Category:

You've gotten lazy and comfortable and findable, he told himself. You're just stupidly lucky it was a friend who walked up that beach.

... A friend he hadn't seen in years, who was clearly in trouble, and who wasn't being forthcoming with information. Not that it mattered; he was already aboard. He tucked Mister Feefs' carrier into one of the cargo nets at the back, then took the seat next to Qai in the cockpit, shrugged into the safety harness, and put his sand-encrusted feet up on the dash. Wiggling his toes, he watched dried sand sprinkle down around him. Qai either didn't notice or didn't feel the need to comment as she ran through system checks and powered up the engine.

Whoever was manning the port tower sounded like they'd been woken from a sound sleep. After some indeterminate mumbling, the clearance was granted, and Qai took the shuttle up with practiced ease.

"Now can you tell me what we're doing?" Fergus asked. 

"We're going to go get Maha back," she said.

"Who has her?" 

"Pirates."

Qai and Maha ran their smuggling and gray-market procurement op out of Crossroads Station out along the Bounds, and as far as he knew, they and the area pirates kept out of each other's way when not actively seeking out the other's business. It was a dangerous move—and one that could destabilize the entire local economy—to upset that delicate balance of professional criminal courtesy. He could see a clueless, overconfident newbie bumbling fatally into that kind of trouble, but if it was an amateur, Qai would have resolved it quickly and permanently, and without need of him. And she'd have had fully three-quarters of the Crossroads riffraff at her back.

Well, she did say it was complicated, he thought. "Have they asked for ransom yet?"

"Yes," she said. She pulled back sharply on the helm controls, and moments later they were rocketing through the wisps of noctilucent clouds in Coralla's upper atmosphere. Looking down, he could see the lower, thicker clouds building off the shore, see the muted flashes of lightning building within. It felt odd and uncomfortable not to be able to feel it.

"How much?" he asked, when she remained silent. "I don't have a lot of cred left I can access, but whatever I've got is yours."

"It's complicated," she said. "Now be quiet while I fly."

"Okay," he said. He might have been sitting on a beach for over three years, but he hadn't lost his wits enough to bug a pilot when she didn't want to be bugged.

She remained grimly silent the remainder of the trip to orbit.

Qai's ship in orbit was shaped like nothing so much as a gigantic purple egg, unlike anything he had ever seen, but before he had a chance to ask about it, she pressed him—politely but urgently—ahead of her up the docking arm from the shuttle into the ship's oversized airlock. There were signs posted inside, half a meter above his head, in an unfamiliar alphabet where the letters were raised, sunken, or tilted to different degrees and angles, in a wide variant of hues of gray. He'd seen Dzenni text once—a mix of circles, curves, and dots—and this was not it.

"Whose ship?" he asked. Had Maha been kidnapped by alien pirates? That could be interesting.

Qai sealed the door behind them, then indicated he should walk ahead of her into the ship's curvy corridor. Just as he was sure she wasn't going to answer, she said, "A friend who owed me a favor. Ok'mah'a' oon."

"That's a name?"

"That's a place," she said. "Or, more accurately, it's a very shortened and simplistically expressed human-capable nickname for a place."

"What's it when not dumbed down for us, then?"

"Not something I can pronounce either, although out of sheer luck of physiology I can get slightly closer than you."

"I'm sorry you went through all this trouble to find me," he said. Qai growled low in frustration. "I'm sorry that I'm sorry?" he added quickly.

"As much as it makes things easier that you came along willingly, you are useless to me if you don't fight," she said. "You'll understand."

Fergus laughed. "Now that you found me, it was only a matter of time before someone else did, and probably not a friend. You told me Maha is in danger. I'm not going to refuse to help you, or abandon her. That's not what friends do."

"Amiable but at most occasional business associates, I'd call us." 

"I say friends," he answered. "You know we are."