To Vo La Su had not said goodbye before sprinting out into the halls of the station and disappearing. Corey, and everyone else aboard, had assumed that to be her trying to make a break for it. While slightly worried that To Vo might not last long on her own, Corey had not been so worried as to chase her. He started to regret that instinct when she came back -with half a dozen other police officers in tow.

He put a hand on his gun, and To Vo immediately grimaced and shook her head. She stumbled forward as the cop standing very close behind her pointedly shoved something into her back. Corey swore under his breath. To Vo had dragged back the only thing worse than regular cops -corrupt cops. They had her at gunpoint.

The police procession was still a long ways away. If he backed up now, Tooley could close the ship’s hatch and lock the cops out, hopefully long enough for Kamak and Farsus to return from their shopping trip. Trapped between the ship’s cannon and the two bounty hunters, the cops wouldn’t be able to put up a fight -and they would almost certainly get To Vo killed.

He could practically hear Kamak’s voice screaming at him to let To Vo die, but Corey kept his hand away from his gun. There had to be another way out. There always was. Corey would find some way out of this.

His options started to feel a lot more limited when the cops reached the boarding ramp and immediately shoved a gun into his ribs.

“Smart guy,” the lead cop said. “You’re Corey Vash, I assume? Why don’t you give us the grand tour of the Hard Luck Hermit.”

Corey kept swearing under his breath as another cop took his gun. These ones clearly knew exactly what they were dealing with. That would make bluffing or surprising them much harder.

No matter how easy or hard it would be, Corey had to be alive to outwit them. He put his hands up and complied as the cops walked him back aboard the ship at gunpoint. Doprel was milling about in the common room when the cops arrived, and froze in place when four guns got pointed at him, while two more stayed trained on Corey and To Vo respectively.

“I’m sorry,” To Vo croaked. “This wasn’t-”

“Stop,” the lead officer said. “Just keep those big arms up, freak, and don’t make any sudden moves. Where’s your pilot?”

“Tooley!”

Tooley failed to appear.

“Tooley, we kind of need you out here,” Corey repeated. A gun pressed a little harder into his ribs.

“What’s she up to?”

“Nothing, I swear, just hold on a second,” Corey said.

“She’s sleeping in the cockpit,” Doprel said. “Heavy sleeper.”

The lead cop rolled his eyes and gestured to one of his cronies. They entered the cockpit and returned a few seconds later with a bleary-eyed Tooley held at gunpoint. In spite of her tiredness, Tooley was not at all nonplussed by the situation. She expected to be woken up with a gun to her head most times she went to sleep nowadays.

“Good fucking going, To Vo,” Tooley mumbled, instinctively knowing everything was the cops fault.

“I’m sorry.”

“If it’s any consolation, you lucked out,” the lead cop said. “We’re smart enough to keep you alive. Slightly higher bounty for that, you know. Somebody must be really excited to watch you die.”

Or very interested in keeping their distraction going, Corey thought to himself. It was still good news. They were slightly, very slightly, less likely to get shot.

“Cool, you by any chance know who’s paying for this shit?” Tooley asked. “Want to know who I need to curse with my dying breath.”

“All you need to know is that they’re paying,” the cop said. “As soon as our two missing crewmen get back, maybe you’ll get to make your introductions while we cash in.”

“Unless Doprel kills you all before then,” Corey said. Doprel took a step back and held his goliath arms up even higher to look as non-threatening as possible. The cops kept their guns held a little closer to the hostages anyway.

“Nobody’s going to make any sudden moves,” the cop said.

“You would be shocked how sudden sudden can be,” Corey said. “Like, I know he’s big, but Doprel’s fast. One of you sneezes at the wrong time, all six of you are dead before you even finish the sneeze.”

“That’s exaggerating,” Tooley said. She was not sure what Corey was going for, but she wanted in. “Fastest I’ve ever seen him kill six guys is about seven seconds. He saves time by picking up two guys and using them to beat two other guys to death.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“That is not true,” Doprel insisted. He’d only ever used a person to beat another person to death one at a time. “And I am not doing anything as long as any of you are in danger.”

Corey absolutely believed that, but the corrupt cops were not so sure. He could see every spare gun twitching in Doprel’s direction, and even the one pressed firmly into Corey’s ribs was drifting away from his skin. Step one of his plan was working. Now he just needed a step two. Luckily the high-strung cops were doing a lot of the work for him.

“Captain. Maybe we should…”

The cop trailed off, but made a sharp clicking noise to indicate his presumably lethal intent. The Captain shook their hairless head.

“We off even one of them, that’s half a million cece’s gone,” the Captain said. “Nobody pulls the trigger unless they have to. Now-”

The Captain took a look around the room and appraised his situation. He could conceivably call in reinforcements, but that would involve splitting the bounty more ways. Greed won out. Rather than adjusting his allies, the Captain focused on his enemies. He had one very large, imposing Doprel, two moderately intimidating crew members in Tooley and Corey, and one very small, pathetic To Vo to contend with. He focused on the diminutive former officer.

“Get over there,” the Captain ordered, shoving To Vo in Corey’s direction. “You, with the big gun, keep an eye on the freak. I’ve got these two.”

To Vo fell to the ground at Corey’s feet and clung to his leg. His current captor stepped away only when the Captain stepped forward and pressed his gun to Corey’s back, not giving him a single moment of freedom to exploit. The biggest gun in the room stepped up to focus on Doprel, and the standoff resumed.

In the tense silence that followed, Corey’s mind raced. He still had a gun pointed at him, but most of the rest of the cops had their backs turned to him. If he could cause a distraction (and not get himself shot in the process), then all the dirty cops might turn towards him, turning away from Doprel in the process and giving the hulking alien a chance to spring into bloody action.

He was just formulating what kind of distraction he could cause when To Vo’s hands started to move down his leg -into his boot. The same boot where he kept his knife.

“Shit.”

Her clumsy grasping at the blade made a small cut in Corey’s leg as To Vo drew the knife out. She pounced with an agility fitting her catlike features and jumped on the back of the Captain, blade in hand, and pressed the knife into his throat. His sudden shout made the cops twitch, but all guns stayed firmly trained on their targets. Corey closed his eyes and grit his teeth in expectation of a shot that never came.

Even with the tip of a knife held firmly to his throat, the Captain did not seem all that worried. He actually chuckled slightly at the display.

“Really? You?”

“Let us go,” To Vo said. She audibly sobbed as she spoke, and tears were running lines through her fur even as she held the knife to the Captain’s throat. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“It shows, you little twerp,” the Captain chuckled. “Do yourself a favor and drop the knife.”

To Vo’s hand trembled, digging the knife a little deeper into the skin of his neck, and the Captain worked hard not to flinch. She lightened the pressure a second later.

“Nemb loves to talk about his friends from the academy, you know,” the Captain said. “All one of them. You’re the only other wimp he ever met. He isn’t cut out for this kind of stuff, and neither are you.”

To Vo’s hand steadied slightly. He was speaking in the present tense. That made it slightly more likely Nemb was alive. She was even pleased that Nemb had talked about her.

But Nemb didn’t know everything about her.

“I’ve killed someone before,” To Vo said. “I don’t want to do it again. I don’t. I don’t. But I will.”

The Captain actually laughed at that. Corey felt the gun drift a little further from his ribs. He looked over at To Vo, and saw her slitted his eyes focused intently on him, and the motions of the gun at his back.

“You? A killer? Do you really expect me to believe that?”

The Captain made a single arrogant shrug. The gun flitted away from Corey’s back, if only for a moment. A moment was enough. Corey watched as the slits of To Vo’s eyes went wide, her fur stood on end, and the knife sank deep into the Captain’s neck.

His arrogant chuckle turned into choked gurgle as the knife slid through his veins and into his trachea. The bloody gag turned into a muted scream of horror as the blade of the knife tore outwards, sending an arced curve of blood spraying across the room. The deep crimson blood splattered across the faces of the nearby cops, prompting gasps of shock and horror -and a flinch.

The moment of shock intensified when Doprel started swinging, and two of the remaining cops went flying into either wall, leaving bloodstains and dents where they impacted. Tooley dropped to the ground and kicked her captor in the leg, an ultimately meaningless gesture, as Corey put a bullet in his chest in seconds. He’d snatched up the Captain’s gun and started blasting as soon as the knife had sunk in.

As it so often did, the long tension gave way to a sudden burst of violence. Doprel grabbed a third police officer and crushed his skull, as Corey shot the last living officer in the leg, then the shoulder, then the head. His aim wasn’t exactly the best under pressure. He turned the gun and did a quick scan of the room, seeing only friends and corpses.

“Doprel?”

“Got a few in the chest,” Doprel said, holding his hands over small bullet holes in his torso. “Nothing important.”

“Tooley, you alive?”

“Unfortunately,” she sighed. If Corey hadn’t known better, he might’ve assumed that disappointment was genuine.

‘To Vo, you-”

He cut himself off as he turned around and saw To Vo on the floor, crouched over the bloody Captain. Their former captor was still twitching -and To Vo still had the knife in her hands, and tears in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, as the Captain clutched desperately at his gouged throat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

In spite of her professed sorrow, or perhaps because of it, To Vo raised the knife in both hands, hesitated for a moment, and then plunged it into the Captain’s forehead, right between his eyes. His dying twitches stopped instantly. To Vo took her hands off the knife, curled into a ball, and started to cry.

Corey had just barely started to feel pity when he heard a glass bottle clink into the metal floor. He looked up and saw Kamak, who had attempted to triumphantly return from his shopping with a bottle of alcohol in hand. The true captain looked around at six dead cops, a bloody crew, and a crying To Vo.

“I was gone,” he hissed. “For fifteen drops!”