Qwern watched the new hires file by. It wasn’t a terribly inspiring display, but he hadn’t expected it to be. Not in this port, not on such short notice, and not for the pay he was offering. At least he had his warm bodies, to do the little things, and assist the surviving professionals on board the freighter. And to serve as shields. In a pinch.

And he needed to save his funds, for a very different sort of professional. This whole endeavour was still likely to end up costing him money. At least in the short run.

Qwern turned and watched the procession move on, up the stairs and to the scaffolding that led into the ship itself. Everything around here looked rickety and old, because it was, and the sky was its usually dark, heavy self, promising a torrent of rain after a brief break. This was a miserable little stop, but it had little in the way of regulation or rule of law, and he could count on his containers not being checked unless they actually left the ship. That was an immediate point in its favour. And then there were the people, connected to the port via the similarly degraded city down in the valley below.

This was a place that both bred and attracted the vicious, the lost, the outcasts and the despised. Those who didn’t mind signing up for a slaver ship, or at least didn’t stand up to their fellows about it.

“So, you keep keeping me in suspense, Qwern,” Konno said from his left-hand side. “You promised me a solution to the Warden, and I don’t think I’m looking at it.”

One fresh hire stumbled, and needed a moment to halfway gain his balance back. Quite a lot of these people were coming here straight from the dockside bars that housed these types of scum in between flights.

“Only a little bit of suspense left, Konno,” Qwern said. “You can hold out.”

Konno crossed his arms and looked aggravated, but not to a degree that Qwern considered a problem. Maybe he was being petty, but with everything that had gone wrong he felt entitled to amuse himself a little.

“What about you boys?” he asked the other four men with them.

They weren’t fresh hires, as such, having come in right at the start of the current operation, from a port only slightly better than this. They weren’t his personal favourites, but at least they looked mean. So they had that going for them.

Benn, the only one whose name he could remember, shrugged.

“I’m just waiting to be off the ground,” he said sullenly.

His tone was a good match for a face that was so oddly small and pinched that it bordered on being an actual deformity.

“Well, we’ll be off soon,” Qwern assured him. “We need to be. We have a deadline.”

“A dead line,” one of the other men said, in what Qwern supposed was some sort of attempt at humour. No one humoured him with a chuckle.

He couldn’t help but look back at the ship one last time. Things were going well with the containers. The life support systems had held up, and the people inside of them hadn’t turned on each other in a panicked frenzy, as sometimes happened. So there had been no fatalities. But there still weren’t enough of them, which was half the problem. But he could talk his way through that.

Probably.

The other half… well, he was about to meet the solution.

Probably.

The last of the dregs filed into the freighter, and Zamm started walking. It was inevitable that the new hires would find out just why there were so many vacancies, but he just needed to fly off before word spread. And before they sobered up.

“So, it’s time?” Konno asked.

“Oh, it’s time,” Qwern told him.

A general rule of space travel was that smaller ships were faster, and he’d sent one of the surviving shuttles ahead to make inquiries and deliver a message on his behalf. Upon arriving, he’d been assured that it had been received.

Now he just had to survive the result.

The promised rain started coming down, in little pricks that were obviously going to become a torrent real soon. Torrents were pretty much the default state of things here, and the brief dry spell had gathered quite a lot of ammo up there.

He would have preferred an indoor meeting place, but had to put up with threading his way between the port complex and the rock that hemmed it in, and down an ancient, weathered set of stone steps, hewn right into the cliffs.

“Oh, this is wonderful,” Benn grumbled, as the rain slowly but steadily picked up. “Just wonderful.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Qwern said. “Now be quiet for this. We are in for some delicate negotiations.”

“If someone tries to sell us water, I’m leaving,” Benn said, still grumbling like a sullen kid.

Qwern stopped, and fixed him with a look. One didn’t get to head operations like by being soft, or by not knowing how to put your foot down.

“Be quiet, I said,” he insisted, in a sterner voice than before.

He hooked his thumbs lightly in his belt, which of course put his hand very close to his pistol. Benn’s hand did a little drifting of its own, and his three buddies looked unsure. Everyone had left the ship with weapons; it was that kind of port. But Qwern was the boss, and he wasn’t going to let these boys pretend otherwise.

“And I meant it,” he went on, after emphasising his point with a hard stare. “Don’t start trouble. Not here, and not now. Not when we have a problem of this magnitude to deal with, and NOT when I am lucky enough to have a solution within reach. Don’t get us killed because you never learned when not to speak.”

Benn wanted to grumble some more, or to push back with childish belligerence. But he had already lost the stare-off, and so just settled for a sullen silence.

Qwern took his victory without making an overly big deal out of it, following his own advice, and kept on going.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Their end goal was a natural garden of sorts; an area between three tall, narrow cliffs, where actual dirt had managed to settle, deeply enough for a bit of fauna. The cliffs were heavily marked by scratched letters and the odd plasma burn. No doubt it was a popular retreat for those connected to the docks, during tragically rare sunny hours. For now, it was just the six of them, and the three of them.

The men had set up a camp of sorts; a small collection of travelling bags, and a portable shelter that protected an actual campfire. Qwern didn’t know what they were burning, and he didn’t care. This was it. The potential counter to the Warden.

One sat cross legged before one of the rocks, adding his own very strange artistic endeavours to it, in what looked very much like blood. Another one stood waiting for them, his hand on the head of an axe almost as tall as himself, and the third emerged from behind a rock as Qwern’s group had fully entered the little garden. He was the only one in an overcoat; the other two were bare-chested and barefoot. All of them were bushy-bearded, tall, heavily muscular in a very natural-looking way, and just about covered in battle scars.

The artist with the highly suspect paint spoke something Qwern didn’t understand a word of. The other two didn’t respond. They simply took in the newcomers with just about the fiercest stares Qwern had ever seen. It genuinely put him in mind of large predators he’d seen caught and caged.

Overall, they looked like how a comedian might interpret mankind’s distant ancestors, except it wasn’t very funny when the joke stood a few feet in front of you, toying with the edge of a keremak axe.

“Konno, boys, I would like you to meet three genuine Muan Ragers. Warriors from the Outer Fringe. The most ferocious killers you can imagine. These three have earned a name for themselves in certain circles.”

The one with the axe let out a noise. Qwern supposed it was an attempt at a chuckle, but the dark abyss that was the man’s voice made it a little unclear.

“Work?” the man in the coat asked, in a similar baritone. “You have work?”

“I have work, yes, if you’re willing to take it. It is a tough one, I won’t lie to you.”

The man in the coat pointed a thick, weathered finger at him.

“Talk, space-rat, talk.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Qwern saw Benn scowl at the words.

“I need a very special kind of killing done,” he said, quickly to cut off any errant grumbling from Benn. “One I believe is perfect for you three. See, we had an encounter with a Kalero Warden some days ago, and we believe she might still be after us. She… doesn’t like our type of-”

“Kalero…” the axeman mused, pronouncing it in an odd way. Or perhaps it was the correct way.

As the painter continued his inexplicable work, the other two looked at each other. Qwern had worried about this deciding moment. Wardens were flesh and blood. They could be killed, but not many wanted to roll those dice. By all accounts, it usually required terrible casualties, and most sane people fled as their comrades started dying in droves.

The two Muans grinned at each other. Like everything else about them, it looked feral. And the axeman let out that deep, dark rumble again.

“Talk more,” the coated one said to Qwern. “Explain.”

“She is after my freighter. I think. On a small, fast ship. And I have a deadline to meet, so I can’t afford to hide or take side-tracks. The big problem is that… that way they move. The way they just appear wherever they want. It’s not a thing I know how to counter, or-”

There was a mocking quality to the coated man’s latest grin.

“Rules. There are rules. You don’t. We know. We fix. We fight.”

“Do you actually know how to deal with the Warden?” Qwern asked.

The coated one spoke a few words in that strange language of theirs, followed by:

“Old. Old… history. Old fight.”

He touched the pommels of the two short blades in his belt. There was a tense anticipation in it, but then these fellows looked tense in absolutely everything they said or did.

“Good, excellent,” Qwern said. “Look, I need you three on board my freighter as we fly on. As… insurance. If you can-”

“We CAN,” the axeman said, with a hint of heat, and a slight stiffening of posture. “We can. Bao,” he added, and thumped his bare chest. “Wari. More than…”

There was now a mocking, sneering quality to his grin, as undisguised as everything else about him, as he looked Qwern’s group over.

“... soft men.”

“Oh, eat yourself, Fringer,” Benn sullenly sneered back.

Qwern put his hand up, but it was too late. That held, feral tension burst loose as the axeman sprang. He moved with shocking speed for his size, and brought his weapon down on Benn’s shoulder. The keremak went through it like nothing, and the man immediately swung the weapon again and took off the other arm.

Konno’s hand moved, but Qwern grabbed the man’s wrist and pushed both of them away.

The other crew members yelped and went for their weapons, but were nowhere near fast enough. The one in the coat sprang as well, letting out a hideous, nerve-shredding yell, and one of his short blades went into one of Benn’s little crew. It was a quick little flurry of stabs that showered the Muan with blood, and by the time the other closest man could raise his gun the axeman had him.

The axe blade entered his torso, and the half-naked Muan then swung the man around by his new handle. The body, possibly still alive, was lifted off the ground and smashed into the nearby rock wall with skull-breaking force.

The last of Benn’s group ran. The axeman left his weapon lodged in the dead body and charged after him. He caught up with the man in moments, and tackled him. For the first time in a life that Qwern considered brutal and merciless, he saw a human being’s throat get bitten out.

Benn was still alive on the ground, sort of, and the man in the coat stepped over to him and gave his head a full-powered stomp. His head didn’t squish like a grape; big though the Muan was, he wasn’t a Nihunian. But the second stomp definitely caused an audible breaking noise. And with that Benn was gone.

The axeman, hunched over his latest kill and his face covered in gore, let out a scream. The man in the coat answered with one of his own. They both sounded like they had three lungs and vocal cords made of thick leather, but it was the sheer wildness of their movements that chilled Qwern the most.

He still had a death-grip on Konno’s wrist, and had to fight down his own fight-or-flight instincts as both of the men turned to look at them. They didn’t attack, not immediately, though their eyes swam in a strange sort of madness.

Qwern made a gamble, let go of Konno, and started a slow clap.

“Good,” he said, in a voice he managed to keep calm, even as his insides felt lethally chilled. “Good show. Now, shall we talk price?”

The man in the coat laughed. It was another low, grinding noise, with an edge of malice.

The painter stood up and turned around. He was every bit as shaggy and messed up as the other two, but looked older by maybe a decade. The carnage seemed to neither bother nor excite him. He just smiled.

“We will fight for you,” he said calmly. “We will kill the Warden.”

The axeman ripped his weapon free with a loud, awful squelching noise. The one in the coat dried his blade by smearing it against his own palm, then walked over to Qwern and offered him a handshake.

This was no time to be squeamish, and so he put his hand into that blood-soaked paw and endured a crushing squeeze.

Sealed in blood, I suppose.

Minutes later, he and Konno walked back alone. The new hires were packing up their little camp.

“Weren’t things bad enough?!” Konno demanded to know, but in a voice too low to be heard by the Muans.

“We can make this work,” Qwern insisted. “We’ll just make sure everyone knows not to bother them. At all.”

“Well, I’m not going to be interacting with these freaks! What are you doing?”

“Arranging a little extra,” Qwern told him as he worked his comm. “I told you I have connections here. Why not fire multiple shots when you have a problem of this magnitude? Let’s see if we can’t at least make things a little more difficult for our Warden.”