The lading information Petro had bought included the traffic beacon for Buka's ship, so they knew exactly what time what he would be arriving. Everyone was awake and ready.

Buka's ship was old. He had bought it from one of the men he met on a hunting vacation at an insultingly low price. The kind of young hotshot mercenary that had money to burn and something to prove. He thought the old man would be too proud or modest to accept when he had offered it to him in jest. He also thought the old man wouldn't call him out on trying to wriggle out of the deal when he accepted. Young people cared far too much about pride and appearance, it made them weak.

Old man. He hated that he thought of himself like that. He couldn't deny it either. He was an old man. He wasn't the oldest person at the office, but he was the oldest person in his department. He watched younger hires come and go year after year, climbing the ladder of success and leaving him behind. He was starting find thin patches in his fur, and his winter coat was coming back shorter and shorter each year. He couldn't afford to replace the teeth he had lost, so now he had to cut up his food before he ate it.

He had wanted to marry and have a child. Cutting up his own food was a bitter reminder that he had never gotten to do so for someone else, and would never have anyone else to do it for him. He felt especially bitter about all the women who had denied him the opportunity over the years.

That was all going to change. This was his chance. If he could prove to these bigshots that he could get results, he could finally have a chance to leave the medical supply warehouse. They couldn't promise him anything, but the possibilities they dangled in front of him were tantalizing. Even if none of them ultimately amounted to anything, the payday from this would be enough to get the debt collectors off of his back; he had given up hope of retiring, but at least he could work himself to death in relative peace and quiet.

The polar bear tried to sit up in bed and gave up halfway through. With a grunt, he grabbed the arm bar next to his cot and pulled himself upright. He remembered scoffing at them when he was young. If you can't even sit up, what are you doing in space? he remembered joking with his friends in battle academy. He hated how weak he was now. He knew what it was like to be fit, to have both his legs, and he resented their absence.

He sat on the side of the bed, resting his right lower paw on the ground to brace himself. His prosthetic leg was in its charging dock beside the bed. He pressed the bone anchors protruding from the skin of his left thigh stump to the upstanding base of the prosthetic. There was a soft chirp and an electric tingle as it attached. He dispensed a dollop of conducting gel from a bottle and rubbed it onto a bare patch above his left hip. He pulled an individually-wrapped electrode from its sleeve, pressing the adhesive side to his shaved black skin. Pulling at a cable that had retracted into the prosthetic, he plugged it into the electrode and coughed reflexively from the first twitchy burst of positive electrical feedback into his fine hypodermic muscle fibers. The clamps holding the prosthetic lower paw in place released, and he gave it a testing flex as he brushed off stray white hairs. As he leaned forward to stand up, the underside of his belly rested on the cold metal.

It felt good to use his leg again. He had gotten this one over a decade ago, and it had spent years broken in a closet. When he had first lost his leg, Nakuna sent him an updated prosthetic every few years. Then they stopped sending them, but gave him a very generous discount on the prosthetics sold by the companies they had partnered with. Now they gave him nothing, and there was nothing he could do about it but stop using the powered leg when it broke. Now he went around on a glorified peg leg that was uncomfortable and exhausting but didn't have any moving parts to wear out.

He was proud of getting Mr. Martineaux to pay to fix the leg. He was the one who had come hat in hand explaining that he had tried his hardest and was very sorry but the company medical plan just couldn't afford to include the plan he needed anymore. It felt good to get one over on the stingy fuck after years of being told no.

Yes, things were definitely looking up. He was finally being recognized. All he had to do was prove himself, and he could finally resume the life that was denied to him all those years ago. He had accepted he would never be famous, but at the very least it would be nice to be respected.

All he had to do was bring home some dumb college kid who had never been in a fight in her life. He had never set foot on a university campus, but he had seen videos on the news and the pseudonet so he knew they were awful places. If he had had cubs, he would never let them go to one. He couldn't understand why Nakuna didn't just shut them down, all they did was brainwash dumb kids into hating their parents. He thought battle academy would straighten out a lot of those dumb college kids, and was looking forward to giving this one a piece of his mind.

He checked his communicator. No calls from the girl while he was asleep.

He would give her one more chance. He called her, listening to the outgoing chirp modulate in and out as the call tried to connect. Finally it ceased. No answer.

That was fine. He had seen how the natives acted on his hunting trips, they were terrified of Nakuna. Whatever podunk tinkerer had ripped out the tracker would crumple the moment they saw the Anole lumbering towards their storefront. Even if it wasn't actually flying the Nakunan flag since this was an undercover operation, the implication was still there.

The polar bear waddled to his clothes rack with a lopsided gait. Before getting dressed he checked the holster of his leg out of habit. He had cleaned out his old service pistol and installed the railing to fit it inside his leg before he left. He gave an experimental roll of his hip, and the holster slid the pistol up for the taking with a satisfying click. He doubted he would need it, and it wouldn't be easy to reach in his flight suit, but he always liked to have it with him even when he wasn't in the badlands.

He couldn't fit into his old uniform anymore, but Mr. Martineaux had gotten him a new one in his new size. Unadorned. He had thought that putting it on would feel triumphant but instead it just reminded him of the life he missed out on. He didn't mind watching it vanish as he zipped up his flight suit.

He had a small ship, the cabin was barely large enough to stand up in and rested between the cockpit and cargo bay with no separation. He had picked the Anole because it was the only megaflora-rated option that could fit inside. Mr. Martineaux wasn't willing to cover one large enough to tow behind the ship, and he wasn't going to push back. He wanted this.

He didn't really need a landing site from her. It just would have been more convenient and given the kid something to do other than think she could outsmart him. For once, he didn't care how far away he had to park. He had a joyride in a walker to look forward to.

There was a smugglers' spaceport with a cliffside entrance, but it was surrounded by anti-air batteries. He didn't trust the junkies and scum that lived in places like Big Zig, so he landed in a burnt clearing well outside of the city borders. Judging by the small size of the clearing, he imagined it must have been some kind of drug lab that went up in flames. They burned very hot, very quickly.

By the time the Anole had wriggled its way to the city, Buka felt comfortable behind the controls. The headlamps illuminated the gnarled roots and uneven dirt as the squat legs pinwheeled over it at a surprisingly agile pace. Left paw guiding the sensitive snout, right paw controlling the ponderous hindlegs, his own legs sitting idle. He wasn't even going to bother with the grappling hook unless he had to, those things were death traps. He didn't even want to think of going vertical in this thing after what had happened to him last time.

He hated how much he was thinking about the accident. Every time he tagged along on a hunting trip it had been as a passenger, and all he had wanted was to be behind the controls again. Now instead of feeling the exhilaration of tasting power and control, he was only reminded that he should never have missed it in the first place.

Buka saw the ambient light of Redtree in the distance and checked the heads-up display of his cockpit window. It wasn't the new cutting-edge light curtains that the kids at battle academy were growing up with, but the kind he had grown up with: a simple reflection on the glass of the windshield. Only capable of displaying flat monocolor, the map display was a grid of negative space with the last location of the tracking beacon highlighted with a glowing circle.

The early morning passers-by on the street saw the bright headlamps and heard the signature xylophonic ping of a walker's shock absorbers tensing and releasing as he approached a paved road. It had been a long time since the arpeggio of metal tension coils contracting and releasing was heard on Big Zig. Heads snapped in recognition at the sound as he slowed from a scurry to a mosey and eased into the city.

Buka loved how afraid they looked. People were scurrying out of the way, closing windows, stepping back into opened doors. Now it was feeling like a hunting trip. Natives were natives, even if nobody was native to Redtree.

He followed the gently winding curve of the main road towards the spot on the grid, watching it grow closer each time he glanced over. This was great, no traffic to avoid and plenty of people to scare. Mr. Martineaux had told him that the people here didn't have walkers so he would be unopposed, but he had been expecting at the very least some people with machine guns and vests on street corners. This was supposed to be a smuggling colony. To him, it looked more like a rowdy little resort town. The kind of place he could never afford to live in back in the Nakunan Empire's borders.

At last he arrived outside of Zed Steadman. Thanks to the thick canopy of the trees, the tracking signal wasn't accurate enough for him to know which of the three buildings she had gone into. He wasn't in a hurry to leave the armored cockpit of the Anole to find out. He reached for his communicator to try giving the girl one more call, only to find it buzzing with an incoming connection from her. He answered.

"I hope this is you seeing me out front and telling me you're coming out before I cause trouble." he said cooly.

"Geez louise, you weren't kidding!" the voice he had heard the day before responded in distress, "I'll be right out! Just don't hurt anyone. I'm wearing a poncho, you'll know it's me."

He wanted to tell her to lose the poncho, that he wanted to see her hands when she came out, but she had already disconnected. Damn kids had no patience, no respect. He hoped she wouldn't be too annoying about him telling her as much on the long flight back home. He was looking forward to it.

The double front doors of the building with the Zed Steadman sign swung open. He recognized the silhouette of the tegu girl from the pictures Mr. Martineaux had shown him. People didn't look like this when I was that age.

She stepped out, and a slightly larger form stepped out behind her. Buka's eyes widened in recognition and he leaned forward in his seat. Pink scrubs. Black combat boots. White face. Black eyes. Buster Harkness. The Butcher of Baldwin's Fall. The only difference from the pictures he had seen on the news all those years ago was the chunky pair of sunglasses covering the front of his face. He looked right up at the cockpit through the piercing beams of the headlight and smiled, giving a playful little wave as they walked.

Buka didn't have a mask. After the Mark Starr Syndrome days he swore he would never wear one again. Now he was facing down the deadliest bioterrorist of his generation in a walker that was rated for filtering pollen and had a very prominent disclaimer that it was weather-resistant not weather-proof.

At least he didn't have to worry about going out like Lance.

He leaned forward in his seat and switched on the targeting reticle. The navigation display vanished with a muted pop and the afterimage faded as a set of crosshairs appeared in the middle.

Buster was standing behind Kayla. Her poncho made her silhouette even larger, so as he brought the crosshairs over them there was no shot he could take that didn't run the risk of at least winging the daughter of the man who was paying him.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

They hadn't discussed the possibility of his daughter being injured, let alone killed. He had seen the grudges that Mr. Martineaux held around the office. He could only imagine how personal his boss would make it if he shot his daughter when he was supposed to rescue her.

They stopped walking. They were just standing there halfway between the Anole and the building, facing him down from the sidewalk. Standing in the gap between benches, sunflowers tall in their planters off to their sides, blossoms upturned to the artificial light.

They were waiting for him.

Buka reached down and grabbed his communicator from its dock on the console. His hands were shaking as he redialed Kayla's communicator. He watched her answer it on the other side of the street through the windscreen of the cockpit. Her face was uncovered. She was squinting into the light and holding up her free hand to protect her eyes, but it was undeniably her.

"Hey Buka!" she answered with forced nonchalance.

"Do you know who that is?!" he asked in an anxious growl.

"Oh, Buster? Yeah, I never thought I'd be friends with a celebrity. He's pretty cool for an old guy. Don't worry, he's retired. He doesn't want to hurt you." she continued, playfully turning the hand blocking the light over as if she were checking her nails

He didn't like this. The kid was talking to him like he was stupid. It was humiliating.

"Listen, I don't know what he's told you but he's dangerous. You need to get him to go away and come with me." he thought for a moment, "If he's really your friend he'll listen to you."

He watched her put down the phone and talk to Buster, relaying the message. They both laughed. It was a genuine laugh, and he grew furious at the disrespect.

The panda took the communicator. "Hey Buka, how's the leg treating you?" he greeted with cocky smarm.

Buka froze. This was worse than he thought.

"Relax, you wouldn't have made it this far if we wanted to kill you. You're lucky, I just want to talk."

Buka was starting to panic. He began to shuffle the Anole to the side, trying to get a clean shot on the panda. "You're bluffing."

"Oh?" Buster teased, casually strolling in time with the Anole to always keep Kayla between him and the cannon, "I'm not bluffing, I'm dazzling."

The word "dazzle" was the signal. Buka didn't notice the passers-by starting to congregate around Zed Steadman. He didn't notice that they were all wearing long cloaks and coats. He didn't notice them all start to rush towards Buster at his signal. Because he was distracted by the panda reaching down, grasping both the pants and shirt of his scrubs in one fist, and pulling them both off in one quick sideways motion.

They were tear-away scrubs. The kind of clothes that dancers wore to rapidly disrobe for dramatic effect. A stripper costume. It was the fruitiest goddamned thing he'd ever seen. He didn't even have a chance to register what the panda was wearing beneath it as he reflexively averted his gaze from the sight of a potentially nude man.

He didn't see the crowd rushing towards Buster. They were letting their coats fall to the ground, just as Kayla was dropping her poncho in turn. So many different species, body types, genders, and the one thing they all had in common was that they were all dressed in black in white. Stripes. Checkerboards. Spirals. Polka dots. Simple black garments wrapped in white bandages. Ornate decorative monochromatic patterns. A few of them were even wearing actual camouflage, black and white polygons designed to artificially accomplish what the panda's iconic black and white coat had naturally evolved to do in its natural environment: blend in.

It was only a moment, but when Buka looked back up he was no longer looking at Buster and Kayla. He couldn't tell who he was looking at. There were so many people, and they all blended together as they crowded in tight concentric circles around where Buster and Kayla had stood. They must have practiced, it was almost like a dance as every few steps one person would switch from the outer circle to the inside and back again. The fact that it was so rough and uneven only made it harder to try and pick out where one figure ended and another began.

"What's this crap?" Buka asked, dumbfounded.

"Like I said, dazzling." Buster began, he was enjoying this.

"You polar bears might be stronger than us pandas. You might be bigger. Your evolutionary ancestors might have been apex predators while mine were humble grass-eaters. But the one thing we have over you is that your coat can only blend in. You vanish into snow, like we do. But when you have a bunch of polar bears together, just out in the open like this, it's not that difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins."

Buster was completely lost in the crowd. So was Kayla. Buka couldn't understand how people so big could hide so well. He wanted nothing more than to open fire on the crowd in front of him, but he had no way of knowing that Kayla wouldn't be in the line of fire.

"In the wild, we were solitary creatures so it never really came up all that often. But this panda's not so solitary, so you're not getting Kayla. She's found a new home, and she'd rather die than go back with you. I think you'd rather go home empty handed than have to explain to your boss that you killed his daughter, so you lost before you even got here. All that's left is for you to turn around and leave."

Buka was reeling, gritting his teeth and gripping his armrests so tightly his claws were digging into the padding. The panda sounded cocky, untouchable, exactly the way the other soldiers had sounded when they were toying with their prey on hunting trips.

Buster sounded the way he had wanted to sound.

Buka tried switching through the different targeting filters, no luck. Everyone was carrying a communicator and headset. It was enough of a mix of warm and cold blooded species that no one thermal signature stood out. Even if he had a cutting-edge content recognition tracker, the constantly shifting lines and patterns would confuse it. He was fucked.

Switching to the weapon scanner, nobody in the crowd was carrying so he couldn't track that way. He saw a notification in the corner and whipped the head up. Twinkling like stars in the canopy of the trees were sharpshooters, almost a dozen, spaced out far enough that he would only be able to shoot one before the others all opened fire. A few high-powered anti-material rifles like he saw in movies, but many of the shooters strapped into the branches above had made their own arsenals: crude disposable zipguns with electrical firing mechanisms, mine launchers aimed with laser pointers intended as toys, some kind of sonic rifle made from concert equipment.

The Anole was basically a gun with legs. It was a glass cannon built around climbing trees and waiting. He had been so confident in shock and awe that he hadn't realized it was all he had until it was already gone. They all had a clear shot on him, and he was on the other side of the street from the crowd. If he tried to close the distance, they would cut him down before he crossed the street.

Buka closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He couldn't clear his mind but he could focus on his anger, sharpen it.

"We can do this dance for awhile, but once I start getting tired I'm going to have the sharpshooters open fire." Buster taunted, "I want to send you back home, but if I have to pick between you and Kayla she's a lot more fun to talk to."

Something clicked for Buka. "I get it now. You made some kind of virus and infected me, and now you want me to go back and cause some kind of plague." he thought aloud with dawning horror.

More than anything, the sheer flippancy of the laugh that he received from Buster convinced him that he was wrong. "Buddy, I live above a bar. Even if I didn't give biologics up forever, the worst I could do is poison you with methanol if you come back in a month. And even then, it probably wouldn't do much to an alkie like you."

Buka growled through his gritted teeth. How the fuck did he know about that? Mr. Martineaux had assured him he would keep it a secret.

"No, I want you to go back because I know that Mr. Martineaux is the kind of asshole who will never admit when he's wrong. You work for the guy, I bet you can vouch for that. If I killed you, he would just hire actual mercenaries. The kind that own their walkers. People who could actually cause problems for us. I think if you go back and show him your black box recording of this encounter, he'll get the message and back off; if he won't respect his daughter, he'll respect me and what I'm capable of."

His rage was dulling but the sadness behind it was welling up. This was his one chance to get out of the rut he had spent two thirds of his life in, and it was falling apart in his paws. He wanted nothing more than to blow every single one of these insolent outlaws to smithereens, but he couldn't.

He impotently moved the targeting reticle around, and the barrel of the cannon moved in turn. Buster laughed. No, worse: he giggled.

"Don't even try. If you had enough spine to do what you wanted instead of what you were told, you wouldn't have wasted your life working in a warehouse as a consolation prize for the people who didn't want you."

Buka finally sputtered, "How do you know all this about me?"

"I learned it from your bosses. They really do not respect you at all, your information is just out there because they sell it. It must suck not having any self-respect, I would never work for someone who did that to me."

Another roar from Buka.

"Go ahead, have your temper tantrum. We know what you're really like, that's why none of these people are afraid of you. You're beaten."

Buka wasn't going to let him win. He had to save face. "If I go, they'll just send someone else. You're not going to get away with this."

Somewhere in the mass of people, Buster's smile stretched even wider. Time to go in for the kill.

"I've been getting away with this for over a decade at this point. You want to know why? Same reason I was good at biologics: it doesn't matter how big and powerful something is, it's made up of smaller systems and those systems are made of parts and those parts can be compromised. The smallest virus can kill the most powerful warrior. A broken terminal box can cripple the mightiest of walkers. And a fat old panda can embarrass an empire so badly that they'd rather pretend he never existed than fix the problem they created. I've lived here for years, everybody knows, nobody cares but you. Go home, old man. You don't belong here, and you're not welcome here."

Buka didn't respond, but in his cockpit his ears lay flat against his head. He was realizing that he really wasn't going to be able to bring Kayla home, and with that realization all the fantasies that had been driving him started to topple like dominos. He was never going to escape the medical supplies warehouse. He was never going to have a job that didn't make him miserable. He wasn't a warrior, he was a failure.

The panda had gotten all these people to help him. The polar bear was alone. No amount of firepower could change that.

"Hey, look on the bright side: you get to go back and enjoy the life you work so hard to have. You've got years of drinking yourself to death to look forward to. Don't throw all that away because your boss thought he could save some money."

Buka wished someone would help him.

"And hey, I'm sure if you ever go on one of those hunting trips again it'll hit different. Now that you know what it feels like to be on the other side. You're not even going to have that anymore. One less distraction from work!"

Buka suddenly remembered what else Buster was known for. They had been talking for a long time. What if the panda had slipped out of the crowd without him noticing? He could be sneaking up on the Anole right now, active disassembler slung under his arm. This could all be a distraction.

Buka finally picked up the communicator. "I'll go. Please, shut up."

"Better skedaddle, I'm starting to get tired."

Buka whirled the Anole around, as if to leave. There was nothing behind him but road and tree. He felt paranoid. Foolish. He didn't want to give the panda the satisfaction of retreat without at least firing a parting shot.

"You're not going to get away this time. I have proof that you're still alive. Even if Nakuna won't do anything about you, I know people who will. We'll come back." he threatened.

"No you won't. I know you, Buka. You're a failure. That's why Mr. Martineaux sent you here, he knew you were gullible and desperate. All the other soldiers do too. That's why they take you along, they think it's funny to watch someone who isn't one of them pretend he is. You came here alone, if you had even a single friend this might have turned out differently. If anything about you was different or surprising, you could have wriggled out of this. You're exactly as pathetic as everyone says you are. Until you change that, you'll never be a threat to anyone who knows they're capable of fighting back."

He had lost. He wasn't going to embarrass himself anymore. Buster was right. He wanted nothing more than to turn around and mulch every single one Buster's buddies with enough cannonfire to tear down the buildings behind them. But he couldn't, because he had to answer to Mr. Martineaux. He had a job to keep and a ship that needed insurance. His entire life had been a series of compromises and humiliations, and today was no different.

He turned all the way back down the street and scurried off in such a hurry that he forgot to disconnect from the call. Buster's voice rang out one last time, lacking the taunting bravado of earlier.

"I know what it's like where you are, and now I can genuinely say I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I hope you find a way out. Once I was just like you, and hating someone drove me to become the person I am today. I hope hating me is enough to make you climb out of the well you're drowning in."

Buster ended the call. Buka was holding onto the controls for his life, the clawed feet of the Anole rapidly going from clanking on paved road to kicking up clods of dirt. He was already cursing himself, Mr. Martineaux was going to see this footage. He could at the very least have retreated gracefully and not fleed in a panic. Maybe he should have taken a shot from the sharpshooters, just to really prove they were there and he was in danger.

Buster's words still ringing in his ears, he felt angry again. He was wishing he had been shot at so his boss wouldn't yell at him? He just faced down one of the deadliest terrorists of his lifetime and lived to tell the tale, all because Mr. Martineaux couldn't accept that his daughter very obviously didn't want anything to do with him. Why was he more afraid of Mr. Martineaux than a bullet?

As he clambered the Anole into the bay of his ship, he thought about all the other times Mr. Martineaux had been just as cruelly stubborn with him. The denied raises. The shrinking team sizes and increased quotas. The mandatory overtime. Having to do training on lunch breaks so they weren't paid, but calling them 'team building exercises' out of feigned benevolence.

As Buka strapped the Anole down, he thought about how he had known Mr. Martineaux for years. Every day his boss had seen him struggling with his peg leg. He had even expressed sympathy for it. He could have paid for that new leg any time he wanted. He only opened his wallet when he couldn't force Buka to do something.

As Buka's ship charted an undignified retreat over the skies of Redtree, he was still thinking of Buster. He was too proud and petty a man to let such a slap in the face go. He would be back for Buster Harkness. If the person he was now wasn't capable of that, he would simply have to become someone who was.

He was thinking about Buster. But he was thinking about a lot of other things too.