It was like she had channeled Vorn, and it left him staring at her wide-eyed. Her too, for that matter. What was wrong with her to antagonize the man?

"So that's how to get your attention." She had a strange and slightly terrifying look to her large-pupiled eyes. "Now, where is your med room. I know you have one, if you have a blazing pod in your ship and you would rather come here than go back to it."

"Down this hallway, third door on the right." He started down the West hallway before her.

"Sit." She tried to force all her strength into that order. "I'll get the stuff." He refused.

"You've seen the cats. Hans'll protect me." He pointed at himself, then at her, "He won't protect you. I don't even know…" He trailed off as the two staggered to the medical room. "Kitty." The single word raised the hairs on her neck.

"Yes, sir?"

"How many Jags are here?"

"There appear to be five, sir."

"Three kits?"

"Yes."

"How long have they had access to the front rooms?"

Kitty had not detected a tripped sensor, or the duo would have been warned prior to entering the house. She performed a quick scan of their normal territory, and discovered that the creatures had managed to gnaw a panel loose to an adjacent room.

"It seems that they may have escaped sometime last month. Nearly two weeks ago."

"And when was Mrs. Klenton here?" Kitty had a log of Mrs. Klenton's arrival and departure times, and she had departed on her last visit.

Kitty had not thought it was an important bit of information. Regardless, she quickly ran through the footage of the maid's last visit and how long it took the Jags to break free.

"Approximately four days before the escape. She is due back in three days."

"Thank the suns," He breathed in relief. "Please inform her that she will not be returning while remodeling is under way. Paid, of course."

"Of course. The notification has been sent." It was not until Saedah had sagged in relief that Kitty realized he'd feared the cats had killed the woman.

The two reached the third room, past two closed doors and two dark bedrooms furnished with only small beds and smaller dressers. Another open door revealed a bathroom with the grandest shower she had ever seen. The third door on the right was the last door on the right. The hallway ended with a closed double-door.

The Med room was lit with bright lights. It held a white medical-grade gurney in the center. The walls and tile were clinical-white. The ceiling was lined with white ceiling tile and Kitty's sensors, as well as a medical device above the gurney. The device above the gurney was an arm similar to that from the pod in the ship. Along one wall was a floor to ceiling, wall to wall cabinet full of medicines. It was a staggering collection.

"What is all of this for?" Nyx breathed, trying to take in the sheer scale of the house.

"Medical needs?" Saedah gasped, moving towards the gurney unsteadily. "What else?" He hopped onto the white surface, leaving red smears in his wake. He was bleeding from scratches she had not seen initially. "We've fled here on occasion, when going to another system wasn't feasible."

"Nyx, this may take some time. Why don't you go get comfortable? It seems you are interested in a shower. I believe there may be a change of clothes in Citram's luggage. I will light the way for you, if you wish." Kitty chimed in, appearing in her shimmering form just beside the door. Saedah nodded as he tinkered with the machine's panel.

"Please."

An ungodly amount of time later found Nyx surrounded by steam and fifty tiny shower heads hitting her from nearly every direction. She reclined in a built-in shelf, having re-directed the jets to follow her to that spot. The shower's audio system was playing a relaxing melody. The smell of vanilla bean and sugar-scrub was heavy in the steam, lulling her eyes closed.

She could so easily have fallen asleep there. To prevent just that, she traced a finger along a rock embedded in the shower wall above her head.

This was a good decision. When she got back to… Wherever it was she was allowed to go back to, she would request a cave shower.

The bathroom off the hall had hosted an all-glass contemporary shower. Citram's bathroom had been designed after a cave, including bioluminescent plants and self-sustaining fish ponds. It was surreal, and Nyx had immediately chosen it over the hallway bathroom.

"The water is heated hydrothermally." Saedah's voice broke into her reverie. Nyx squawked and nearly landed on the rock floor. "It's also how the power to this house is generated."

"What the hells are you doing in here?!" Nyx screeched, trying to cover herself.

"Relax. I can't see through walls. I'm on the com, you dolt." She could hear his sardonic smirk.

"Still, it's unnerving to talk to you while I'm naked." She muttered, more to herself than to him. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the button on the screen to shut off the shower and snagged a towel. She had placed it atop a rock shelf just outside the waters' reach, and was suddenly quite happy she had done so.

Saedah was quiet for a long moment while she dried off.

"I just wanted to talk while this finished." From outside the cave-like shower, his voice was obviously fed through a speaker, and much quieter this time.

"Talk about what?"

"Anything." It sounded like he was forcing the speech through clenched teeth.

"It should only need a few stitches, right? The cat didn't get too deep, did it?"

Instead of an answer, Saedah replied with: "The other four cats have all been closed off in the East wing. It's just Hans here with me." He was definitely in pain since Kitty had told her that much about the cats, else she never would have left the safety of the medical room.

"Of course." Nyx attempted to sooth as she dressed in Citram's too-small night clothes. Citram was much shorter than she was. Her largest night-shirt barely covered Nyx's stomach, while the shorts covered almost nothing. She wrapped a short robe around herself that came to her knees. "I'll be taking some of your clothes, also. Citram is too small." She thought she heard Saedah cough and decided to go see what was going on in the med room.

She pushed the door open to the medical room and halted midstep.

"What the-" She started, taking in the scene.

The arm that the cat had gruesomely attacked was bandaged, presumably stitched. His left was under the needle of the medical arm. It was an ugly sight. She'd had suspicions that the arm was a prosthetic, from what she remembered of her first sight of him. It had been a twisted mess, missing two or three fingers. But to see it flayed, exposing those non-organic, metal components replacing the inner workings, made her stomach churn. The skin, though, was not like most prosthetics of his extent. Instead of synthetic skin, his was his own. His very sensitive, real skin.

Gods.

The table the arm rested on was splotched with blood. The skin around the mechanical fingers had been peeled back. The skin above his mechanical parts had been cut completely out. Distinctly, she noted that was where the tattoo had been. A hose had slipped from the robotic arm and Saedah was trying to re-insert it with shaky fingers. The mechanical arm sat silent and still while he worked to fix the malfunction.

"For the love of the gods, Saedah." Nyx said in disbelief. "Do you enjoy pain?" She shocked herself when she took the hose from him. She hadn't realized she'd moved so close. He leaned back against the bed and exhaled shakily, checking the blood pack hanging over his head and draining into his bandaged arm. There was a second bag of some clear liquid in writing she couldn't understand going through the same I.V.

"Not like I have a choice. I think the whole arm'll have to go." He looked at her with green eyes. The same green eyes she had seen that first meeting. The green eyes that had flickered at her only a few moments during their escape. The red rings were gone and he looked so tired.

"For the suit?" She clipped the hose back into place, then checked the wound as she had done when working with Mac on NaBoht, when there had been no one else to help. Considering the amount of blood, she tied another tourniquet just above and touching the previous one. Mac had told her to do this to prevent the buildup of potassium. If that were to happen, the patient could receive a lethal dose when the tourniquets were removed, stopping the heart.

"Yes." He watched her as she moved with weighing eyes.

"Couldn't you live without the suit?" she lifted her discarded belt and wound it around itself, noting the dual syringes on the floor beside the gurney.

"No." He spoke without pause.

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"And the nerves have rejected the nodes?"

"Of course they have. Well, mostly the other way around." He laughed derisively, "The nodes are programmed to attach to organic material. The nerves here…" He indicated the arm with his right hand, "... are non-organic. The two cannot combine." There were an awful lot of parts in there.

"So, what did you mean to do here?"

"Take a look at what I am dealing with." His tone said that she should have known that much, at least.

"And a scan would not have sufficed?" Nyx scoffed at the unnecessary brutality of what he had done to himself.

"I tried." He gave her a look as though she were a whole battery short of a full charge. He continued, giving her the explanation she was seeking, "The metal has something in it that interfered with the images." He pointed to a set of images projecting in three dimensions on the wall and covered his face with his arm, refusing to look at the images himself.

She moved to the projections, seeing how the they seemed to warp. The distortions reminded her of highly exaggerated heat waves. That was, if heat waves could also produce something she could only describe as bubbles. The bubbles were small, clustered in the areas of his arm and fingers that had been modified. Blackness consumed the bubbles' centers, but cycled through the colors of the rainbow on the perimeter, like an onion, each band of color wider and fainter than the last, until it merged with the rippled distortion.

Looking back at him, she could understand his desire to return to normalcy, to some very small degree. She could also see that the metal components in his arm were of low-grade material. She had traded in the prosthetics market for a short time with her father many years ago, and most of those parts had been far superior to what she was looking at presently. The parts in his arm were barely a grade that wouldn't poison him.

Hopefully.

"Saedah…" She knew he wanted to get back into the skin. To do so, some major changes would need to be made. They would need to replace the parts at a minimum, for his health alone. Even if they were just to replace the sub-par parts, it would still result in even more bone loss. "Are you sure you want to go through more? You've been through enough. No one would blame you-"

"I will finish what I started with my brother; my family. I want no pity from you." His voice was steady when he took his forearm away from his eyes. "Kitty, clean this up and get the plans ready for the operation."

She would not say that she saw his clenched left hand shaking as the arm closed the wound. She would not say that she saw his jaw muscles clenching, ticking as he chewed on his bitter reality. She would not say that she did feel pity for him, consuming a part of her stomach. So she stayed silent.

"I want to think, Nyx. Please." Saedah's voice was quiet, but Nyx heard it.

In the large common room, she pulled her com out to call Citram. Unease had settled firmly in her stomach and refused to budge. She had even packed a go-bag for each of them after leaving Saedah's company.

"That will not work, Nyx." Kitty stated, flashing into her projection just feet away. Nyx jumped and wished punching the projection would do more than make her look and feel foolish. It irritated her to the ends of the galaxy when Kitty popped in on her like that. "Saedah has demanded that he have privacy."

"Kitty, he needs them. I can't help him like they can." Nyx tried reasoning with the A.I. It was the truth, but Kitty only looked at her with a face of stone. Saedah did not trust her. For reasons she could not fathom, the male had put a wall between them. While she could catch glimpses of him on the other side, she could not reach him. She knew that if she were to force the issue, he would distance himself more from her, if not turn violent.

"I can not go against this directive." The deadpan tone was grating on Nyx's nerves.

"Can you tell me of a loophole here?" The plea was thick in her throat, and something deep within her railed against begging for even this.

"That is against my programming."

"I thought you were sentient!" Nyx barely managed not to yell, turning to look down the hallway for any indication Saedah could hear her arguing with Kitty.

"I am, but I am also governed by the program from which I was created. I can not harm my team. I can not disobey Saedah. I can do what I want beyond that, but those are the two largest rules." The two looked at one another for a moment with Nyx pinching at the corner of her mouth in thought.

"What would happen if you decided to join a different team? The other team?"

"Oh, I can't do that." The finality and dismissal in that tone shocked Nyx.

"Why?"

"Because I can not disobey Saedah." Kitty said this as though it were the answer to all and should have been obvious.

"And Saedah would not turn on the others." The defeat in Nyx's tone seemed to cheer Kitty up.

"Correct." The projection chirped, smiling at Nyx.

"So, if you can not harm your team… Would you consider it harming him-" She motioned toward the med room, "if you left him as he is?"

"I can not disobey Saedah." Her voice deepened and grew a cold edge. She seemed to not particularly enjoy repeating herself.

"He is hurting. And keeping them from him is hurting him more."

"He does not want them here right now." The cold edge in Kitty's voice grew colder with each word.

"He does not know what he needs! He needs-."

"Nyx!" The projection raised her hand to forestall further comment, "I know what you are doing. I know what he is doing. And I know the others will look here sooner or later. Drop the matter. Be there when he needs it. You are the only one at his disposal." After a pause in which the two gazed toward the medical room, Kitty continued. "Look around. The East wing is closed due to the cats, but Saedah will see to them soon. There is a wonderful solarium in the north wing overlooking the falls and pits, if you would like to see it at night. I suggest you go there to think." The image of Kitty winked out and left a gaping Nyx fuming at her disappearance.

Never had she been dismissed by an AI! The nerve of this thing!

But she went to the solarium.

It was a large glass half- dome filled with a few short trees, small shrubbery, and flowers. It seemed that the light the Solarium received was mainly that of the sun, as the room was bathed in darkness. The only light, faint as it was, came from along the edge of gravel paths winding throughout the dome. The flora seemed to be allowed to grow naturally, landscaped solely with plants that grew less than five feet tall, except for the three trees. All the flora in the dome complemented one another, growing at different heights. Some of the groundcover breached the pathway causing the light to shine through from below.

It was all beautiful.

She walked slowly, taking it all in. Several strange miniature red trees were mixed in with flowering shrubs and ones with needles instead of leaves, with shorter foliage growing beneath. The strange red ones were her favorite in the room and seemed to weep with long branches sweeping the ground laden with feathery leaves.

Then she found a bench along the furthest point from the entry and looked out.

The world was on fire.

The plumes of thick white smoke she had seen in the daylight met the earth in pools of brilliant blue flame. Every few minutes tiny tornadoes of fire would reach skyward. The sky was ablaze with dazzlingly clear and bright starlight. The starlight and pools of eery blue fires cast a unique beauty to the seemingly untouched world beyond the glass.

She did not notice that the path lighting dulled and winked out. She could only see the world before her. Later, she could not say how long she had sat and gazed out on the landscape.

"This is my favorite place on quiet nights." Saedah whispered from behind her. Aside from a slight jolt, she did not react to his presence. "Mind if I sit with you?"

"Go ahead." She turned to him, equally as quiet as he, and continued "I assume this is your place, right? Your home. It's more your's than mine, in any case." He seemed better. There was no way a man could take such a beating and seem fine in such a short time.

"It is mine. I inherited it when my father died." He smiled sadly as he sat. "We share much between us." She raised an eyebrow in question. "The Ghosts." She made an 'ah' sound and turned back to look out through the glass.

She sighed, enjoying the quiet after so many months and looked to her company. His shoulders were bunched and his scowl remained.

"How do you manage the paper trails?" She asked, turning back to watch the flames to avoid meeting those eyes again.

"Pseudonyms." He responded, shrugging, and allowed silence to engulf them again.

"And what about the nights that are not quiet?" She asked after a long moment. Saedah turned to her, confused. His eyebrows were drawn low in concentration before comprehension dawned. If this was his favorite place on quiet nights, where did he go on other nights?

"Ah. When I am here, I am either here alone or with two or three of the Ghosts. Usually its Vector and he likes games. When the twin V's get together here, there's always a game match. When the crew is here, or together anywhere, I try to make the best of it."

"Thats…" She was going to say 'nice', but something caught her eyes. "What is that?" She asked, half standing to squint at a double streak just topping a plateau to their southeast, still distant, but clearly headed straight for them..

"Kitty?" Saedah asked, standing and bodily dragging Nyx into the house proper. First she was too shocked at his grip on her elbow to object, then she was too focused on matching his stride and not slipping on the gravel pathway to interrupt Kitty's response.

"It looks like two enemy fighters inbound, sir. The initial scans missed their entry. They have a cloaking tech."

He spat a long string of curses. Had Nyx been anything but a Maverick, some of the expletives would have been scandalous. After four long strides outside the dome he finally dropped Nyx's arm. The two raced toward their packs and the common room. "Ship ready? How are we looking? Do they have friends?"

"Pegasus is ready and waiting. They will be in range within two minutes. I can not verify more since they are cloaked. Orbital scans are not picking up anything, but those scans do not have the same equipment as the Pegasus. Perimeter weapons enabled."

"Perimeter weapons?" Nyx whispered, looking at Saedah. The first thought that crossed her mind was 'paranoid bastard', immediately followed by 'His paranoia might just save your skin, though'. So she kept her mouth shut on that point, but raised her voice to ask, "Now can we drop the ban on calling the others?" They burst into the common room. Saedah darted toward the medical room, motioning her to the packs and the door.

"I can handle two ships, Nyx." His tone was not boastful, only matter of fact.

"And if there are more upstairs?" She asked as she she snagged the packs and took the stairs two at a time. She stood at the landing at the head of the stairs, waiting for Saedah to join her.

"When we get to that bridge…" Was all she heard around the commotion down the hall.

"We don't have the time, Saedah!" She yelled, her words emphasized by turret fire that sounded entirely too close for comfort. Then Saedah was there and they were darting through the hatch. Saedah moved ahead of her, but only just. Nyx paused long enough to gather her staff before she joined Saedah in the ship, nearly on his heels. He tossed a bag aside as he began to shout orders to Kitty. The hatch slammed home and the ship launched before the two could get more than five steps inside the craft.

The Pegasus shuddered.

The deck of the cargo bay lurched up, or maybe she down. In any case, the hard metal connected with Nyx's face. Hard. She hadn't even had time to get her arms up to cushion the blow.

She tasted blood. She could almost feel her face swelling already.

As the world grew into focus around her, she saw Saedah struggling to his feet as well. His bandages were growing red again. A thin stream of crimson dripped just right of his nose as he looked at her a bit unfocused.

They both lurched to their feet simultaneously as the realization met them. Pegasus was trapped.

"Kitty!" Nyx and Saedah called out in unison. There was no answer.

Nyx managed to head off Saedah and lurch up the ladder towards the cockpit first. The desperate speed she put behind her flight had her landing in the gunner's seat before Saedah could top the ladder.

"Kitty!" Saedah yelled for the fourth time, each time growing louder and more concerned. "Mother fu-"

"ASSHOLE!" The voice boomed from the audio system with such volume and anger that Nyx had to touch an ear. No blood came away on her fingertip, but her bones still vibrated and her eardrums rang.