Interlude Three - Missy

Missy had worked with some pretty shady people doing some pretty shady shit, so she wasn't exactly unused to being thrown out into situations that the more normal sort of person might have been desperate to escape from.

Still... she'd left Haumea for a reason a long time ago.

That life wasn't for her, not anymore.

Yes, there had been some fun, but...

Her old home, the place she'd grown up in, the community she'd been part of since she was little, it took being apart from it to realize just how incredibly fucked it was.

The Lunatics weren't fun-loving deep-space anarchists. That's how they liked to appear, that's what they painted on their masks, that's what they wanted to be. Reality had a way of inserting itself into that kind of fantasy.

She had gladly worked for the greater good of their society for years. Putting down dissidents who were on the wrong side of anarchic, hunting down spies, chasing after traitors that ran away... she was a Warmime, and dirty work was her day job.

Until... until she met someone. Until she started to look back and see how things actually were. Until she was ordered to put down that someone because they were trouble.

She retired soon after.

She always suspected her past would catch up to her, one day, but her retirement had been as cut and dry as it could be. Sure, she knew a few dirty secrets, but they were the sort of thing that was rumoured-at anyway. Sure, she left with a couple of cores, but they weren't overly precious, and the day she left she split all of her cores and abandoned the splits.

It had left her weak, comparatively, but it also meant that the Lunatics weren't any weaker for losing her.

She'd probably left a small gap in their ranks. After all, she was pretty damned competent, if she said so herself. She wasn't going to be all that easy to replace, but they'd manage.

So she settled into the life of a first mate on an old junker of a ship, travelling the system and minding its own damned business. At first the rigidity had chafed a little, but she got used to it. Plus, it wasn't all bad. There were perks to spending time at every port in the solar system. Missy might have quit the business on Haumea, but she still had her paints, and there were men, and women, across the system that found her... exotic.

She rarely had to spend a night in port alone, which was nice.

It was a piss-poor band-aid on the wound in her heart, but it was something.

She figured she'd go on like this for some time, until the Held Together gave out, was caught by pirates, failed to deliver something, or... maybe she'd even move on to another ship, or pick up a little craft of her own one day.

She never expected to be thrust back into exactly the kind of work she'd been doing before.

She never expected to find it so damned thrilling.

Missy pushed the thoughts away and tried to focus on the task in front of her. There was a console from that pirate ship they were actively pirating, the Sappho. It was the ship's navigation computer, but also the system controlling the ship's torpedo and missile launch system.

Usually, she'd think that anyone that had both on the same mechanism was a fool, but this was a pirate ship, so that was a forgone conclusion.

"Missy?" Evelyn asked.

Missy knew that the name was fake. Evelyn Ville. E. Ville. No one sane would actually call themselves that, not when it was very close to encroaching on the name of one of the three Emperors. "Yes?" she replied.

"Are we ready to launch?" Evelyn asked.

"At the press of a button. But once we're going, everyone will know."

"Hmm, that's a fair point. Miss Aurora, if you would be so kind as to get on the comms and swear a little? Perhaps insinuate that we're disconnecting from the docks for our own safety?"

Aurora looked up. The noblelady--the one very likely responsible for them being chased down by pirates in the first place--seemed a little frazzled. Her hair was a mess, curls having freed themselves from her coif, and there was an appreciable flush on her darker skin. "You want me to act like we're pirates leaving the station?"

"Exactly," Evelyn said. "I doubt that other pirates would follow any sort of procedure in this situation, so let's play up the fact that we're doing the same."

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"I'll... try," Aurora said.

Missy reached down and tapped the final release on the clamps holding them in place. The entire ship shivered, then swayed around them. "Ready to move," Missy said as she took full control of the helm and activated all of the ship's manoeuvring thruster suite.

It was strange to be piloting a ship that wasn't a rustbucket like the Held Together. This thing had some real power behind it, and it wouldn't take seconds for a pressed command to be acted out.

"Take us out, slow and steady," Evelyn said. "Then we'll see about aiming those torpedoes and missiles. There are a lot of sitting ducks around here."

"A duck's one of those earth chickens, right?" Twenty-Six asked.

"Just so," Evelyn agreed.

Missy shook her head, and not for the first time, activated one of her cores.

Of all the cores and powers she had taken with her when she left Haumea, this was the one that was most likely to have them chase after her. It wasn't directly powerful, but it was... useful. A full tenth of the Warmimes had copies of it.

The core was called the Eye of Marceau. It allowed her to 'ping' other cores nearby and gauge their relative strength. It was far from perfect, and it took some time to get used to telling how strong a core was, but it did mean that when out on the streets, Missy could point to each core-wielder in sight, regardless of how subtle their core and its powers were.

Aurora came back as a tiny constellation of weak lights. Like faint, distant stars twinkling together. All of her cores save a couple were copies of copies of copies. Weak, but slowly repairing themselves.

Twenty-Six came back as a single point, a weaker star, but not entirely faded. Her core was likely a second-generation copy of its original, and it had matured successfully.

Missy's own cores glowed bright within her. Two fully regrown cores. One was even an original, healed from its split years ago.

She could even feel a few distinct cores dumped in a locker by the ship's airlock, tossed in there by Evelyn when they boarded. That would bear investigating later, though she doubted that Evelyn had entirely forgotten.

And Evelyn Ville... was nothing. A blank spot, with no more cores shining from within than Missy could see in the average person.

That was, of course, entirely impossible.

"Missy, can you spin up targeting and send it to my seat?" Evelyn asked.

"Alright," Missy replied as she did just that. Her hand rested on the ship's yoke, and she gently pulled them up and away from the station. She felt a slight, momentary bit of acceleration, then nothing again as she let the ship drift.

She had an idea of what Evelyn was aiming for. They'd play the part of pirates on the run from some trouble in their own station until they were poised to strike. And then they'd let loose with everything the Sappho had to offer.

That was actually a fair bit. Missy had an eye on the ship's weaponry, and every tube was filled with anti-ship torpedoes, EMP bombs, and MIRVs designed to disable entire small convoys of cargo haulers. There were even more torpedoes and missiles stored away and ready to reload automatically.

"Hmm, so many targets, so few projectiles," Evelyn said as she idly tapped the targeting screen next to the captain's seat.

"Want a list of priorities?" Missy asked. "Or just go for the biggest, meanest ships around the station."

"Yes, that was always my favourite tactic. Find the biggest, meanest, strongest person in the room and kick their teeth in. It puts everything in perspective for the rest."

"Yeah," Missy said. She eyed the back of Evelyn's head. Who the hell was this woman?

"We'll just shoot a bit of everything. I want to keep some ammo for our trip as well, something tells me having empty tubes wouldn't be the best option at the moment. Do you agree?" Evelyn half-turned and met Missy's eyes.

She didn't know what to think. There was no anger, or fear, or condemnation, just a steady, curious gaze.

"Yeah, I guess that's not the worst idea," Missy said. "Should I get ready to launch us out of here as soon as you've fired?"

"No, we need to stick around to keep the Held Together safe. I plan on that ship making it to Callisto no matter what."

Yeah, this woman was weird.

Missy had to get to know her more, before she pulled out another weird trick.

***