When Buster came to, he was sprawled out across two hospital beds. They had been lashed together to accommodate his size. He was alone in a small room with a locked door, hooked up to an IV drip. There was a conspicuous surveillance bubble in the corner of the room. He waited. He fell back asleep.
When he awoke, he was no longer alone. Dr. Calvini was back, and for the first time she looked shaken.
"Hello Buster, glad you could join us. You were out for three days. We didn't want to wake you up, but we have something you need to see." she greeted him, terse. "You should be able to walk with me."
As they walked to the administrative center of Zed Steadman, the large panda kept having to lean to the side to let stretchers and wheelchairs go by. Not out of hurried emergency medicine, but the more practiced and calm day-to-day rhythms of long-term care. Every human he passed openly gawked at him, and he tried not to stare back. The fabric of the hospital's green scrubs swished against itself with each step.
"The good news is that our tech team were able to start opening up that treasure trove you brought us. It confirms what you said. They're already finding things that are making me very unpopular as the sole dissenting voice on the board. I'm not going to apologize, but I thought you'd appreciate knowing that for now nobody thinks you're a spy." she said with resigned acknowledgement.
Dr. Calvini continued, "The bad news is that we got a message from your old friends. I think you need to see it."
The panda felt a bottoming-out in his stomach. "You mean someone from the Nakunan Empire?"
She lead him into the executive conference room, where a rectangular table was set up in front of a large screen. Five other humans were seated, waiting for them to arrive. Buster had a hard time telling humans apart; just as humans had a hard time recognizing the subtle difference in a panda's eye spots, the finer details of their facial features just didn't register to him. As he looked across the assembled board he just saw a collection of skin colors and hair types and accessories. To them, his eye spots had a deep crease in the center that helped him stand out from other pandas. When he had been a cub, his mother had called him Buster Butterfly because his spots resembled their wings.
"No, it's Lance. He's got all of Tartarus Squadron with him." she said, "We got a message this morning. It was broadcast planet-wide across all bands. Incredibly illegal. Like I said, you need to see it."
She nodded to a darker-skinned man seated at the table. He hit a button on the keyboard in front of him. Then the large screen behind the table lit up and there he was, towering over them: Lance the jackrabbit, with his piercing amber eyes glaring triumphantly into the camera.
"Hey fuckers, we're The ████ Wranglers and every single one of you is going to die unless you do exactly what I say." he began.
Buster visibly grimaced in anger and disgust at hearing that aggressive patter once again. Lance was standing in their mothership hangar with the other three members of Tartarus Squadron standing around him looking intimidating. Letting Lance do the talking, like always.
"So. Imagine my surprise when I find out that the weird nerd I went to high school with, the one I spent all quarantine being nice to and trying to have fun with, is a fucking dishonorable traitor. They're saying it's the largest mass-casualty biological weapons attack the Nakunan Empire has ever sustained from a domestic terrorist. And they aren't doing shit about it! They're just going to quarantine the whole planet and keep it under blockade and hope that if anyone tries to come or go from Baldwin's Fall they'll be able to track and intercept them afterward. Fucking bullshit!"
Lance suddenly darted toward the camera with his uncanny lagomorphic speed, as if he were going to lunge at Buster through the screen. Instead he grabbed the camera and whirled it around, showing four towering Komodo walkers with the bubble windows of their cockpits hunched right at floor level in the docking stance.
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"All fucking traitors must fucking hang!" Lance shouted from behind the camera, "And since Nakuna isn't going to do it, we're going to take some well-earned vacation time and string up the big fat traitor ourselves."
The Komodo was the opposite of the Jerboa in just about every way. Standing over two stories tall at full height, the Komodo was a medium walker with a heavy walker's artillery: surface-to-air missiles, chain guns capable of cutting a concrete wall in two with a single sustained burst, a hydrocutter that could be refilled with moisture pulled from the ambient atmosphere, and a flamethrower for anti-personnel work. The Komodo was slow, ponderous, and could destroy just about anything built by Nakunan paws or human hands.
What stood out to Buster's specially-trained eyes was the cockpit bubble. The Komodo was designed specifically for operation in high-risk conflict zones. The cockpit was completely sealed and the life support was top of the line.
They came prepared to fight someone from the world of biologics. Little B would be useless against the Komodo's air purifier.
"Our mothership is going to be arriving at Baldwin's Fall in about two days your time. If you turn over the panda to us, we will leave. We're mercenaries, and we're professionals. The only reason we kill is because we get paid to do it. If you give us what we want, we have no reason to bother you. If you don't give us the panda, we're going to spend the next few weeks combing over the planet until we find wherever you're hiding, and then we're going to take him by force!" the bunny yelled, flipping the camera back around and stepping into frame with the rest of his squad.
"Look, I know Buster Harkness. I spent quarantine with him. He's a fucking loser. He didn't have any friends at base because he is an unpleasant little freak. Even the other science nerds didn't like him. You can't trust anything he says, he is a man without honor. He is not worth dying for, and he's especially not worth torpedoing whatever little operation you were running here under everyone's noses." Lance snarled each insult into the camera with as much venom as he could. He was legitimately upset by all this.
"You can't stop us. Just give us what we want. I've included a frequency in this message. When we arrive I'm going to open it, and if I don't get a response we're going to get to work. Make the right choice." he finished tersely, and the video ended.
Silence in the room.
Buster looked from the screen to the humans. They were so hard to read with their unmoving ears and flat faces.
"I'll go if you want me to." he said finally, "But I know Lance, and there is no way he isn't going to just kill you all once he's finished with me."
"Obviously." said Dr. Calvini, "We were able to pull his video from Ryzeen off of your personal databank. Besides, I helped write the dossiers on every member of Tartarus Squadron. Fuck these bloodthirsty hatemongers. They're legitimately one of the worst in a very crowded field."
The darker-skinned man interjected, "We do have a problem now, though. We can't evacuate, even if the entire planet wasn't being monitored right now: We have people on life support, people who can't handle the stress of leaving atmosphere. This is a hospital. We have building security and we have a reinforced entrance but we can't fight off a siege. The only real defense we have are the electromagnetic burst emitters in the walls of the entrance tunnel, and they're primarily intended for incapacitating vehicles that patients might try and escape in. They only effect whatever is in the tunnel and take hours to re-arm. Even if we got all four Komodos in the tunnel at once and hit them, they would just power back up after a few minutes and resume the assault. Anything powerful enough to permanently fry a walker would be a danger to the patients and our equipment."
"That's why we wanted you in here." explained another human. He couldn't tell if this one was a man or a woman but they lighter-skinned than Dr. Calvini, "We have two days before they get here. You know them better than any of us, if you want to start helping Humanity then we could really use all the help we can get with this."
Buster had been overwhelmed up until now, but that cut through it. I can help.
He thought for a moment. He pictured Lance: his anger, arrogance, hotheadedness. He imagined Stubbs: Vicious, collected, yet always deferring to Lance. He thought of Pitt: The disgusting pervert who loved making people uncomfortable. He remembered Rema: A quiet ball of rage just waiting for an excuse to lash out at someone.
He had carried them with him long after they left Ryzeen. Now he found himself turning them around in his head like puzzle pieces, trying to figure out how this could all fit together into a picture that wasn't the death of countless innocent people.
It was when he started flipping around the piece that represented that sack of stolen data drives that everything started to click into place.
"I have an idea. It's gonna take a lot of work, and I'm going to need your help, but I think we can do this."