Leeroy

The Shadow's latest clients were camped in the aft port airlock as a precaution. The decision didn't exactly sit right with him, but he certainly felt better having them a quarter-second away from being off his ship than having them anywhere else at the moment.

"I don't get it, what's his angle?" Leeroy asked the assembled command group gathered in the Shadow's ops room.

Calling their assembly a command group was little more than a holdover from the outfit's inception as a paramilitary auxilia. In reality, none of the mercs aboard the Stalking Shadow carried a formal rank except the ship's Captain. Any given command group would vary from job to job, usually only the job scout and prospective team lead met to discuss the time-honored risk-reward metrics and a mission time table with the Captain to ensure they wouldn't be left behind when the ship moved on. Periodically, specialists and self-appointed experts would be consulted for any particular discussion, to add their unique insights and add a layer of theoretical redundancy to burgeoning plans. Rarer still, the rank-and-file mercs—those who would point, shoot and do what they were told without concerning themselves with the little things—might join in on a meeting to be forewarned and to decide if they wanted to risk their lives for a stake of the pay.

The current command group meeting was the largest he'd seen in years, with nearly every merc on the ship crammed into the ops chamber to have their opinions heard. The room was clearly divided between those who wanted to carry out the job and those who wanted it turned down. The naysayers would have already won the argument except the factions in their ranks couldn't agree on just how the job should be turned down.

"His angle doesn't matter." Havoc said, slamming a fist on the ceiling like a gavel. "We should take the money, space them both and stop pissing around with this botshit!"

"If we take the money, we take the job." Alice—the outfit's de facto reconnaissance expert—countered, with a chorus of murmured agreement rising at her words. "We should spool up one of the shuttles and put them back where we found them. Hell, we can sell them off to slavers for all I care, I just want them off this ship."

"The last thing we need is two more freaks on this ship." Aivery—one of the crew's three pilots—added, pointedly staring across to Princess.

The room hushed momentarily, waiting for the pale woman to snap back or lash out with her trademarked defense of peri-humanity. It was like waiting for the first shot to sound a battle as the enemy marched closer. Princess's defense never came.

"We have to kill him." She whispered. "He's a monster."

"What about the girl?" Someone asked from the rear of Havoc's camp.

"I don't know what she is, but she's not human-" Princess said.

"I don't CARE what she is!" Havoc roared. "Let's kill them both and be done with all this pissing around."

"We made a deal with them," Leeroy said, countering Havoc's hot-blooded anger with flinty steel. "Part of that deal includes their protection. Why would he reach out to us? Why would he agree to come aboard a ship of hired guns in the first place if he was trying to lay low? It doesn't make sense. What's his angle?"

"He probably didn't plan on getting shot on touchdown." Aivery sneered.

"He wanted me to shoot the woman." Princess said. "I saw him smiling and… I saw more too. He want's her dead, that's his angle."

"That doesn't make any sense." Havoc said. "Isn't he her bodyguard or something?"

"Because everyone who gets that job is so thrilled about their principle." Leeroy said. It took Havoc a few seconds to spot the parallels.

"So we should kill her to get rid of him." Havoc said, finally getting on the same page as the rest of the room.

"I doubt it will be that easy." Leeroy said. "Putting aside the fact that we've already agreed to keep her mostly safe and taken money for the job, I don't know if we could kill either of them if we wanted too. At a minimum, we'd destroy the Shadow in the process if they let us try, or they'd destroy the Shadow and kill most of us if they fight back."

"So we space them," Alice offered. "Get them in the void and fry them with the ship to be sure."

"We don't know how he stopped Princess's shot or himself." Gidget—the crew's leading technophile and one of its most scientifically inclinated thinkers—noted.

"We could probably get the girl," Aivery said. "But we have no way of knowing how he'll react if we do manage to space her."

The ship's Captain nudged himself forward and the room fell silent. He was a wiry old man who's stooped back was so set in its ways that it refused to straighten even in the absence of gravity. His voice was a drawn, gravelly gust, the words pouring from his lips like a steady breeze.

"Ghost, what have you been able to learn about our guests?"

"Self-designate, Treu, displayed the capabilities of a high order telekine— one who can move objects with his mind. Among the research liberated from The Project, telekinesis was noted to be near the pinnacle of all psycho-kinetic manifestations. It is very probable then, that he also has access to other disciplines of psychokinesis and-"

"In Standard, please." Leeroy interrupted.

"Self-designate Treu, is remarkably dangerous. His mind is a weapon capable of tearing this ship apart, given the raw expenditure of his manifestations paired with the speed and precision he neutralized Princess's weapon and attack. Otherwise, he is as dangerous as any other two-twenty-four centimeter, one-seventy-two kilo man who has dedicated every waking moment of his life to weaponizing himself."

"Can you put that in-" Before the speaker could finish '7ft 4in & 380lbs' flashed on the round table's display. "Oh, damn."

"The other entity introduced as Bim, is not human nor any genus of known sentient humanoid species. It has no appreciable pulmonary or cardiovascular functions, nor any thermo-regulatory functions measurable in traditional human ways."

"Meaning her rich girl on the lam act is only half botshit." Tony mused from his place behind Leeroy. "She wants to get out and see the sights, but where did she come from?"

"The paymail already came through, where she came from is irrelevant. Plus I got the feeling that uncle warbucks there was willing to spend as much money as it took to get us to take on this job." Leeroy added. "Which raises the question, why does he need us?"

"The same reason most people hire mercenaries for a job they could do themselves," Princess said bitterly. "Deniable assets. We do the dirty work, his hands stay clean."

"I'll admit, there is a certain backwards logic to that line of thought." Gidget said. "We've certainly taken on more convoluted jobs in the past."

"What are we doing with them? Some of us want to go back to sleep." Chop's synthesized, droning voice filled the room.

"I don't know how the hell can you sleep with those things on our ship." Aivery commented.

"We took the job. Our word is our bond!" Knight—one of the Powertechs who formed the backbone of the Stalking Shadow's deployed forces—roared from Leeroy's camp.

"Let's kill them before they get us killed!" Bull—a Powertech from Havoc's camp—countered.

"Killing them is stupid; so it taking the job. Getting them off our ship is all that matters." Rock stated. Murmurs of agreement arose from all three parties, some mercs abandoning their respective camps to join the Terran sniper in Alice's growing majority.

"The easiest way to get them off the ship without killing anyone is to can this bickering, do the job we were hired to do, and dump them on the next planet down the chain. We get paid, they leave, everyone's happy." Leeroy said. "Ghost, we're still a week out from Nexo Isla by last count, right?"

"Approximately. Given the peculiarities of faster-than-light travel, seven to nine day cycles is a reasonable estimate."

"Call it ten days then." Leeroy said. "Ten days of polite company, then we can drop our guests off planetside-"

"And drop a few nukes on them for good measure." Xadria—a ruthless demolitionist—grumbled from Havoc's camp.

"I want them off the ship as much as the next gal, but isn't setting these… 'people,' loose on a keystone world a bit… negligent on our part?" A Powertech named Nye asked tentatively while maintaining her position in the neutral camp.

"If you've got a better suggestion, the room's all yours." Leeroy said, then addressing the room in faction. "If ANYONE has a better idea, I'm all ears. But I won't break my word and I won't kill someone- something, that has signed and sealed a deal with me unless they give me a damned good reason to."

"That fact that those freaks are still breathing isn't reason enough?" Aivery asked.

"Designate Bim has only been observed breathing point-nine percent of the time since its arrival on this ship." Ghost helpfully corrected.

The crowded room, fell into tense silence— everyone waiting for someone else to offer up the magic bullet that would end this discussion once and for all.

"What about her?" Aivery said, throwing a chin towards Princess.

"What about her, Aivery?" Jhordan said flatly, her blunted tone carrying the warning far better than a growl would have.

"She's the reason we're in this mess-" Aivery started.

"Princess raised the flag so we can see just how deep in the shite we are." Curtis countered, fists curled. "She did a botched job of it, true, but at least we know now."

"Enough! All of you." Leeroy said, slamming the ceiling to all the room into order before another round of bickering could break out.

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"I'm just saying," Aivery said. "She's our expert on sub-human trash-"

Havoc's fist caught her in the temple and the tawny bitch went cartwheeling across the room. For a few seconds nobody moved as the big lug re-anchored himself then found Princess's alien eyes from across the room.

"We're square for the station now, Bug-Eyes." Havoc said, then gently bounded across the room to collect the unconscious pilot. "C'mon Frank. Gotta make sure I didn't break another one."

The stunned medic pushed himself out of Alice's moderates and followed after Havoc.

"Anyone else feel like stirring the pot?" Leeroy asked once the two men had towed the erstwhile agitator out of the room. "No? Good. We've taken the job. I'm not exactly thrilled about this, but I'll be damned before I break my word. Let's all just survive until we make it to Nexo Isla and we can plan our next steps from there."

There were murmurs and hesitant nods of compliance from the room. A few awkward seconds of loitering later, the mercs started breaking from their factions and trickling out of the room in singles and pairs. As each of them cleared out of the room, Leeroy could feel the weight of his decision bearing down on him— micro-gravity be damned.

His loyalists were the last to leave, offering up supportive oaths and empty platitudes as they parted, until Leeroy found himself with the Captain and three women. Jhordan and Nye exchanged some whispered words while Princess stared vacantly at a random point on the room's far wall.

"Tell me I didn't just throw our outfit to the wolves." Leeroy said.

"You'll just have to make sure you didn't." The Captain said. "And should the wolves come howling, I suggest you sleep with a gun."

The Captain clapped Leeroy on the shoulder, using the gesture's momentum to make his own exit. Jhordan drifted closer to her nominal superiors, Nye close behind. Her question was directed to all of them.

"The big guy, Truth or whatever he called himself, he's like the people on Talfryn's station. Isn't he?"

Leeroy had only heard about that particular job secondhand. It was supposed to be a nice, easy gig for Princess to get a taste of command but had turned into a hellish battle of attrition that scarred her team, nearly getting four of them killed and opening the can of worms that psychically active humans—or near-humans, in Princess's case—were the key ingredient in making sentient AI. Then there was Talfryn himself, a scientist who turned out to be not quite man or machine but something else entirely, something alien and so much worse too. Something Princess still screamed about when she was trapped in nightmares she couldn't wake up from.

"Ghost?" Princess asked, voice small and eyes fixed.

"He is 'like them,' yes. However, The Project only received dropouts from the more esoteric human-supremacy efforts during the prime of its operation. Based on available captured documentation and observed evidence, Treu is a far superior specimen than any received by Talfryn during The Project's approximate two-centuries of operation."

"So he's a monster among monsters. That figures." Princess said.

"Why?" Leeroy asked gently. "What does he look like to you?"

"You mean 'what do my freak eyes see?' He looks like radiation leaking from a damaged reactor, bleeding through the walls with fingers made of fog that flick out to lick people, burning them up so softly they don't even notice it. It's like staring at the sun during an eclipse and seeing a face staring down out you as your eyes boil and you feel your DNA unraveling inside of you."

"You can see all that with your eyes?" Nye asked.

"Not just my eyes. Not since Talfryn."

"What about the girl?" Leeroy asked, gently steering the conversation away from those rocky shores.

"I can't see her." Princess uttered the words as if even she couldn't believe it. "She's invisible if she's not right in front of me."

"You can see people when they're not right in front of you?" Jhordan asked, a similar gentle tone as Leeroy had used infecting her voice.

"Sometimes," Princess said with a shrug and a miserable, knowing smile. Then she pointed to the wall she was staring at. "That's Treu. Next to him there this little pocket, kind of like how running water swirls after it hits something, that's the woman." Her finger shifted slightly. "Hero is watching them with someone else, I can't tell who— the light isn't bright enough."

For his part, Leeroy just saw his friend pointing at an empty wall as she spoke.

"I'll have to take your word on it." He said.

"Ghost, who is it?" Princess asked.

"Tony and Hiiro are both outside the aft port airlock, debating whether they should question our 'guests' collectively or individually. I can relay their discussion through the intercom, should you like to listen in."

"It would be Tony." Princess said ruefully. She finally tore her gaze from the wall she'd been looking through. "Not crazy, just a freak with freaky powers."

"So what do you want to do?" Leeroy asked her.

"What the hell are you asking me for? This is your job, clean up you own mess. And keep that fucking monster away from me. I can't- not again. Not yet."

Princess flung herself from the room, blinking back tears. Leeroy heard a single sharp slap as soon as she'd left their line of sight. His gaze met Jhordan's, and a single tilt of his head was all the prompting she needed to follow after their distraught friend. Nye hovered for a moment before putting words to his own thoughts.

"Tough break."

'Hard times make for hard women.' Leeroy quoted absentmindedly.

"Too true. So what do you think Tony and Hiiro are going to ask our guests about?"

"I don't know, but I'd better make sure they're not going to get us all killed."

Neither of the would-be interrogators had worked up the nerve to open the airlock by the time Leeroy arrived, but he could tell it was a near thing. Tony had all the self-preservation and curiosity of a cat that never seemed to remember how hot a live wire was, no matter how many times it burned his paws. And Hero… Hero had mainly kept to himself since coming aboard the Shadow. Sure, there were times when he'd spoke privately about his past or mingled with the crew adeptly, but it always came across to Leeroy as a collection of polite half-truths. Like Hero hadn't quite warmed up to the crew enough to trust them with his secrets, or his life. Looking back, the first sentence out of Hero that Leeroy honestly believed was the first thing he'd asked their guest before agreeing to this flustercluck of a contract.

"Leeroy!" Tony said, jumping without really moving in the micro-gravity. "We were just… guarding the prisoners."

"They're not our prisoners and no you weren't." Leeroy stated bluntly. "Neither of you would have been scheming while my back was turned, would you?"

"Of course not." Hero lied. Staring him in the face, Leeroy almost believed him.

"Drop the act Rookie, we've been ratted out." Tony said. "Who was it?"

"Ghost." Leeroy admitted, keeping the other half of the truth to himself.

"Figures, nosy little virus never minds his own business." Tony grumbled. "Well, you've caught us, now what?"

"I've got some questions for our guests, I figured you'd like to join me."

Before Tony could ask if he was joking, Leeroy opened the inner airlock-- his hand hovering possessively over the controls. His guests didn't seem half as pissed as he would have been in their situation. Treu was sitting cross-legged on the floor despite the lack of faux-gravity and the woman—the thing wearing a woman's tanned skin—floated in the upper-left corner as far away from the imposing man as possible. Treu opened his eyes, his left locking onto Leeroy's face while his right scanned his surroundings like some disgusting reptile.

"You've decided to honor our agreement." Treu stated.

It was a reasonable assumption, considering that he'd opened the inner airlock door instead of the outer one, but the way he'd said it set Leeroy's teeth on edge. He'd noticed it earlier too. There was something off about Treu, beyond the perversely knowing look carried behind his crossed eyes. The way he spoke made Leeroy think that logical deduction hadn't played into his statement, but rather that Treu had somehow overheard the command group's conversation. Something about his mannerisms was irritatingly familiar. After some thought, it clicked. Treu was a smartass who knew just how much he knew.

"The woman, what is she?" Leeroy asked cutting to the heart of it.

"A tourist." Treu answered with a fae grin that paired with his large face and crossed eyes making him appear decidedly inhuman. "Though it seems you don't find that answer as amusing as I'd anticipated you would. Hasn't your esper told you already? I suspected she would, given our first impression of one another."

"Wait a second," Tony said. "Who's our epser? And what's an esper for that matter?"

Hero tore his gaze from the woman who was, rather literally, above the conversation to glance at Leeroy for confirmation.

"He's talking about Princess." Leeroy said, then motioned for their guest to elaborate.

"I hadn't anticipated this." Treu said vacantly.

"There seems to be a lot of that going on. Maybe instead of sticking to the faulty script you have prepared, you could try playing along." Tony said, half-mocking.

"The 'woman,' as you call it, is my charge and by the nature of our contract, yours as well. If you'd care to remove your hand from the airlock's emergency purge, I may be inclined to reciprocate to your inquiries in a more productive manner."

Leeroy fought off the urge to hammer down on the purge and fling them both into hard vacuum. He'd already decided to honor his word and offer protection, so why was his gut telling him to get these people as far away from him as possible? Protection contracts weren't about civil niceties or minding your manners, they were about keeping the target alive no matter how much you wanted to put a bullet in them yourself. With far more force of will than it should have taken, Leeroy lowered his hand away from the airlock's controls.

"I've reined in the worst of our dissenting voices, but if you so much as look sideways at someone-" Treu swung his right eye from Tony to Hero without moving his head. "Er… nevermind. Whatever freaky shit you can do, keep it to yourself."

Treu swiveled both eyes to look at Leeroy and smiled the thin-lipped grim of a predator hiding his teeth.

"That, that right there. Stop doing that." Tony said.

"Very well, I shall endeavor to make our cohabitation as incident free as possible." Treu switched his speech pattern, abandoning his overly formal air for a sudden intensity that caught Leeroy back-footed. "Now, you wanted to know what this creature is. Are you certain you want the answer? There are some things, that once known, cannot be so easily forgotten."

What the hell was with this guy? Leeroy wasn't sure if he was missing a few screws or wound over-tight by whatever abilities he had. Repugnant as he was, Treu had still put forth a question, one that Leeroy was hesitating to answer.

All he could think about was Princess and how she'd changed after Talfryn. The icy mask she wore to keep everyone at a distance had gotten brittler, she had this tension about her whenever she thought she was alone. The only time she seemed like her old, jaded self was when she was being beaten down for the color of her skin and eyes, for being a woman who saw things no one else could. Once, as a younger more self-assured fool of a man, Leeroy would have dismissed the idea of 'cursed knowledge,' but after seeing his friend wane into a threadbare shadow of her former self, he wasn't so sure about that now. Princess had been shown… something, and whatever it was, was crushing her spirit day by day.

Some part of him wanted to know what that something was, to take up the burden to better share it with those who were already suffering under it. But the part that had seen a woman he cared for wasting away, jumping at shadows and hunting for any scrap of proof that what she witnessed was real, that part of him wondered if he was strong enough to bear that curse without succumbing to it. If he was strong enough to save a drowning friend without getting pulled under by those damned murky waters too. Leeroy didn't know if he was. He wouldn't know until he made that choice and had to live with the consequences.

Tony had no such hesitation.

"A healthy curiosity never did any harm. So what? She's an alien or something?"

"She is a what you might know as a Devil."

"Like, red skin and pitchfork devil?" Tony asked, looking over the silent floating woman. "Because, I'm not seeing that."

"What you see is irrelevant. If you must think of it as a xenos creature, think of it as one composed of an immense, incorporeal reserve of knowledge, energy and destructive potentiality. That profane mockery of the human form contains a sealed portion of such a being."

Leeroy had to agree with Tony, he wasn't seeing it either. Bim, this devil woman, didn't seem to be much more than a regal young lady recently into adulthood. Sun-tanned arabic skin, immaculate short black hair, patrician features on the petite side; to the uninformed she looked every bit the sheltered rich girl who'd run away from home with nothing but a luxury dress and sandals. Even now she was floating near the airlock's ceiling, above the conversation both physically and in the snobbish socialite way of those who thought themselves better bred than the common people. If Leeroy could only kick one of his unwelcome guests of his ship, the supposed devil woman wouldn't have been his first choice.

Leeroy directed his gaze back to the woman's bodyguard. Just looking at the hulking man sat on the airlock floor was enough to have the hairs of his arms standing on ends. He couldn't place what, but there was something animalistic inside him that instinctively detested the man. It was almost like he was staring down one of the ferocious proxy-bärs of his half-remembered homeworld. While Treu certainly had the size to rival the savage woodland beasts, it wasn't the man's bulk that threatened to unnerve Leeroy.

"And what does that make you?" Leeroy asked. "Her guardian angel?"

"Nothing so absurd." Treu snapped, sounding ticked off by the comparison. Then, with a cold, predatory smile he added, "I'm simply the monster that kills other monsters."