of an Aetherial caster than you realize,” Fari said.

“Or that you’ve just got the weirdest luck,” Darius said.

“But we are totally going to make a movie about you,” Fari said.

“Because if we don’t someone else is going too,” Darius said.

“As long as I get 10% of the gross, I promise not to bring my weird luck anywhere near the production,” Mel said.

“That’s extortion!” Darius said.

“Which isn’t to say we’re unwilling to negotiate,” Fari said. “10% might be a pretty big savings over the alternative.”

“What I’m curious about is how you’re going to cast for this scene?” Mel asked as she stepped out of the space skiff and looked around.

“For a festival city this does look strangely uninhabited,” Darius said, stepping out after her.

“It’s not exactly empty though,” Fari said.

“Yeah, there’s no people here,” Mel said.

“But there’s plenty of frogs,” Darius said.

“Does any else get the sense that they’re watching us?” Mel asked.

“Yes. Because they are,” Fari said. “Every frog in a hundred yards is turned in this direction.”

“They don’t seem to be attacking us though,” Darius said.

“Of course not,” Mel said. “They’re frogs.”

“Yeah, frogs,” Fari said. “And the fully sapient minds that I’m detecting around us are…covered by an invisibility cloak?”

“That doesn’t seem likely,” Mel said.

“Maybe we should head into the festival area itself and see what the people are like there?” Fari said.

“Or maybe we should get back in the skiff and find another festival to check out? Maybe on another planet, or in another star system even?” Darius suggested.

“I like that idea, it’s a good idea, a brilliant one, I’d even go so far as to say that I love it,” Mel said.

“So, of course, we’re not going to do that,” Darius said.

“Of course,” Mel said.

“We’re going to get turned into frogs aren’t we?” Fari said.

“I could say no, but we all know I’d be lying right?” Mel said.

“Well, at least Fari will be safe,” Darius said.

“I don’t know about that,” Fari said. “There’s definitely something weird in the air here.”

“We should probably hurry then,” Mel said.

“Ribbit,” Fari said. “I mean, right!”

“Fari, why are you appearing as a frog now?” Darius asked.

“Something’s modifying my avatar,” Fari said with a croak in her voice.

“Webbed hands,” Mel said, holding them up for Darius and Fari to see.

“Wait, something is transforming you?” Darius asked. “You? Even with your Void magic?”

“I think I’m transforming myself,” Mel said. “My danger sense is screaming every time I try to block the transformation.”

“We should really get out of here,” Darius said.

“Too late,” Mel said. “I don’t think you can operate the skiff controls like that.”

She was speaking over their telepathic link since between the three of them, none had the capacity for human speech anymore.

“For what it’s worth, you make as cute a frog as you do a boy Darius,” Fari said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I have to say, it’s not as unpleasant as I imagined it would be. I almost feel…”

“Bouncy?” Mel said. “As far as I can tell we still have our regular anima levels.”

“So a human sized portion of Physical anima to run a frog sized body?” Fari said. “You’re even more overcharged than you normally are.”

“How about you?” Mel asked.

“Size and mind have little correlation, so I think I’m basically the same, I just look a bit different,” Fari said.

“Well then, I guess we get to explore the festival in this form,” Darius said.

“There’s got to be an answer there somewhere,” Mel said.

“The big question is whether we can do anything about it as frogs?” Fari asked.

“My martial training may not help so much, but I suspect anyone who thinks we’re just simple frogs is going to be in for a big surprise,” Mel said.

***

Three hours later they were in the space skiff, blasting out of orbit at the maximum acceleration the craft could handle.

“So, a Frog God,” Darius said. “Didn’t know that was a real thing.”

“Technically it was just a big spirit with a lot of anima,” Fari said. “A really really big spirit.”

“Probably a mistake to kill it like that, but I gotta say, I regret nothing there,” Mel wiped frog slime out of her hair and focused on pouring energy into the skiff’s engines.”

“More discorporated than killed,” Fari said. “Spirits like that are effectively immortal. It’ll be back for the next festival if people keep believing in it.”

“Think the people chasing us are aware of that?” Darius asked.

“Hard to say, I don’t speak ‘Incoherent Rage’ so well,” Mel said.

“To be fair, a lot of the people who transformed back were delighted to be freed,” Fari said.

“I’ve got to admit, it was kind of fun bouncing around like that,” Darius said. “Maybe we can come back next year?”

“Hell no!” Mel and Fari said in unison.

“Where to now then?” Darius asked.

“There’s really only one choice,” Mel said.

“Oh no, oh gods no!” Fari said.

“Yep,” Mel said. “We gotta find another festival.”

Fari didn’t so much observe the fairgrounds as loom above them. Like a sapphire god, she gazed down at the little tents and attractions and found them wanting.

“This is hopeless,” she said and scattered the tiny people before her into a shower of illusory particles.

“That’s about the tenth layout you’ve tried so far isn’t it?” Mel asked from the other side of the war room.

“Eh, it’s been a few more than that,” Fari said. Roughly around a thousand iterations of the basic fairground design had flickered across the planning table. Most of them Fari was able to dismiss out of hand without any in-depth study but some had held more promise. At least until she looked at them closely enough.

“Are you running into a simulator limit?” Mel asked. “I remember having a bunch of headaches trying to set the table up for war game planning.”

“I recall that too,” Fari said, casting a smile in her friend’s direction. “That’s why I removed the direct link to the Horizon Breaker’s main cannons before I started doing any of this.”

“So no chance of just blasting the festival area off the map?” Mel asked.

“I make no promises about that,” Fari said. “But if it happens, I’ll probably have a lot harder time claiming it was accidental.”

“I’m surprised you’re having trouble with this,” Mel said. “Isn’t it basically child’s play compared to the deployments you’ve organized?”

“Yes,” Fari said. “No. It’s different. Deployments are easy, or easier, for me. There’s a set goal, and the motivations are predictable. We want to arrest people. They don’t want to be arrested.”

“Isn’t a festival kind of the same, except everyone’s goal is ‘have fun’?” Mel asked.

“The problem is everyone’s idea of what’s ‘fun’ is different,” Fari said. “I can’t predict that and it’s messing up everything I try to put together.”

“I don’t think you need to predict their fun,” Mel said. “But if you’re having this much trouble with it, I’m guessing there’s more to planning this festival than spacing out the food booths and leaving room for some public toilets right?”

“I don’t know!” Fari said and buried her head in her hands. “Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe this does just need a grid and some walk through diagrams.”

“If that was all it took, you wouldn’t have gone through a dozen plans trying to figure it out,” Mel said. “Something about this excited you though. What was that?”

“It seemed like fun,” Fari said. “I mean it’s a festival, it’s supposed to be all about fun isn’t it?”

“Not for the people who have to work it,” Mel said. “But come on, it was more than that. I’ve seen you get interested in things before, and there always some challenge the pulls you in. Something unusual or unexpected.”

“Well, this is supposed to be for the Empresses 25th Anniversary Gala,” Fari said.

“Yeah, but they’re doing festivals in honor of that on a lot of worlds,” Mel said.

“True, but this is the one we’ve been assigned to,” Fari said.

“I’ll grant you that,” Mel said.

“And I thought this would be a good chance to…I don’t know, connect with people,” Fari said.

“You sound like you’re worried about that?” Mel said.

“No, I’m not,” Fari said. “But, well, I do serve some pretty specific functions here.”

“Meaning you’re concerned that you’re slipping into the role of a machine rather than a person?” Mel asked.

“Not really,” Fari said. “But maybe I’m not nurturing the person part of myself enough? I mean, what we do here, our work? It feels pretty comfortable, easy, even when it’s not easy if that makes any sense.”

“I think it does,” Mel said. “And I’m probably just as guilty of it too. We stay so busy that it’s easy to let the missions become everything we do and think about.”

“Maybe that’s not even bad?” Fari said. “It could be that mission work is what I was designed for. That might be why trying to plan this festival is driving me insane.”

“I suspect that’s not the answer,” Mel said. “And I don’t think your ‘design’ matters all that much.”

“How can we know that though?” Fari asked. “I don’t even know what I am. Not completely.”

“Why don’t we try to find out?” Mel asked.

“What do you mean?” Fari asked.

“The festival is still a few months away right?” Mel asked.

“Yes, but what does that have to do with me?” Fari asked.

“It means we’ve got a few months that we can get away from mission work,” Mel said. “Or we can think of it as focusing on a new mission.”

“We can’t take months off just to deal with me going crazy though,” Fari said.

“I think you’re radically underestimating the sort of leeway I have in choosing my assignments and the companions I ‘request and require’ aid from,” Mel said.

“But there’s so much else we need to deal with,” Fari said. “There hasn’t been a week in the last eleven months that we haven’t shut down some horrible plot or dealt with some weird event that no one else could.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Mel said. “But that also mean you’ve been slaving away for eleven months without a break.”

“It’s ok,” Fari said. “I’m built for that sort of thing. I don’t need to take breaks.”

“Your body is a masterwork of spellcraft. It doesn’t tire or run out of energy. I get that,” Mel said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t need R&R too. You’re more than your body.”

“I guess that’s the problem,” Fari said. “I don’t know if I am. I’m hitting this limit that I don’t think should be there. Not for a real person anyways.”

“First, you are a real person, and second, share,” Mel said. “What is it that you can’t do?”

Fari stepped back from the table and sighed.

“I can’t think like someone’s who’s having fun would think,” she said.

“Ok,” Mel said, more prompting Fari to continue that agreeing with her.

“Laying out the festival is more than just setting up spaces for everything. I did that in about two seconds,” Fari said. “To make it work though, you need more than that. You need to have the stalls connect to each other. You need to have spaces where the patrons can encounter the unexpected or find shelter and quiet in all the bustle.”

“And you’re having trouble thinking like a festival patron?” Mel asked.

“Yeah,” Fari said. “I can put myself into the mindset of the people we fight against. I can put myself into the mindset of our teammates. I can even put myself into the mindset of ancient people who designed crazy traps in long forgotten tombs, but I apparently can’t think like a everyday normal person who’s going out to a simple street festival.”

“And when was the last time you were actually at a street festival?” Mel asked.

“I don’t remember,” Fari said. “Maybe, back before I was a gem?”

Mel choked back a laugh.

“I’m pretty sure I see what your problem is,” she said.

“But that can’t be it,” Fari said. “I read up a ton on festival planning. From personal accounts to professional reviews. I don’t think I’m missing anything there.”

“I’m sure your research was exhaustive,” Mel said. “And I’m sure I’m getting you out of here.”

“Why? Where are we going?” Fari asked.

Mel tapped her forehead to activate the telepathic channel to the Horizon Breaker’s captain.

“Did you need the space skimmer this week?” she asked Captain Hanq without any preamble.

“Are you going to blow up my nice new skiff?” Hanq asked back, also without preamble.

“I’ll bring you back a nicer one if I do,” Mel said.

“That’s all I ask,” Hanq said.

“Excellent,” Mel said. “Oh, and I’m stealing your Chief Tactical Officer too.”

“You’re not allowed to break that one,” Hanq said.

“I promise, I’ll be very gentle with her,” Mel said.

“Fari, should I be letting her steal you?” Hanq asked.

“I don’t know sir, she hasn’t shared her crazy idea with me yet,” Fari said.

“Are you planning to let my Chief Tactical Officer in on why you’re abducting her?” Hanq asked.

“Eventually,” Mel said.

“Does this involve stopping a criminal empire, uprooting a century old conspiracy or toppling the rightful ruler of a planet?” Hanq asked.

“Nope,” Mel said. “Just a vacation.”

“A vacation?” Hanq said.

He was silent for a moment, contemplating that.

“Right, get off my ship,” he finally said. “The both of you.”

“But we have our weekly briefing tomorrow and…” Fari started to say.

“Nope. Off. Now,” Hanq said. “I know the the kind of Trouble you find when you go looking for it, and that’s when Trouble has a chance to hide. If you’re on vacation, Trouble’s not even going to see you coming and I don’t want the rest of my crew anywhere near that.”

“But..” Fari said.

“Nope.” Hanq countered. “How long of a vacation are you planning on taking?”

“A week,” Mel said.

“Make it two,” Hanq said. “And don’t worry about the skiff. I’ll put in the purchase order for the next one today.”

“Are you sure sir?” Fari asked. “We had that lead on the Phantom Count’s whereabouts that turned up this morning, and there’s the Spatial Rupture in the Hypernal system we were going to check out when things quieted down.”

“I’m having the warp crystals on the skiff charged now,” Hanq said. “It’ll be ready by the time you get to the docking bay. Oh and you are not allowed to track down either the Phantom Count or the Spatial Rupture.”

“I will need to swing by my quarters to pick up my clothes,” Mel said.

“No you won’t. Darius will be meeting you in the docking bay in five minutes with everything you need,” Hanq said.

“But what about…” Mel started to say.

“I’m posting Black Team as guards between the Tactical Room and the docking bay,” Hanq said. “Their orders are to make sure you start your vacation, or shoot you if you try go anywhere else.”

“My team wouldn’t shoot me,” Mel said.

“We’ve been trying to get you to take a vacation for the last six months,” Lt. Tym said. “We’re loading up the sleep gas pellets and will be in position in thirty seconds.”

“Sleep gas pellets! That’s cheating!” Mel said, since her Void magic abilities didn’t work particularly well against physical attacks and even with a shield spell she still needed to breathe.

“We really can’t stay?” Fari asked.

“You are always welcome here,” Hanq said. “Just not for the next month. Get out there, explore a little, take some time away from all this craziness.”

“Wait, a month now? What if something comes up?” Fari asked. “People might need us.”

“I think it he’s going keep extending our vacation until we shut up and get out of here,” Mel said.

“You should listen to Mel,” Hanq said. “She is wise beyond her years.”

“Ok, ok! We’re going!” Fari said. “Umm, where are we going?”

“It’s a big galaxy out there,” Mel said. “I think it’s time we saw some of the parts of it that don’t want to kill or enslave us.”

“That sounds like a delightful idea,” Darius said. “Will three be a crowd on this trip?”

“Please come with us!” Fari said. “My only hope of containing Mel’s insanity is if we can double team her!”

“I don’t know,” Mel said. “Can you really spare that many of us Captain?”

“I think he can,” Darius said. “Blue squad is force marching me down to the docking bay right this moment.”

“I called them too,” Hanq said. “I thought you might appreciate the company.”

“I don’t know what to say then,” Mel said.

“Tell me that you’re all going to have a good time,” Hanq said.

“I’ll make sure of that,” Mel said.

“And that you won’t get into any trouble,” Hanq said.

“Of course not,” Mel said.

“I love that thing in your voice where it sounds like you actually believe what you just said,” Hanq said.

“Ok, how about nothing we can’t handle then?” Mel asked.

“That I am willing to believe,” Hanq said. “Enjoy your month off!”

SIster Marilith gazed at the two smugglers into whose care she was entrusting the eleven young children that surrounded her.

“I’ve got to admit, we’ve never run a cargo like this before,” Zax, the smaller, smarter and less trustworthy of the pair, said.

“Not that we’re not up to it,” Willock, the more honorable of the two, said.

For Sister Marilith’s purposes, neither of her former wards were ideal for the task at hand, but should could only work with the tools she was given, not the tools she wished to possess.

“I’m am only concerned that your vessel is up to the challenge,” Sister Marilith said.

“It’ll be close quarters, some of the kids will probably need to ride in the gun turrets,” Zax said. This drew the expected grins of anticipation from the more martially inclined among the children. Zax knew how to make friends and influence people, regardless of their age. This was the trait Sister Marilith was most concerned with.

She had been raising cast-offs, orphans and foundlings for the better part of four decades, ever since she joined the Sisters of Water’s Mercy. She had felt the work to be her life’s calling, that her love of children required her to help the ones who had no else to help them. The calling was still there but the years had tempered her idealism and enthusiasm.

These children had many needs, from complex things like support, and counseling to simple necessities like food and shelter. To focus on only those would be a mistake though. Even in these early days, the children needed someone to set boundaries for them. To show them what was and was not acceptable, so that they wouldn’t run wild. That endeavor was made immeasurably more difficult with a rogue like Zax around to provide an example for getting away with all sorts of boundary breaking behavior.

“I am less concerned about your seating arrangements and more about your vessel’s capacity to cloak itself,” Sister Marilith said.

“Cloaks are illegal in this system, Sister,” Zax said. He saw the objection forming in Marilith’s eyes and rushed to add, “And also expensive, which is why we don’t have one.”

“How do you smuggle without a cloak?” Sister Marilith asked.

“You don’t need an invisibility spell to keep people from seeing things,” Zax said. “You’ve just got to get them to see what you want them to see.”

“The children are not to be seen at all,” Sister Marilith said. “If their whereabouts are known their safety will be compromised.”

As the children of a famous Warlord there were many in the local area of the galaxy who had cause to wish the children harm but the clearest danger came from their own clan. With the loss of the Karr Khan, the remaining elements of the clan needed someone to rally behind as the heir to the throne. The clan had many factions though, and no matter which child one faction chose as heir, another faction would strive to eliminate them. The factions knew this which was why several of them had decided to get a jump on the issue and eliminate all the viable heirs not directly under their control. The children had survived by taking matters into their own hands and escaping just a few steps ahead of their assassin’s arrival.

It had seemed like good luck that the Sisters had been waiting to take them in, but Sister Marilith didn’t believe in luck and had little use for Aetherial magics. She and the others had moved to intercept the children the moment they heard of the Karr Khan’s demise. People thought of the Sisters as kindly missionaries or simple caregivers. As though caregiving was ever simple, or kindness precluded seeing people as they really were.

The truth was, the Sisters routinely dealt with miscreants a dozen times more clever than most Planetary Intelligence services were forced to contend with and if they were kind, it was because they saw too clearly the sort of damage a lack of kindness produced in people.

“Relax Sister, no one’s going to be looking at these kids at all, I promise,” Zax said.

Sister Marilith wondered if perhaps she should have been kinder to the young Zax, or if the reverse was warranted. Raising children was more an art than a science and despite her best efforts, Sister Marilith wasn’t sure she’d produced all that many masterpieces.

“We’ll be discovered before we reach the ship,” Tchini said. She was one of the leaders among the children and was gifted with a talent for future sight. When she spoke the others listened, but there was always a current of mistrust as well. The girl had misused her talents in the past, Sister Marilith reasoned, and the others held that against her regardless of the present circumstances.

“Yes we will,” Zax said. “Hopefully sooner than later too. This place charges it’s docking fees by the hour.”

“So it is part of your plan to put these children in danger?” Sister Marilith asked.

“No, no, no,” Zax said. “The children are already in danger. That’s the great part of the plan. We really can’t make things worse!”

“I can think of several dozen worse situations we could be in,” Sister Marilith said.

“Sister, do you remember the time you disciplined me for stealing a parade float and driving it off the parade route so that I could impress Salle Evens?” Zax asked.

“No, I do not recall such an incident,” Sister Marilith said.

“But I bet you remember punishing me for sneaking out of parade duties to steal the answers to our mathematics mid-term don’t you?” Zax asked.

“Yes, you had a week’s latrine duty for that,” Sister Marilith said.

“The balloon ride with Salle Evens was worth it,” Zax said.

“Are you saying…” Sister Marilith started to ask.

“That I didn’t really care about my math mid-terms?” Zax said. “I believe I will allow my academic record to speak for me in that regards.”

“What he’s trying to say is that the kids will be safe with us Sister,” Willock said.

“I wonder if they shall,” Sister Marilith said, her eyes narrowing as the calculus of the dangers arrayed against her charges shifted.

A small light blinked on Zax’s left bracer and the smuggler nodded to his compatriot.

“We need to get moving now or we’re going to miss our appointment with your assassins,” Zax said.

Sister Marilith ground her fingers into her rod. It wasn’t too late to abandon this mad plan. If she’d learned anything in her years as a part of the clergy of Water’s Mercy it was that she wasn’t infallible and admitting her mistakes early saved a lot of trouble later on. All sorts of warning bells were telling her she needed to do so in this circumstance, that the children’s lives were too important to risk on the mad plans of a former student who’d clearly not amounted to more than a two-bit criminal.

As a responsible adult, it was on her to put an end to foolishness and chart a path that would see her charges safe and healthy at the end of the day.

She held her tongue though and nodded in agreement. It was difficult, far more so than taking control would have been, but she’d learned that sometimes, on admittedly rare occasions, you needed to trust that the children you’d raised could rise to meet challenges the world threw at them, no matter how difficult those challenges were.

“Ok, so, this is kind of going to be like a race,” Willock said to the children. “I’m going to assign you parters. You can only win the race if you stay together with your partner and go exactly where we say. Understand?”

The question was met with nods of agreement and one raised hand.

“What if we don’t like our partners?” one of the children asked.

“Then we’ll arrange for one of the assassins to be your partner instead,” Zax said.

There was still grumbling as Willock arranged the children into groups of two and three but since each group was sent off to follow Zax as they were formed there wasn’t time for them to try to reassemble into new formations on their own.

The mad rush of adults and children drew plenty of attention as they whipped through Naru Stations public areas. The disrupted crowds and the speed of the children’s passage did serve as a shield of sorts though. At least two assassins were forced to take pot shots from the crowd instead of the ambush posts they’d been attempting to secret themselves in. As ill-prepared as they were, the first shots went wild and their second shots never left their bolt casters. Willock was a much better shot on the run than he really had any right being, but everyone has a few skills that just come naturally to them.

The mad flight ended at the dock where Zax and Willock’s ship was waiting for them. Also waiting were a trio of Naru Station security officers looking for a fresh bribe after the original one Zax had offered on their landing proved to be counterfeit. Naturally the moment the security officers saw their quarry, they drew their own bolt casters. As did a half dozen previously unarmed people around them.

“Thank the stars you’re here! Clear a path for us!” Zax yelled to the armed people facing them and sent a pair of bolt caster blasts wildly over the heads of the assembled combatants.

From the officers’ point of view, their target was undeniably calling for aid from his associates, by whom they were outnumbered. The only logical move therefore was to reduce numerical advantage the enemy faced by switch to fully automatic fire and mowing down everyone but themselves. There were a few little creatures scampering about, but they weren’t armed so they were more cover to be shot around than targets to be aimed at.

From the assassin’s point of view, there was a local firing at them who was obviously working with station security. With their covers blown they had to eliminate all witnesses, starting with the witnesses who were capable to eliminating them back.

As all parties were primarily interested in surviving first and killing second, the barrage of bolt caster fire that exploded in the docks hit no one. Everyone was firing wildly and diving for cover and no one was in a position to stop the children from piling into the waiting crates which were being unloaded from Zax’s ship.

Sister Marilith watched as Zax keyed a command into his bracer and the dock’s loading golems activated and began lugging the crates back into the ship.

With the enemies under cover from each other, the bolt caster fire intensified and the damage to the station began to mount precariously.

This in turn brought in more security forces.

The assassins tried to concentrate fire on the boxes as they were moved, but the golems proved resistant to their caster bolts.

Sister Marilith’s heart soared at the apparent success of the plan when she saw the last of the crates the children had climbed into placed in the loading tube to the ship.

That feeling of elation lasted for ten precious seconds.

Then Zax’s ship exploded.

Outside the docking window, Sister Marilith saw the Karr Khan dreadnaught that had pursued them through multiple star systems. Its guns glowed in the aftermath of the utter destruction of Zax’s ship. They’d reduced the vessel, and the boxes it contained to a nearly invisible mist of fine particles.

The next several hours passed in a blur of disbelief.

Station security arrived in sufficient force to disperse the assassins and arrest Zax, Sister Marilith and all of the others caught in the firefight.

She was questioned, but the inquiry was perfunctory and terminated early once the proper bribe was delivered by one of her fellow Sisters.

“Where are we going to go next?” Sister Terizi asked.

Sister Marilith wasn’t sure. She’d never failed her charges as profoundly before. She was questioning her place in the order itself when a familiar voice spoke up from behind her.

“The next stop was Beta Arexus wasn’t it?” Zax asked.

Lightning shot out of Sister Marilith’s rod and pinned the man to the wall.

“You dare show your face to me?” she asked.

“This…is…”, Zax struggled to say. “Kind…of…familiar.”

“Get out of my sight,” Sister Marilith said, dropping the restraint spell.

“Well, I’d love to but you see, I’m kind of broke now and there’s the matter of services rendered,” Zax said.

“Services rendered?” Sister Marilith asked. “You’ll get not a single coin from us.”

“Aww, I thought the kids were worth more than that,” Zax said. “Ah well, I suppose I always wanted a little group of minions. Is it legal to fit them with slave collars though? They seem really mouthy.”

“The children are alive?” Sister Marilith asked.

“Uh, yeah, of course they’re alive,” Zax said. “Did you think I was going to let my ship get blown up for free?”

“I don’t understand?” Sister Marilith. “How? They were loaded onto your ship!”

“No, a bunch of boxes were loaded onto my ship,” Zax said.

“The kids were already offloaded onto our other ship,” Willock said.

“But how was that possible? I saw you both, neither of you got near the boxes,” Sister Marilith said.

“Yeah, that was a critical part of the plan,” Zax said. “It really had to look like we were pinned down, otherwise somebody might have looked a little too closely at those boxes and noticed they didn’t have bottoms.”

“But where did the children go?” Sister Marilith.

“I’ve got them,” Salle Evens said as she came up to join the group. “What, you didn’t think these two were dumb enough to work alone did you?”

“What are you doing here though?” Sister Marilith asked.

“Oh, we never split up, none of the kids from our graduating year did,” Salle said.

“Yeah, we may not have turned out quite the way you expected, but we never forgot the things you really taught us,” Zax said. “Stick together.”

“Take care of each other,” Salle said.

“And family is what you make of it,” Willock said.

Naru Station shouldn’t have been a destination of any particular note. The chance for coincidental meetings should have approached zero.  It was a Class 13 space habitat, approved for short terms layovers by the standard variety of sapient species in the Crystal Empire. Its orbital position around the star Sensina Prime placed it close to the system’s natural warp points, but several newer stations had drained away most of the trans-galactic business that once flowed through Naru’s docks. In short, it was nothing special and a perfect spot to be overlooked.

In the absence of official (aka legitimate) commerce, other sorts of “entrepreneurs” had  settled in and made Naru Station their home.

“This is not the place for us,” Willock said, eyes narrowing at the grime and seedy lighting of the bar they were heading towards.

“This is exactly the place for us,” Zax said. “We’ve run five jobs in the last five months and you know what we got to show for it? Five credits between the two of us.”

“Five credits and neither of us is doing time or has a bounty on our head,” Willock said.

“That’s not good enough for me,” Zax said, not entirely thinking through his words.

“We might need to consider getting into a more legitimate line of work,” Willock said. “Galaxy’s not like it used to be. Everywhere you go you’ve got Crystal Guardians and Imperial Overseers keeping things on the straight and narrow.”

“That’s propaganda,” Zax said.

“Five jobs, five busts,” Willock said. “Hard to argue with the numbers there.”

“That wasn’t the grand and mighty Crystal Empire,” Zax said. “Each one of those failures is on us.”

“If each one’s on us then why aren’t we looking for a new line of work?” Willock asked.

“Because this is what we’re good at,” Zax said.

“Our history seems to suggest otherwise,” Willock said.

“Never look to the past for a guarantee of the future,” Zax said. “We had some bad luck and made a few dumb calls. The important thing is, we learned from those.”

“And that’s why we’re here?” Willock said.

“Exactly,” Zax said. “We kept trying to work the micro-smuggling routine with the wrong sort of people.”

“I thought we were playing it safe,” Willock said.

“We were,” Zax said. “Too safe. Every one of those idiots we hooked up with was too risk adverse go through with the whole deal.”

“So we’re looking for a better class of idiot then?” Willock asked.

“We’re looking for people who know what they want, and who aren’t afraid to do what it takes to get it,” Zax said.

“Aren’t those the kind of people the Imperials locked up first though?” Willock’s asked.

Zax shook his head and sighed.

“Do you know how big the Empire is?” he asked.

“Sure, they run the whole galaxy don’t they?” Willock said.

“Nope. Official records put it at about 68% of star systems are under Imperial rule. The rest is unclaimed or unexplored.” Zax said.

“So that’s still the ‘Million Worlds’ right?” Willock asked.

“People say a ‘Million Worlds’ because they don’t understand big numbers,” Zax said. “You look at the stars out there and with just the ones in our galaxy, you’re talking over one hundred billion systems. Do you really think the Crystal Empire is tracking down players like us when they’ve got sixty eight billion solar systems worth of problems to worry about?”

“Maybe not, but they say the Empress has some kind of crazy powers,” Willock said.

“I’m sure she does,” Zax said. “It’s ridiculous to even think she took over as much of the galaxy as she has, but as far as I can see that just means she’s got ridiculous problems that she needs to fix with all those powers.”

“What about her Guardians?” Willock asked. “They’re supposed to be everywhere, taking care of everything aren’t they?”

“Are you even listening to me?” Zax asked. “Sixty eight billion systems. How are you going to police sixty eight billion systems?”

“With a lot of cops?” Willock said.

“In twenty years?” Zax asked. “You think they found enough people to trust with that kind of power in twenty years?”

“They found some they could,” Willock said. “I heard one just took down some old Warlord named the Karr Khan last week.”

“That’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about,” Zax said. “That happened like fifteen systems away from here, but you’ve already heard about it.”

“It was kind of big news,” Willock said. “A whole city got wiped out from what they were saying.”

“And I rest my case,” Zax said.

“I don’t get what you’re saying.” Willock said.

“I’m saying that one little thing a Crystal Guardian does and a week later it’s all over the news out to a fifteen system radius with everyone talking about what a badass they were,” Zax said. “Only if they were really so powerful, why didn’t they stop the city from getting wiped out in the first place?”

“The Karr Khan guy was supposed to be pretty tough too,” Willock said.

“Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t, but the point is it’s all propaganda,” Zax said. “The Crystal Empire set itself up as the problem solvers of the galaxy but it’s all a smoke screen. They’re so big picture they can’t possibly deal with little guys like us.”

“I thought the whole point of coming to a broken down place like this was to hide from them?” Willock asked.

“Hide from them?” Zax said. “We could light the biggest flare you could imagine and we’d never even get them to notice us. No, we’re here because this is where you find people who are willing to take chances. People who are down on their luck and who’ve got nothing more to lose.”

“So, people like us then?” Willock said.

“We’re only passing through,” Zax said.

“Looks like that’s what everyone here is doing,” Willock said as they stepped into the bar.

Since it was located on a station, the bar was necessarily cramped for space. To help with that, the owners had taken the liberty of knocking out a few of the walls to “borrow” space from the adjacent shops after those businesses closed. Patches on the exterior walls showed that safety regulations were followed only as loose guidelines for the most part. Between the dim lighting and the thick, smoky haze that the air purification spells struggled fruitlessly to keep up with it was easy to overlook the signs of an impending hull breach, and for most of the people in the bar it was likely to happen on someone else’s shift anyways so it didn’t need to interfere with their quest to blot out their ability to form coherent thoughts.

“Is our contact here?” Willock asked.

Zax scanned around the bar, looking for any sign of the Rhidian small arms merchant they were supposed to meet.

“Not yet,” he said. “We’re early though, so that’s good.”

They took a table without looking at the bar tender. She’d get over to them when she had a free moment, but until then they didn’t owe her any credits which was fine with both Willock and Zax.

“This is one of the things we couldn’t do before. A nice face to face meeting. None of this mental projection stuff,” Zax said. “We all see each other’s faces, and we’re all on the hook to make the deal go through.”

“What if the law sees our faces too?” Willock asked. “Push comes to shove, I’d like us to be able to say we had six jobs we walked away from successfully not five and then we got sloppy and caught on the next one.”

“There’s no one here who’s going to bust us,” Zax said. “The long arm of the law doesn’t reach this far.”

A rod cracked down into the small table between them with a loud enough bang that it sounded like someone had been shot. Naturally, the rest of the bar looked at everything but Zax, Willock and their table. No one was going to see anything about what went on next if they had a choice about it.

“Mr. Hargriss and Mr. Rais?” asked the elderly woman who had slammed down the rod.

For a moment the two criminals were too stunned to process anything, but Zax, being the quicker witted of the two, managed to recognize the voice and manner of their new guest in under a second.

“Sister Marilith!” Zax whispered the name and felt a childhood of guilt reach out from the years he’d left behind and pull him back into the place he’d been when he was five.

“Good, it is you,” she said and sat down at the table beside them.

“Sister, what are you doing here?” Zax asked, trying to force his voice back to an audible level. That was better than Willock was managing. The taller of the two men had gone rigid as a board and silent as a corpse at the Sister’s arrival.

“I thought I saw you slinking in here,” Sister Marilith said. “Probably waiting to meet with some other criminal aren’t you?”

“We’re just here for a drink,” Zax said. “Sister what brings you to Naru Station? Is there going to be a Temple of Water opening up here?”

Zax’s felt like time had turned back somehow and that he was once again the little orphan boy who’d been taken in by the Sisters of Water’s Mercy.

“I’m here because I’ve got a job for you two,” she said.

“We’re not looking for work Sister,” Zax said. He knew, on some level, that it was insane to be as afraid of this woman as he was when he was nine and got caught stealing the last slice of pie out of kitchen. Somehow though that feeling had never actually left him and the fear at being caught for his wrong doing was always embodied in a scene exactly like this one.

“Tell me about what you’re doing now then boys,” Sister Marilith said.

“We’re in the transportation business,” Zax said.

“Good, you’re smugglers then, just as I thought,” Sister Marilith said.

“Smugglers? No, that’s crazy…” Zax started to say.

Sister Marilith’s rod ground into the table producing sparks and a thick crunching sound against the old metal.

“You were here to meet the Rhidian weren’t you?” she asked.

“The Rhidian?” Zax asked. Trying to play dumb had never worked for him in the past, under any circumstances, but between fear and surprise it was the only strategy Zax could come up with under the circumstances.

“Yes,” Sister Marilith said. “He won’t be coming. Sister Terizi is escorting him to Station Security.”

“Why?” Zax asked, feeling like his terror was perhaps not as misplaced as he first imagined. Rhidians were neither a small, nor a peaceful race. Zax couldn’t imagine that the arms dealer had gone along quietly or without protest, but the fact remained that he wasn’t here and Sister Marilith was.

“He was trying to unload Pledian Crystals,” she said. “Those are illegal in this system and every adjacent one as well.”

For some reason Zax couldn’t fathom, people had an issue with weapon power enhancers which drove the user into a murderous rage. From Zax’s point of view if you were going to fire a bolt caster at someone being in a murderous rage seemed like a foregone conclusion.

“What happened to the crystals?” Zax asked, a small and wholly irrational hope of completing their original transaction still flickering in his heart.

“We kept them,” Sister Marilith said.

“Oh, that’s…that’s good I suppose.”

Zax could think of no worse people in the entire galaxy to have Pledian Cyrstals and no one he would have less interest in trying to steal them from.

“Yes, it is,” Sister Marilith said. “Now since you’re out of your intended employment, you’ll listen to offer that I am extending to you.”

Zax considered trying to deny their involvement with the Pledian Crystals again, but experience finally won out and he stayed quiet, which was the one winning strategy he’d ever discovered when dealing with the Sisters.

“We have a group of children in our care,” Sister Marilith began. Nothing about that surprised Zax. The Sisters ran orphanages. Of course they had children to look after.

“They are being pursued.” she said. Which was unusual, but not entirely unbelievable. The Sister did take in all kinds of problem cases, as Zax and Willock were proof of.

“And you’re going to help them escape the remnants of the Karr Khan’s forces, who will be here in about ten minutes.”