Three Strikes & Black Skies

The cold needles its way through Lucas' coveralls, and no matter how vigorously he rubs his own arms, the chill never abates.

The shepherd cornerian blows into his cupped hands and watches the vapor drift lazily across the hangar, catching what little light bleeds in from the emergency strips along the deck plating. The main lights have been dark for sixteen days now, the heat cycled down to the bare minimum needed to keep a man breathing without frostbite setting in. The base's old converted ore-cracker reactor has been dumped to idle, and their main transponder silent. Every non-essential system has been pulled offline to keep their signature low.

It's the first time he's seen stealth mode used for more than a drill in three years.

The cornerian shuffles a few steps closer to the hangar viewport, boots crunching on frost. Beyond the armor-weave glass, the asteroid's jagged horizon cuts a black silhouette against the scatter of stars.

'Job's been good,' he tries to tell himself. 'Too damn good for it to fall apart now.'

And it has been good. Their last haul was the kind of score most crews dream about and never see; A jumbo set of cargo pods lifted clean off a Reachic merchant, stuffed floor to ceiling with hardwood logs from the noble estates back home. That timber moves like gold on the gray market once you find the right buyer, and the quartermaster had already been bragging about knowing the perfect fence in the Triad by the time the take was stowed. It was smooth, too. The merchants were too scared to put up a fight, and unmoored the pods for them without a shot fired, letting them run home with their spoils.

The good, clean run did little to lift moods around the base, however.

Partners went dark first. Sister cells that had been in-network for years suddenly not answering their check-ins, or worse, had their deadman switches trigger. Then it happened to rivals. Operations run by people he'd never met and never wanted to, gone quiet inside of days.

A few final transmissions made it through before the jamming clamped down. He'd listened to them himself, hunched over the comms tech's shoulder in the mess while the tech scrubbed them for signal. Most were nothing. Panicked voices half-swallowed by static, orders to scramble, orders that never got finished. All of it happened amid alarms in the background, too, and one grisly audio stream had the telltale hiss-oosh of a hull breach.

Only one word came through clean.

Strider.

Lucas' breath hitches in his throat.

Every spacer forum, encrypted board, and sideways little chatroom frequented by people who don't advertise their line of work all want to know about this 'Strider Squadron'. Nobody had heard of them six months ago, but now every dreary corner holds whispers of them. The consensus, as far as consensus went in places like that, was that the crew popped out of dark space with nothing but a corvette, a handful of fighters, and began to leave bodies behind.

The stories get wilder the further from the source you go. A lead fighter that nothing can pin down, painted white like it's begging to be seen, and packing weapons that can rip ships ten times its size to bits.

Some claim it's an Arwing variant, which nobody wants to hear, because there's only one organization that flies white Arwings, and you don't want your problems to involve that organization.

Others swear it's bigger, slower, something custom. A Wolfen, maybe? No one knows what's worse.

Then one lucky bastard who said he was a Libret Navyman finally got a clear picture, and ones claiming it was a custom job were vindicated. The design, all hard angles and swept wings, was one never seen until then. Debates on its capabilities started someplace unholy, as that same bit of footage of the white fighter showed it breaking the back of a Sov cruiser with an unknown weapon.

At least everyone agrees on the name, one screamed by that Sov captain before he met his end: Three Strikes.

Three Strikes almost never flies alone, either. With him is some other custom job fitted with a cloak, a twitchy Caracal 7 that flies exclusively in knife-fight range, and some madman who takes a B-spec Brawler gunship into dogfights. More recently, another team of uniform fighters have been sighted with them, and they follow their leader's example of flying like they all have a collective death wish.

He pushes off the viewport and paces a slow line along the deck, arms folded tight against his chest. His breath keeps coming out in clouds.

The most horrifying rumor about the new boogeyman on the block? His ties to Venom.

Some say he's an escaped bio-weapon, free to take out the seething hate programmed into his brain on anything around him. Others say he's a jitted scion of one of the Reachic noble houses, a contemporary of Usurper Prince Andrew Oikonny.

Hearsay about the crew is running wild, too, as only genuine freaks would follow such a monster. Supposedly, when Three Strikes tore a Libret smuggler station to shreds months ago, he was flanked by a ten-foot-tall slavering giant and a former SDS.

Lucas shakes his head, banishing the dark thoughts.

The cornerian looks back out through the viewport, at the dark, the cold stars, and for the first time in a long time, he feels the tightrope sway under his boots. Hoping to distract himself, he turns up the radio in his helmet.

The chatter is low and crackling, the signal stepped down to match the rest of the base's quiet protocols. Most of it is nothing. Deck reports, maintenance schedules, and someone complaining about the galley running short on real coffee for the third day running.

"Control to LT. Got those ghost signals on ELINT again. Can't pin them down."

"Copy that." The lieutenant's voice is clipped, already annoyed at being bothered. "Probably solar wash off the dust fields. Ignore it."

"That's what I said last shift. And the shift before that." Control is a vulpine voice, reedy and wound a little too tight. "Let me run a real radar sweep, just one to confirm or deny we've got something out there."

"Denied."

"C'mon, this is-"

"Denied, Control. You know the order came down straight from the Fayren. Lockdown means we don't go lighting ourselves up because you got spooked by a couple of flickers."

A pause on the line, then Control pushes back harder. "It's been over two weeks. Nothing's happened. If something was coming, don't you think we'd have seen some sign of it by now? And if something's still on its way, shouldn't we know before it gets on top of us?"

The shepherd listens, and despite himself, finds he agrees with Control. The lieutenant doesn't, however.

"We didn't last this long by being reckless jackasses, Control. You want radar, you gotta send radar. You send radar, you light up every scope in range. That's not a risk I'm authorized to take, and it ain't a risk the boss wants taken. Reset your ELINT baseline and shut the hell up about it."

Silence on the line, followed by a sigh. "Copy," Control says, finally. "Resetting."

Lucas frowns behind his visor. He'd like to think the lieutenant is right. Men like that usually are, in his experience. That's why they end up calling shots and he ends up hauling pallets.

He looks out through the viewport again, at the same scatter of rocks and dust, the same black gaps between them. Nothing has changed. Of course nothing has-!

It's small. So small he nearly writes it off as the same solar flicker the lieutenant just dismissed. A sliver of light tucked against the shadowed flank of an asteroid.

His glove is on his visor mic before his brain catches up.

"L-Lucas in hangar to command," he internally kicks his own ass for stuttering. "Something just moved out on the base's three o'clock!"

Brief static. "Say again, hangar?"

"Something moved! I saw it from the viewport, I swear!"

"Quiet." The lieutenant cuts back in. "Control, pull external feeds. Give me a visual, now."

"On it, stand by-"

Then the floor kicks.

The shock slams up through the floor and straight into his teeth. Alarms bloom across every channel in his helmet, a dozen voices crashing together with the base's automated alerts trying to cut through the noise with warnings that nobody has the bandwidth to hear. The hangar's emergency strips flare from dim amber to screaming red.

Lucas turns toward the viewport just in time to watch a white shape scream past, low and so close that engine wash rattles the armor-weave glass in its frame. It's there and gone in under a second, a streak of pale against the black, and his eyes don't even have time to register the shape of it before the hangar bay door detonates with an ear-shattering boom.

Air rips past him in a howling column, pulling at his coveralls, at his helmet, at him. His boots slide half a meter across the frost-slick deck before his gloved hand catches the edge of a cargo strap bolted to the floor. For a terrible half-second, the dark hole where the bay door used to be is the only thing in the universe.

Then the emergency atmo shield snaps online with a blue flash and a concussive thump he feels in his chest, sealing the void away behind a shimmering field of crackling energy.

The roar stops, but there is no time for the ringing in his ears to abate before a ship pulls close to the wrecked door, its port flank splitting open.

Combat bots, six of them, leap down from the corvette and storm in through the atmo, boots hammering the plating. Boxy armored torsos, heavy-gauge legs, no pretense of a face on the sensor cluster where a head should be.

Snowford-Law models. His memory throws the name up without being asked, something from a brochure that passed through the bunks last year when the bosses were shopping for new security hardware.

But… They move wrong. The metal men are far too fluid for middling door-kickers, and although their faces are little more than a bunch of lenses, their gaze is far too sharp.

The lead bot pivots toward him before he's halfway to his feet, carbine snapping up.

"Hands up." The order is flat and artificial, pitched for clarity as much as threat. "On your knees. Now."

Lucas goes down so fast that he knows his knees will bruise. His hands splay out above his head, palms empty as the bot closes the distance in heavy strides.

His wrists are yanked behind him, and zip-cuffs bite into his fur. Rough metal hands then reach into the left side of his jacket and seize his pistol, yanking it free and tearing his pocket open. Once his captor is satisfied, the shepherd is kicked face down, hitting the floor hard enough to see stars.

The others thunder through the hangar in short order, breaking off in pairs toward the internal accessways.

Then the shooting starts.

It comes from everywhere at once, muffled through bulkheads and distance, the sharp percussive zat-zat of automatic fire answered by the deeper coughs of the bots' carbines. A scream rises somewhere deep in the base, cuts off abruptly, starts again further off. Something metal falls over with a long, ringing clatter. The command channel in his helmet dissolves into overlapping shouting, someone calling for backup to corridor four, someone else just cursing over and over with a fear in his voice Lucas has never heard a grown man make.

He lies there, cheek pressed to the frost, forced to listen to a massacre.

The shooting thins out in stages. First the screaming stops, then the heavy carbine reports grow sporadic, then the automatic fire from the defenders tapers to nothing. The whole thing takes less than ten minutes.

From his place on the floor, cheek still pressed to frost, Lucas watches boots file past.

The first group comes walking. Three of the mechanics from the machine shop, wrists bound behind their backs, a bot at their heels with its carbine leveled at the base of the rearmost man's spine. They're pushed to their knees beside him in a rough line, close enough that he can hear the closest one's teeth chattering. None of them say a word, and the shepherd can't blame one of them for choking back a frightened sob.

More follow. The quartermaster, bleeding from a cut above his eye. Two of the gunners from the AA array, one limping badly. A cluster of deckhands Lucas has shared meals with for the better part of a year, all of them gray-faced and staring at the floor.

Some aren't walking.

A bot rounds the corner from corridor two dragging a body by the ankle, the limp form leaving a dark, wet streak across the deck. Another follows with a second body slung over its shoulder. They're dumped in a pile near the far wall without ceremony. Lucas counts three in that pile before he forces himself to cease.

Then the shooting stops entirely, and the silence that fills the base is somehow worse than the noise.

One of the bots breaks from its post near the prisoners and walks to the center of the hangar. It stops there, sensor cluster rotating slowly, scanning the parked fighters lined up along the inner wall. For a long moment it just stands, motionless.

It… It looks like something thinking.

Lucas opens his mouth to ask the man beside him what the hell it's doing when the first fighter's engines spool to life on their own.

No pilot, nor a startup sequence he can hear through the cockpit glass. The running lights flick on, the repulsors whine, and the ship lifts off its landing skids and drifts toward the atmo shield like it's being pulled on a string. A second follows, then a third, each one taxiing itself out of the hangar and through the shimmering blue barrier into the void beyond.

The bot doesn't move through any of it. It just watches them go.

'What the hell kind of outfit is this?'

The hangar sits empty for less than a minute before new engine noise bleeds through the shield.

A candy red Caracal 7 comes in first, hot and fast, touching down on its skids with sparks following. The paint job is garish, loud, the kind of color you put on a fighter when you want people to see you coming.

Behind the Caracal, a B-spec Brawler gunship follows, settling onto the deck with a weighty THUD. The hull is scarred and pitted in places, not from neglect, but from plain, hard use.

The third ship slides in quietly enough that Lucas almost misses it. Angular and dark, it lands so lightly on its gear that the skids barely click against the plating. It sits there like a held breath.

Then the final one announces itself like a dragon.

VTOL jets scream as a white fighter noses through the barrier on a column of directed thrust that makes the ground vibrate under Lucas' cheek. It's somehow both smaller and larger than he expected. It's the kind of ship that looks fast even standing still, every line on it angled toward a point, like the whole frame is a finger leveled damningly at whatever it's flying toward.

On the tail, three slashes catch the red emergency light as it turns.

The cockpit hatch cracks and swings up as soon as the fighter lands, and a tall form drops from the wing to the deck, landing heavily. The man is no species Lucas can place. Simian, maybe. Tall, little fur, flat face.

The figure turns, and eyes like sharpened flint stab into Lucas across the width of the hangar.

There's no satisfaction, nor is there menace. No, clearly those eyes see only a freshly ticked checkbox.

So ends the criminal career of Lucas the dockhand, the breath he still draws the only consolation.

Trigger has heard the phrase before, and it's holding truer by the week. He watches the feed on his wristcomm as the Commando V's sweep the last few corridors, their cameras painting a picture of dark hallways, trashed wall turrets, bound prisoners, and the occasional door kicked off its hinges. Not a bad return on a hundred and forty thousand credits.

Six Snowford-Law Commando V units, bought as a lot from a surplus dealer two stops back, have been paying for themselves quite well for raids like this. The frames are solid. Good armor, decent servos, reliable joints and hydraulics rated for vacuum work. As combat platforms go, they're a far cry from the RK-4 that Nidhogg wears like a second skin, but they don't need to be, as the hardware was never the problem. No, that dubious honor went to the software.

Snowford-Law, in what Jodie described as one of the dumbest corporate decisions she'd seen in a career full of dumb corporate decisions, tried to code the Commando V's control suite in-house rather than outsource like they did with, ironically, the very wristcomm on Trigger's arm. The result was a bot that moved like it was slathered in mud, tried to lead targets that were standing still, and occasionally walked into walls during pathing tests. Reviews were brutal, sales cratered, and surplus dealers ended up with crates of them at fracs on the credit.

Enter Nidhogg.

The AI gutted the stock software in an afternoon, rebuilt the decision architecture from scratch, and had the first unit running combat drills by dinner. They'll never match an RK-4's hardware, but with Nidhogg's rebuild, the gap isn't so vast anymore. They move like something twice their price, and they shoot like something three times it.

It's becoming a pattern, really. Jodie finds electronics with good bones and bad brains, haggles the price into the floor, and Nidhogg performs surgery. The Commando V's are just the latest in a growing list of bargains that punch well above their weight class once the software catches up to the frame.

Even with the aggressive savings measures, there's always something new that grabs at their credits. Every port, every station, every surplus yard they pass in LOSA seems to surface another tool or piece of kit that the crew needs and doesn't have.

More bots and guns for them? Sure.

A better parts printer for Jodie? Easy buy.

New armor and EVA suits for the whole crew? That one stung, but vacuum doesn't negotiate. The sheer abundance of genuine hi-sec space is astonishing compared to the deep frontier.

Trigger closes the feed on his wristcomm and looks up just in time to catch movement at the edge of the Aquila's open hangar. A lanky figure in one of the new EVA suits and laden with empty duffel bags leaps from the lip, sailing through the atmo shield, and hits the ground at a jog.

The helmet comes off with a hiss as he swaggers in. Green scales, wide grin, black eyes already scanning the hangar as he licks his lips like a man before a buffet. One Eddy McCarrick has never looked so in his element.

Trigger raises an eyebrow and puts a hand out, catching Eddy mid-stride. "Hold it. Base isn't confirmed clear."

Eddy stops, blinking. "Not clear? What the hell is all this, then?" He looks at the row of kneeling prisoners, then at the pile near the far wall, then back at Trigger. He opens his mouth to make what is almost certainly going to be an argument about how clear is clear enough.

A gunshot echoes through the base, muffled by distance and bulkheads, followed by silence.

Trigger's wristcomm pings, and he lifts it. "Trigger here."

"All areas confirmed clear, captain. Final hostile neutralized. Prisoner count: twenty. Casualties: fifteen," one of the bots reports. "Internal defence weapons all destroyed. Minor damage to units C4 and C2."

'Huh. Sounds flatter than Nidhogg. They must be in standalone mode… Is Nidhogg's voice changing, or are these units especially monotone?' he wonders to himself, then shrugs.

"Good work, C6," Trigger lowers his hand and gives Eddy his attention once more. "Anything with an asset tag is off limits." He gives the gecko a push between the shoulder blades. "Everything else, have at it."

The lizard goes, now with a bit less certainty and a hand on the gun at his side.

Just a bit away, Lars and Eli finish their circuit of the prisoners, checking each set of zip cuffs the bots cinched and tightening the ones that need it. They walk over together, Lars rolling his thick neck and Eli with his rifle slung across his chest.

The rottweiler sighs, then hooks a thumb back toward the kneeling pirates with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and pity. "Cuffs are solid," he reports through a steamy puff of breath. His gaze drifts past Trigger to the open corridors where Eddy has already vanished in search of plunder. "Still… I gotta say, boss, this feels a bit bandito, ay? Lifting things out of this little shanty?"

Eli snorts, then folds his arms over his rifle. "What, you wanna log an inventory and start a lost and found?" His cybernetic eye gives a faint whir as he glances toward the base interior. "There's damn near no way to get anything unmarked and without tracker tags back to whoever it originally belonged to. Better it goes to us than gets shoved into some patrol station's storage locker and forgotten."

Nodding absently, Trigger glances over Eli's shoulder.

A few meters away, Mila is crouched beside the ranking officer of this little hidey hole, a lieutenant Trigger is forgetting the name of.

He's older than the rest by a fair amount, with gray at the muzzle and a worn, weathered look that is a story all its own. One side of his coat is still dusted with deck frost, and despite the zip-ties biting into his wrists, he's trying his best to hold onto some scrap of dignity.

Mila is making that difficult.

She sits close, one knee folded under herself and the other drawn up, posture easy and unthreatening. Her voice is low, warm, almost conspiratorial. The zipper of her flightsuit is tugged down farther than usual, just enough to draw the eye toward the pale, creme-furred valley of her chest whenever she leans in.

"You don't have to be stubborn," she says gently, tail curled around just enough to brush his leg. "Really. We're not asking for anything crazy. Just help us out a little, and we can make this whole thing nice and easy for you."

The lieutenant swallows. His eyes flick down, then back up. Then, despite himself, down again.

Mila's smile softens, all bright sincerity and tender encouragement. "You know how LOSA cops work; being lenient means less paperwork for them, so I'll tell them all about how you did the right thing."

The older pirate's jaw works.

"I'd be soooo grateful," Mila murmurs. "Anything helps."

He must know, somewhere in the back of his head, exactly what's happening. He has the look of a man who has been lied to before and lived long enough to recognize bait when he sees it… But there's a difference between recognizing a trap and being able to resist it, especially when it comes in a soft, feminine form speaking honeyed words. Out here, so far off the beaten path, how often does a man like him get to even see a woman? Once every few weeks? Months?

Whatever the reason, Trigger can see the moment the lieutenant's resolve starts to slip. His shoulders ease a fraction, and his stare loses some of its hardness. He wants to trust the pretty face asking nicely.

Trigger frowns as a small, unpleasant twinge stirs somewhere behind his ribs. He studies it with the same irritation he might give a seldom seen warning light in a cockpit.

'Huh.'

He knows exactly what Mila is doing. He knows it is practical. Efficient, even. If Eli leaned on the man, he'd clam up and need drastic measures to talk. If Lars towered over him, he'd get stubborn. Mila, however, is applying pressure in a way the lieutenant can't bring himself to resent quickly enough.

Still…

The twinge comes again, sharper this time, and he finds he really doesn't care for it. 'Is this what being jealous feels like?'

Finally, the lieutenant clears his throat. "There's... there's a command access key." His voice is rough, and he avoids looking at anyone but Mila. "Not on me. Locker behind hangar control station. Third compartment down." He wets his lips. "Blue casing. Looks like a little dataspike."

Mila's ears perk. "Oh?" she asks sweetly, leaning just a bit closer. "And that'll help us help you?"

The lieutenant's nostrils flare with a deep breath, and he smacks his dry lips. "Gets you into the local systems. Cameras, manifests, ship registry, comms logs, all of it. Boss kept one on him and one in the locker in case of... of emergencies."

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from NovelFire. Please report it.

"That's very helpful. Thank you so much," the mink smiles, and for most everyone looking, the sight of bodies and the scent of blood and ozone fades for just a second.

She rises in one fluid motion, pads over to the indicated locker, and pops it open after a moment of searching. Sure enough, inside sits a slim blue device no bigger than one of Trigger's fingers. It looks almost like a USB stick from home, if one had been redesigned by a society five centuries ahead.

Mila turns it over once between her claws, then flashes the lieutenant a bright smile. "Thank you. See? That wasn't so hard."

The older man tries to return the smile, and it comes out more like a dazed twitch.

Mila slides the key into the port on the side of her wristcomm and taps the screen. "Niddy, do your thing."

A beat later, Nidhogg's voice issues from the comm. "Key authenticated. Valid command-level credential confirmed."

Lines of text ripple across Mila's display. Then: "Access to the full base network confirmed. Beginning decryption and system-wide copy."

Mila's grin turns positively wolfish, and the act goes up in smoke.

She spins on her heel and bounds toward Trigger with all the pent-up energy of a puppy desperate for a pat between the ears, boots tapping quick on the deck. "I got it!" she chirps, stopping just short of crashing into him. Her tail is already swishing behind her with pride. "Told you I could do it."

Behind her, the lieutenant watches. Trigger sees the exact moment the man realizes the sweet little routine was naught but that; a routine. It folds across his face in a miserable, hollow sort of way, and were Trigger a crueler man, he might have found it funny. As it is, his attention already belongs to Mila.

Without thinking much about it, Trigger reaches out, catches her by the waist, and draws her in close. She lets out a tiny, pleased sound as he presses a short kiss to her lips, maybe a second longer than needed, before pulling back.

"Good work," he says quietly.

Mila wiggles on her feet in delight.

Trigger lets her linger for a moment longer, then releases her waist and lifts his wristcomm. Two taps bring up a contact with no name attached, just a string of anonymized routing numbers.

One, two rings, then the other side connects. "Go ahead."

The voice on the other end is run through enough layers of synthesis to strip it of anything useful. No species, accent, gender, nothing.

"Indicated base and all personnel have been captured," Trigger reports, his tone shifting to the flat, clinical register reserved for business. "Seventeen surrendered, three treated for injuries, fifteen deceased. The leader, Fayren, resisted and was killed, but his lieutenant was captured and presumably has actionable intel. Base controls have been unlocked and records decrypted for law enforcement. No civilians, hostages, or trafficked individuals found. Mission complete."

A pause, brief enough to be genuine consideration rather than theater. "You work fast." There's something in the cadence that might be approval, though the synthesizer makes it hard to be sure. "A patrol has been alerted for prisoner pickup and property recovery, same as last time. Expect the payment and Fayren's bounty after inspection of the site is complete. We estimate four to six business days. Good day, Captain."

The line goes dead, and Trigger lowers his arm.

Lars clicks his tongue, watching from a few paces back. "Why does LOSA even bother with all this knife in the dark business?" He makes air quotes with both thick fingers. "'Middlemen' working on behalf of 'interested parties.'" The quotes come down, and he shakes his head. "Would be so much simpler if they'd just be direct about what they want."

"Being direct would make any LOSA politician burst into flames," Mila says, still close enough to Trigger that her shoulder brushes his arm. "If they want anything done on time, they gotta be sneaky little weasels about it."

The final sweep takes the better part of an hour. Eddy runs point with an enthusiasm that borders on religious, marking unmarked crates for transfer while the Commando V's handle the lifting. Anything with an asset tag or a functional tracker chip stays where it sits, bound for whatever evidence locker the incoming patrol sees fit. Everything else migrates steadily towards the Aquila's hold, with loose items rapidly filling the bags on Eddy's back.

Once the last load clears the atmo shield, the fighters taxi back through in sequence. Trigger takes the Wyvern out with care, making sure not to point his engines at any of the bound forms still tied down, lest he leave them crispy. Eli is hot on his heels, and Lars's Aggressor follows easily enough. The eye-catching Slinky II brings up the rear.

The Aquila's hangar door seals shut once everyone is landed, and the corvette pulls away from the dead rock on a quiet burn, angling for the nearest starlane.

Eddy is practically dancing on the tips of his toes as he and Eli begin the process of cataloging all of the loose loot he nabbed. Both the duffels are filled to bursting, with the zippers almost exploding open the moment a finger touches them.

"How did your scrawny ass even carry all this shit back, gecko?" Eli asks, his face screwed up into disbelief as he and Eddy kneel over the bags in the corner where the various crates are stashed. He reaches in, pulling out a mess of frontier banknotes sealed in a slightly damp sandwich baggie. He holds it out at arms length as it drips. "And how did you even find all of this?"

Eddy waves him off. "Puh-leese. All these places we've been hitting? None of 'em know jack about keeping their goodies away from someone lookin'. It's pure amateur hour! Everyone knows a sink U-trap is only one step better than stuffing somethin' in a mattress!"

"Right…" Eli makes a face and drops the money back into the duffel.

"Y'know, McCarrick," Jodie begins from the other side of the hangar, where the Commando Vs sit in their slim charging docks. She looks up from her inspection of a half-melted scorch on the chest of C4, giving Eddy a raised eyebrow as he rummages through the spoils. "I'm startin' to think the money doesn't even matter. You just like swiping stuff for the fun of it."

"It ain't stealing," Eddy protests, straightening and hugging a shapely, feminine statuette of silver to his chest like a child guarding a toy. "We call this reappropriation. I take nice shit from the greedy bad guys, and give it all to the needy good guys who'll do all kindsa good with it! And really…" Eddy gives her a million cred grin. "Who is gooder and needier than us, eh?"

"Uh uh, whatever you say, Robbing Hood," Jodie says flatly.

By the Wyvern, Trigger watches the exchange with a faint pull at the corner of his mouth. The amusement doesn't last long, as a cool touch on his forearm draws his attention back.

Beside him, Stella runs a scanner, shaped not unlike a metal detector, along his wrist, then up the inside of his arm, her violet eyes tracking the readout on her datapad. The device chirps twice, and she nods.

"Clear," she says, tucking the scanner back into the satchel at her feet. "No pathogens, no contaminants, no foreign particulates." A small, apologetic smile crosses her muzzle. "Sorry for being so thorough. Off-grid hideouts like that can be breeding grounds for all manner of illness, and your physiology calls for more intensive post-mission checkups than the others. A cornerian immune system might shrug off something that could put you in the medbay. I'm…" The skunk scratches the back of her head, casting embarrassed eyes away briefly. "I'm still waiting for testing on your blood and cell cultures to finish before we can begin any vaccine rounds. I apologize for starting so late…"

"It's fine," he says, rolling his sleeve back down. "I'm often mistaken as an ape cornerian, and I usually don't correct assumptions."

He knows Stella is aware of something deeper than him simply being an alien. She's seen the Wyvern and Nidhogg after all, but since she won't be staying, spilling everything to her won't do.

As Stella begins packing her satchel, the pause that follows feels natural enough for him to follow up with: "Have you decided where you'd like to be dropped off? Weissfeld has your asylum papers waiting."

Her hands slow over the clasp. The smile stays, but something behind it shifts.

"Not yet," she says after a moment, her voice carefully even. "I'd like to see Hjagard first. If it's as nice as Mila makes it sound, I might stay there." She pulls the satchel strap over her shoulder and meets his eyes. "We're only a few days out now, so I'll know soon enough."

Trigger blinks. "A few days?"

"Give or take." Stella tilts her head. "Didn't Jodie mention that? We've been making good time on the lanes."

A few days. He'd known it was coming, of course. The route north had always had Hjagard on it, circled in red on every version of the plan. But the jobs had come so steadily, and the days between them had blurred so easily into one another, that the timeline had crept up without him feeling it close.

Now it's here, and the dread settles into his stomach, heavy as a lump of lead.

He's never been good at this. Social obligations, civilian ones especially, have always sat wrong on him, like a uniform cut for a larger man's frame.

Back on Strangereal, his flat was far from downtown, and the only reasons he ever left it were to report to base or to get groceries. Nobody visited. Nobody called unless it was official. That was the way he preferred it, and for a long time, nobody questioned the arrangement.

Were he and Mila not together, he could afford to be distant. Polite but removed, the way he is with most people, in a way that a normal person might find rude. If they did take offence, who cares? Not Trigger.

But now? He cannot rightly avoid her family, not without committing an unacceptable social faux pas and possibly upsetting her. Landing himself in the doghouse without his minky space heater to lull him to sleep is a very real fear.

'What do you even say to a mother whose daughter you're dating? To brothers? Do they expect gifts? Is there a protocol for this?'

"Captain?"

Stella's voice pulls him back. She's watching him with that careful gaze of hers. "Is something wrong?"

"No." The word comes a beat too quick, and he can tell she doesn't believe it, but she's gracious enough not to press. "Thank you for checking me over, Stella."

She dips her head, a motion that's half nod and half small bow, and turns to take her bag back to the infirmary.

His wristcomm buzzes before the silence can settle. A text from Catrina, short and to the point.

When you have a moment, Captain. Rec room.

Trigger glances once more at the controlled chaos of Eddy's looting operation, then turns for the corridor.

In the rec room, in the corner away from the couches and projector, where Mila is lounging amid a movie, and opposite of the galley, where Lars hums and chops something on a cutting board, Catrina has settled herself in quite nicely. A small, L-shaped desk and plush chair that keeps her back to the wall is where she spends much of her time. Upon it, a plain terminal with two screens sits.

The snow leopard looks up as he approaches, giving him a polite nod. "Captain," she begins. "Congratulations on another clean mission. Not every crew can manage such a grueling string of assignments with so few hiccups."

"The last few have had little to no potential for collateral damage, allowing us to operate aggressively," he verbally dismisses the praise and folds his hands behind his back, rubbing the last of the asteroid base's chill from his digits. "What can I do for you, Missus Weissfeld?"

"Catrina is fine, captain," she smiles thinly. "I'm finding this posting agreeable, so some familiarity is not unwarranted. I asked for you as I'd like to address crew public relations and advertising."

Catrina taps something on her terminal and turns one screen his way, pulling up what looks like a spread of data across both screens. Charts, social media aggregates, forum excerpts and the like. "I've been monitoring the perception of Strider Squadron across both spacer and civilian networks," she begins, her tone shifting into something more measured. "Within the usual haunts, your reputation is growing rapidly. The recent string of operations has done a remarkable job of spooking anyone who keeps an ear to the ground."

She scrolls through a few of the forum posts, and Trigger catches fragments as they pass. Paranoid warnings. Pleas for information. A few threads that are nothing but wild speculation stacked on top of wilder speculation.

"The problem, and the opportunity, is that this kind of infamy doesn't stay contained. Bleedover into civilian awareness is going to begin soon, if it hasn't already. When it does, you'll want to be the one shaping the narrative rather than reacting to it."

Trigger folds his arms. "Meaning?"

"Meaning if Strider Squadron is going to capitalize on its growing reputation, a plan to control public perception needs to be in place before the public starts forming one on its own." She flicks a claw toward one of the screens, where a series of team logos and publicity stills are arranged in a grid. Trigger recognizes a few. High-profile freelancer outfits, the kind that get talked about in the same breath as planetary defense contracts and corporate security details. "Many successful mercenary outfits with a public profile play into a theme. A role. It's been a growing trend ever since Star Fox proved that hired guns do have a place as a household name."

Trigger's frown is slight, but present. The idea of leaning into theatrics sits oddly against everything he's trained for. Pilots are supposed to let their flying speak. Showmanship is for airshows and recruitment posters, not operational work. "What are you suggesting?"

Catrina leans back in her chair and steeples her fingers, the tips of her claws just barely touching. "That depends entirely on you, Captain. How do you want Strider Squadron to be seen?" Her ice-blue eyes hold steady on his. "Are you heroes? Compelling villains? Something more ambiguous?"

He doesn't need long to think about it. "Leaning toward one extreme won't do. Everyone on this ship is here for their own reasons, and in most cases, money is money. A neutral standing is what we want."

Catrina nods, slowly, the way someone does when an answer confirms a hypothesis they've already built a plan around. "I expected as much," she says. "Presentation as aloof, consummate professionals is relatively hassle-free compared to the alternatives. No causes to champion, no enemies to court, no ideology to defend. Just results." One finger uncurls from the steeple to tap the desk. "The mystique is already there and building on its own. What we need to do now is give the outside world a tiny, controlled glimpse. Enough to speculate over and obsess about, but never enough to fully understand anything but the efficacy of Strider Squadron."

'I was beginning to worry that Catrina wasn't up to playing the PR game on top of lawyer duties,' Trigger muses. 'Good to know she was indeed the right pick.'

She beckons him around the desk with a curl of her fingers. "Come. I anticipated your answer, so I took the liberty of putting together a small demonstration."

Trigger rounds the desk and stands behind her chair, looking down at the terminal over her shoulder.

Catrina opens a video file and lets it play.

The first frame hits him like a jolt. It's the Wyvern's forward camera!

His own HUD overlay fills the screen, the targeting reticle drifting across a field of stars and debris. Most of the readouts are intact, orientation, velocity, shield status, but key details have been scrubbed clean. Coordinates, redacted. Missile count, redacted. System identification tags, gone. What's left is enough to look real without giving away anything operational.

The footage is from three days ago. The frigate job, right after their demands to surrender were answered with AA fire.

A crew of pirates had been running a converted Kem-class frigate, a spacious hauler, as a mobile base, using it to leapfrog between systems and raid shipping corridors before anyone could pin down a patrol pattern. Naturally, the recent contact feeding them clean-up jobs wanted this crew stopped, and Strider caught them refueling outside a dilapidated, First Expansion era station.

On screen, the Wyvern rolls into a dive as the HUD hums, warning of lock-ons, and the frigate's point defense batteries light up the void in a barrage of bolts. Trigger watches himself thread through the flak and send charged muons downrange with a flash, turning one turret to scrap.

A pair of fighters scramble from the frigate's ventral hangar, barely clearing the launch rails before a burst of red lances in from the edge of frame and turns the lead ship into a tumbling fireball. The Slinky II tears through the wreckage without slowing, already banking to chase the juking wingman.

The comms chatter crackles over the footage, and that's where Trigger's eyebrow climbs.

"Strider One, frigate point defense looks to be concentrated topside. Recommend attack run along the dorsal axis."

That's Eli's voice, joined by subtitles across a clean section of the screen, a "Strider Two" nametag, and a blobby, dark silhouette of a portrait to the left, with only his glowing left eye visible. It's Eli's cadence and inflection, down to the clipped tone when he's focused, but not all the words are right, as he clearly remembers Eli speaking his name.

The vague portrait and subtitles then vanish, replaced with a new speaker.

"Copy, Strider Two. Strider Three, with me on the attack run. Strider Two, Strider Four, you're on the escort fighters."

That's his own voice, and another featureless portrait. Except, again, not all the words are correct.

"Moving to your wing, boss," Lars confirms, and the Aggressor cuts across the screen before slowing, slotting itself to the right of the Wyvern. Once more, a darkened, broad-shouldered portrait joins the words.

"Roger Dodger, Strider One!" Mila's voice comes in last, cheery despite the assignment.

Every instance where someone used a real name has been surgically replaced with their Strider designation. The synthesis is good, disturbingly good, even, and it's aided by the static and distortion in the background of the transmissions. The cadence is almost perfect, each voice matched in tone, rhythm, and personality, but there's something just barely off in the transitions. If he wasn't actually there to know the difference, he'd miss it.

'Nidhogg's work,' he realizes with a low hum. 'It has to be.'

On screen, the Wyvern's muon cannon and the Aggressor's trio of 20mms open up along the frigate's spine before it can bring its shields to bear, stitching a line of explosions across the dorsal plating that peels armor back like foil and leaves weapon emplacements in ruin. The ship shudders, venting atmosphere in white plumes, and begins to list. The view twists as they flip and roll, circling around to the Kem's stacked duo of engines.

A storm of tungsten-tipped lead tears into the top engine amid booming laughs from Lars, and pink bolts fly down the center of the bottom one, shaking the ship with another explosion within.

"Strider Four, watch your six!" Eli barks.

The screen twists again as Trigger banks away to the dogfight happening less than a kilometer away, and they're treated to the sight of Mila's Caracal flipping backwards into its own vector. The post-stall maneuver is a little wobbly, but she blasts the junky fighter behind her with a burst of red, blowing it to bits before momentum carries her back into proper orientation.

"Yahoo! I understand why you love doing that, Strider One!" Mila makes her joy known over the radio before she jets away, homing in on the tail of another panicking bogey.

The rest of the fight isn't anything to write home about. The pirates are lackluster pilots, and it's obvious few of them have ever used their fighter for anything other than menacing civ vessels. Trigger and Lars split and come in wide, herding the last few into a crossfire killbox.

One, however, manages to break and flee, flying away at full burn.

Instrument numbers rapidly shifting, Trigger turns, nose of the Wyvern pointed right at the green bounding box of the runner.

"Lock on."

The box flashes red, and the HUD flashes [FIRE] as the lock tone fills the silence.

"Fox 2!"

A missile streaks out from under the camera, and in a plume of fire and twisted steel, the fighter is gone.

The Wyvern's view banks around, but other than the other Striders coming to settle behind him, there is nothing but debris and the crippled frigate.

"Looks like that's the last of em," Mila speaks. "Crew Chief said these Kems can't hold a ton of fighters, right?"

Eli grunts over the line. "Don't be so sure it's clear. Strider Two to Mothership! Radar is clear here. Confirm?"

"Scans are lookin' clean, Two." Curiously, no portrait for Eddy, who is quickly becoming their sensor operator, just a "Mothership" nametag. "Nothin' as far as the eye can see."

"Good… And get your feet off the console!"

There is a muffled curse and the sound of shuffling, the subtitles merely reflecting it with "..."

"Target is disabled and ready for pickup, no further bogeys," Trigger speaks last. "Good work. RTB."

The video comes to a clean end there, and Trigger leans back against the wall in thought.

Catrina pauses the player and lets the silence do its work for a moment before glancing up at him. "Thoughts?"

Trigger doesn't answer immediately. He replays a few of the key moments in his head, the spliced callsigns, the redacted HUD elements, the silhouette portraits. The whole package is slick… But is it too over the top?

"It's well edited," he says finally. "And I see you've been making use of Nidhogg."

Catrina's expression shifts. Not much, just a slight narrowing of the eyes and a tilt of the head that he's learning to recognize as the snow leopard filing something away for later examination.

"Yes," she says, the word carrying a weight that extends well past the letters. "The AI." Her claws tap once against the desk. "Such capable digital assistants are rather expensive, Captain. Not often seen outside of corporations with the cash and computers to spare for them." She lets the observation hang, then adds, with the careful neutrality of someone testing the edge of a boundary: "Wherever did you happen upon this one?"

Trigger's gaze lifts past her, across the rec room to the galley.

Lars stands at the counter with a whole chicken laid out on a cutting board, his thick fingers working a boning knife along the breastbone with surprising delicacy. Beside him, Nidhogg's RK-4 stands at attention, a second knife held in its articulated grip, mirroring the rottweiler's cuts on a separate piece like… well, a machine.

"Crew Chief Coyote will be displeased to find biological contaminants in this unit's finger joints," Nidhogg observes, not looking up from the task.

Lars grins as he finishes his chicken, setting his knife aside and wiping his hands on his apron, staining the loopy pink heart printed on it. "Let me handle her."

"Archived security footage suggests zero-percent win-rate across all debates with Crew Chief Coyote," Nidhogg is quick to point out.

Lars's grin doesn't falter. If anything, it widens. "That's 'cause I let her think she wins. It's a strategy."

The AI sets aside another bone. "Noted. Statistically ineffective regardless."

Trigger watches them for a beat longer, then turns back to Catrina. "Nidhogg, like my fighter, is a product of my homeworld. That's all there is to it."

Catrina holds his gaze for a moment, and he can see the questions stacking up behind her eyes like rounds in a magazine. Strategically, they remain unfired.

"Of course," she says, and turns back to her terminal. "Returning to the matter at hand. There's no shortage of video hosting sites and aggregates dedicated to real-life combat content. Some of them draw hundreds of millions of views, particularly the grittier feeds that cater to the spacer crowd." She pulls up a list of platforms, scrolling through names and traffic figures. "The simplest approach would be to post the video anonymously, gauge the reaction, and if it's well received, I can compile further footage into a follow-up."

Trigger's frown returns. "Is anonymous posting wise? Even with the editing, it could imply we have a rogue element within the crew," he continues. "Someone leaking footage without authorization. That's not the message we want to send if we're positioning ourselves as professionals."

The snow leopard's ears cant forward a fraction, and something that might be approval flickers across her features. "A fair point, Captain. We could claim the first upload ourselves, post it under the squadron's name as an intentional release. It sidesteps the leak narrative entirely." She taps a claw against the desk. "Though there are risks to that as well. Tying your name directly to promotional material invites scrutiny. People will dig. They always do."

Trigger nods slowly. "I want to run this by Eli before we move forward. Any operational security concerns he might have will need to be addressed first." He straightens from the wall. "Thank you for being forward-thinking on this, Catrina. For now, keep the video internal."

Catrina dips her head. "Understood."

Mila's voice cuts through the bridge like a bell, her tail swishing hard enough to brush against the console behind her. On the main display, the final frame of Catrina's video lingers for a moment before fading to black.

Eddy groans from his station. "Can the part with me at the end be taken out? I sound like a dork."

"You are a dork," Jodie says without looking up from her console, prompting Stella to hide a snort behind a fist beside her.

Lars, leaning against the railing between the upper and lower bridge with his arms crossed, shakes his head as he looks back at the now-dark screen. "I never understood why people like watching this stuff. Life can be grim enough already. Why not enjoy nice things instead?"

"Nice things don't get millions of views and ad money, big guy," Eddy mutters.

By the captain's chair, Trigger stands with Eli and Catrina, the three of them slightly apart from the rest. Trigger glances at his XO.

"Any concerns with this revision?"

The question comes at the tail end of several days' worth of back and forth. Before Trigger even first brought the video to Eli, his instinct had been to shelve the entire idea. Controlled leaks, curated footage, brand management, ugh. The more he thought about it, the less appeal it had.

Eli's response had surprised him.

His XO hadn't shut it down. Instead, he'd gone quiet for a long moment, then said: "Hold on. It's not a bad idea."

That alone had been enough to make Trigger pause.

Eli's argument was pragmatic. Totally controlling any narrative involving Strider Squadron was going to be impossible. Someone, somewhere, would talk. Footage would surface. Stories would spread, garbled and exaggerated, and the team would end up defined by whatever version of events got the most traction. Any control was better than none, and if they were going to have a reputation regardless, shaping it deliberately could open doors that would otherwise remain shut, if they were careful about it.

So Trigger walked back the veto he'd been ready to give, and the last few days had been spent refining the video with Catrina, revision by revision, until it sat right with all three of them.

Or close to it.

Eli takes a moment now, his cybernetic eye dimming slightly as he taps one boot against the floor. The silence stretches long enough that Trigger suspects he's replaying the footage on the implant itself.

Finally, the eagle runs a hand through the white feathers of his head and nods. "It's close. Remove the portraits and it has my approval."

Catrina's eyebrow arches. "The portraits? You're sure? The research I've done suggests they'll appeal to a younger demographic. Mystique, intrigue, the silhouetted figures behind the callsigns. It's effective."

"The fighters will be our faces," Eli says, his tone alone saying he's considered and discarded any counterargument. "We don't need edgy teenage fans."

Trigger nods. "Agreed."

Catrina's expression betrays nothing, but she taps a note into the datapad in her hand without protest.

In the corner, the RK-4 that is rapidly becoming Nidhogg's face straightens from its idle posture. "Hjagard radio transmissions detected. Planetfall estimated in two hours."

The effect on Mila is instantaneous. She spins on her heel, practically vibrating. "Two hours! Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see everyone again!" She clasps her hands together, her mind visibly racing faster than her mouth can keep up. "Oh, and I definitely want to show my brothers this footage! Niddy, can you make a cool montage out of it real quick? Like, just the best parts? And I need to go wrap the gifts I got for mom, and aunt Linda, and the nieces and nephews, and Cathy's..." She falters for just a beat. "I need to check up on Cathy, too. She still hasn't called me back. Is she mad? Does she think I'm still... What about-"

Lars holds up a broad palm. "Take a breath, hermana. You're going to pass out without some air."

The mink stops mid-word, mouth still open and ruby eyes wide.

"Start with something nice and simple," he continues gently. "Like calling ahead. They know you're coming home today, right?"

Mila's ears shoot straight up. "I only gave them a window, not an exact time!" She slaps both hands against the sides of her face as her fur stands on end. "I gotta go do that right now!"

She's out the bridge door before anyone can respond, the sound of her boots retreating rapidly down the corridor.

Trigger sits heavily in the captain's chair, and those two hours pass far too quickly.

Hjagard grows in the viewport by degrees, a sphere of blue and white that swells from a distant marble into something that fills the glass from edge to edge. Cloud systems spiral across its face in vast, lazy whorls, and beneath them, the planet's surface is a patchwork of snow-capped mountain ranges, dark stretches of taiga, and the silver veins of frozen rivers catching sunlight.

Mila calls it an industrial world, and the evidence is there if you look for it. Grid-lines of roads cut through the wilderness between clusters of light that mark the cities, and the faint haze of atmospheric processing hangs over the larger population centers like a second cloud layer. Orbital traffic is modest but steady, freighters and tankers moving in patient queues toward the elevator stations.

But it's beautiful, and there's no getting around that.

'A beautiful planet for a beautiful woman.'

Landing clearance takes some negotiating. The ATC operator for Braskel, Mila's hometown, is polite but audibly cagey about letting an armed foreign corvette into their skies. Nidhogg handles the bulk of the paperwork exchange, transmitting credentials and visa documentation while Trigger confirms their intent as civilian shore leave. The operator hums and haws, consults with someone off-mic, and only then does he finally grant. a landing vector… Though the sighs and whiny tone give away how he's already emailing a complaint to someone up the food chain.

They come in low for the final leg, late in the afternoon by local time. The sun sits fat and orange on the horizon, throwing long shadows across a landscape of rolling tundra broken by stands of dark conifers and the occasional plume of industrial smoke from distant refinery stacks.

Mila has pulled Trigger to the front of the viewport by the wrist, her free hand pointing at everything below with the rapid-fire enthusiasm of someone rediscovering a place they never really forgot.

"That's my old school! See the one with the blue roof? And over there, that's the grocery store that had a fire one time. Like, a really bad one. The whole block smelled like burnt cheese for a month." She presses closer to the glass, fogging it with her breath. "Oh! And that house, the ugly brown one with the shed? That's where Ilsa Frenn had her sleepover in sophomore year. Me and Cathy crashed it." She grins. "That one was fun."

Trigger watches her face more than the landmarks. The way her ruby eyes catch the low sunlight, the way her ears track toward each new memory before her mouth catches up. She's incandescent.

Then the terrain opens up, and a rural property comes into view below. A large, cabin-like house with a steeply pitched roof and dark timber walls, set back from the road on a wide plot of cleared land. Behind it, a field stretches flat and open, more than large enough for the Aquila to set down.

Trigger keys the ship-wide comm. "All hands to the bridge."

They filter in by ones and twos, and he waits until everyone is present before speaking.

"We'll be taking a week, possibly two, of shore leave on the surface. The Aquila will be parked behind the Minks family home." He pauses, choosing his next words with care. "As per Mila, Missus Minks is happy to have guests. If you decide to take her up on that, be polite and don't overdo it. Otherwise, crew members without personal fighters can expense transportation to other parts of the planet for their time off." He scans the room. "Questions?"

There are none, though Eddy wraps his arms around himself and gives a full-body shiver as the external temperature readout blinks on the bridge display. "Shore leave in a tundra. Great. Not everyone's warm-blooded, you know. My blood is literally the temperature of whatever room I'm in! Ever think of that?"

Jodie pats him on the shoulder as she passes. "Shoulda' got a heated blanket before we got here."

The Aquila descends on maneuvering thrusters, settling into the field behind the house with a low hum that sends snow swirling outward in a wide, flat ring. Through the viewport, Trigger can see the house clearly now.

His stomach drops.

There are people gathered behind the house. Not one or two, but a party. Adults clustered in small groups, children darting between legs, someone pulling what looks like a folding table into the house through the back door.

And the children….

'When was the last time I interacted with a child?' Trigger's thoughts whirl, just as fast as they did during his first duel with Shilage, maybe faster. 'Have I ever? Not since I myself was in school. They're cornerian children, too. What do you do with them? Do they expect you to say something? Do they just... talk to you?'

After bundling up in cold-weather gear, the crew splits. Lars shrugs on a heavy jacket that makes his already broad frame look enormous, Jodie zips up a lined work coat, and Stella finally ditches her cropped shirt and jacket for a down-stuffed coat, her tail tucked against the chill. Unusually, it takes Trigger the longest to prepare, as he trades his flightsuit for proper dress blues with thermals underneath. Once he remerges to bemused looks, the three of them fall in behind Trigger and Mila.

Eli posts himself near the bridge with his arms behind his back, watching the viewport and silently making it clear how he has no intention of socializing with strangers. Eddy, still shivering, mutters something about finding the thickest blanket on the ship and not moving until spring. Catrina offers a polite nod from her desk as they pass, already turning back to her terminal.

The front ramp drops with a hiss of hydraulics, and cold air floods the interior in a sharp, clean wave that bites at exposed skin. Beyond the ramp, the field stretches white under the low orange sun, and the gathered crowd near the house turns as one toward the sound.

Mila takes his hand. Her fingers are warm in his, her grip is sure, and the grin on her face is radiant enough to make the cold irrelevant. She walks down the ramp first, pulling him gently beside her, and Trigger lets himself be led.

The family resemblance is immediate. Nearly every cornerian waiting for them is a mink, and most of them share that same palette Mila wears. Yellow fur in various shades, from pale cream to rich gold to near white.

The woman at the front is unmistakably Mila's mother. She stands a tiny bit shorter than her daughter, her smartly cropped hair a more platinum shade against Mila's dandelion, and her eyes are a soft, dewy pink that light up the instant they land on Mila. Her hands come together at her chest, fingers laced, and even from the bottom of the ramp, Trigger can see her trembling.

Behind her stand three men, who must be Mila's brothers, each one built broader and taller than their sister, with wives held close and wide-eyed children just barely being held back from bounding forward. The tallest, who must be Bjorn, has his jaw set in a complicated expression that's trying to be several things at once.

The one on the right doesn't bother with complexity.

His eyes move from Mila to the tall, furless figure holding her hand, and his smile dies on the spot. The words that come out are loud enough to carry across the field, scandalized and incredulous.

"Oh my god, she's actually fucking an ape!"

The silence lasts about half a second. Then the shouting starts.

Trigger screws his eyes shut. 'Wonderful.'