Buster grabbed a water bottle for Petro from the kitchen before they headed back upstairs. The tracer was just as they had left him, but the larger display was now splashed with tabs of photos and documents. His hands rested on the bed in front of him as he read.

"Wow, you're already done?" Kayla asked as they pushed into the room.

"Most official Nakunan records find their way to the brokers within months. I could do this on my own, but we're racing against the clock so it's not the time time to be stingy. I've got a pseudotunnel going into the spaceport that Buka left from, and we'll be able to get his full loadout before bedtime. Until then, let's get to know him better!" Petro switched to one of the tabs and a stark collage of personnel photos filled the screen. Together, they scrutinized them.

Buka Nightingale was a polar bear. 54 years old. In his most recent photos he looked even older and fatter than Buster, but stronger and more powerful as well. His longer muzzle and thicker neck along with the artificially cropped fur on the top of his head made him very much the image of a career military man. He didn't stand out among the other cadets in his academy graduation photos and annual department faculty pictures.

"Hey Kayla, where in the military do your parents work exactly?" Buster asked.

"I don't know the specifics, but they were both office people. I want to say my mom was in logistics and my dad was in medical supplies. They didn't like to talk about it with me because I would always ask them questions." she replied.

"Buka is in medical supplies too." Petro added as he switched back and forth between several documents and summarized their contents, "He went to battle academy, graduated pretty high in his class, immediately becomes an officer in a Caracal division afterward. First time he sees combat, one of his walker's legs malfunctions due to faulty maintenance and he has a really bad spill."

Petro pulled up a medical report. Buster had become familiar with medical diagrams for bone breaks in his time at the human's side, and he winced as he looked at the litany of severe spiral fractures. "It looks like his left leg got caught when he was thrown from the cockpit." Buster thought out loud.

"Exactly. He wasn't wearing his safety restraints. It was so bad they had to amputate above the knee. Since he doesn't have brittle bones he was able to get bone anchors for a prosthesis. This was three decades ago so he has a mechanized leg but it's well below the functionality of modern augmented prostheses. He can't go back to the battlefield and has to do his part for the empire from behind a desk. The worst thing imaginable, right?" Petro teased from his bed, provoking a knowing snicker from the large panda.

The human continued, "I'm seeing a few deployments since then. He's a holiday warrior, takes a sabbatical from the medical supplies office to do desk work at a base every few years. Seeing a lot of stable zones in conflict areas, probably got invited to tag along on some after-hours fun. That's a thing the soldiers do, bring their old and wounded on hunts so they can feel alive again."

"Or for soldiers like Buka, to make up for never having had their chance in the first place." Buster mused, his mind already racing. His round ears were standing straight up on his head and his beady eyes were narrowed. He had pulled out his vaporizer but was only fidgeting with it. "I'm guessing no family if he can travel like that."

"No family. Couldn't find him on any of the usual dating sites or hookup listings. He's not even on birth control. I can't really find much of anything about this guy outside of his work. He signed up for a movie watchers network a few years and posted three reviews, they were all for the same action movie franchise from before I was born. It's real bleak!" Petro rattled off his findings with pride.

"Bleak as hell." Buster mirrored, "That's good. Man, I'm already getting something but keep going."

"Performance reviews." Petro continued, "They're meager. He started out in a makework position coordinating deliveries, but like everything in Nakuna over the past two decades it's gotten squeezed and stretched and he seems to be about wrung out. No formal reprimands, but check out these private messages I got from his work network."

Petro switched to a simple text display of decrypted text communications. Buster scanned through the text and winced a little. "Showing up to work drunk, huh? I've been there. Yeah, this guy's not doing great. At least I had quarantine as an excuse, things must really be getting bad if this kind of thing is getting overlooked as matter of course."

"I've never worked in an office so you'd have a better idea than me." Petro said matter-of-factly, "I did see a really good documentary on that deepsea city implosion from a few years back. It was because they outsourced the staffing to some agency that was doing a galaxy-wide wage fixing scam. They set the wages so low that nobody was willing to work for them and then they just pocketed the contract money while going 'Nobody wants to work!' until the whole thing collapsed from lack of upkeep."

He leaned to one side to lift an arm in an exaggerated pantomime of a shrug, giving a barking laugh. "It's awful, I shouldn't be laughing. But these days reading about Nakuna is like watching an anesthetized cat stumble through a gallery of glass vases owned by your worst enemy."

Buster laughed in turn, opening his mouth to joke but stopping himself. "Sorry, I should focus. Keep going. Actually, hold up. Kayla, if you have any questions feel free to speak up at any time. You're as much a part of this as we are."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"I think I've got it so far. Buka is a has-been who never was and he keeps wanting to relive his nonexistent glory days." she summarized.

"Exactly. He went to battle academy, he's dedicated to the cause or at least the things that the cause will let him do. If he wasn't, he would have bailed after the accident. I could see sticking it out a few years but he must be getting something out of it to keep at it all this time." Buster walked through his thought process, "The daydrinking is something that only started relatively recently, or at least only just got bad enough to notice. I wonder if he's starting to grow a conscience like I did."

"I think it's more likely that he's starting to lose confidence in himself." Kayla pushed back, "Kind of the opposite of that, he's losing it because he feels like he's let down Nakuna. Like his best days are behind him and he's only just realizing it."

Buster looked a little uncomfortable at the thought, but pushed it aside. "That makes sense. I wonder if your parents..."

There was a soft chirp as Petro's communicator lit up. "This is my contact for Buka's spaceship info, I need to talk to them." he instructed.

Kayla looked at Buster as Petro quietly talked into the communicator. The panda looked almost relieved, she could see his eyes lit up in thought as he worked at a plan. For once, he seemed perfectly content not talking. It made her feel better to see that he wasn't worried.

When the call ended Petro flipped to another tab and opened up a new file that was highlighted. It has been uploaded only a few seconds ago. Everything up until now had been a crisp scanned document, these were photos. From the lack of blurriness, they were taken with an industrialized tablet that was meant for inspecting and taking inventory of trotters and walkers.

"Lading." Buster said, as if that meant anything to Kayla.

"Yeah, these are from this morning. Really glad Thom was able to find someone at that spaceport, they earned this one."

To Kayla, it was terrifying. She had seen pictures of walkers before, but this one was coming for her personally. It just hit different when you had to imagine facing one in person. Judging by the spaceport worker next to it, the walker stood almost as tall as Zed Steadman itself. It was a quadrupedal walker with a long slender body, the pointed cockpit head and bowed legs almost a crude pantomime of her own reptilian figure. Instead of her thick and muscled tail, it sported an upturned grappling hook above its haunches. An ominous-looking cannon was mounted on a frilled swivel beneath the head: a metal barrel built into the shaft of a gear with reinforced teeth to brace against the explosive force. Between the gear frill and the long segmented neck, there was nowhere she could run that it wouldn't target her.

Buster and Petro were laughing.

"Oh my god, and it's a rental!" Buster read out loud from the accompanying paperwork. This provoked another round of gleeful chuckles from the the men.

"He's a fucking larper, I knew it!" cackled Petro.

"I don't know what a larper is." Kayla said, hoping that an explanation would give her some clarity.

Buster didn't need to be invited twice. "Back before vidcons invented the single-player game, people would play games over radio. Everyone would have a copy of the board and pieces and they would broadcast their moves to the group. They called these players reapers, from Radio Role Playing. When people would meet up in person to play together they called them larpers, from Live Role Playing. So around here, 'larper' is slang for someone who is play-acting at being tough. Buka is play-acting at being tough."

"What wrong with it? It looks pretty deadly to me." she asked.

"That's an Anole." Petro pulled up a helpful diagram labelling the parts, "It's marketed as a light mass-produced combat walker for caves and forest environments, but as a guerilla anti-vehicle platform. The cannon in the frill is anti-armor. You're supposed to get a group of these things disguised up in a canopy days ahead of a convoy and then they can rain death down on the whole thing before anyone has even has a chance to fire back. That's almost the opposite of this kind of rapid extraction mission. It's like he just picked out the first thing that showed up when he looked for 'forest'!"

"Yeah, an anti-armor round will kill a person just as good as a regular one. But it's more expensive and it's not the right tool for the job. Either he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's not the one making these decisions. And it's a rental, not an official Nakunan military vehicle, so I'm guessing Kayla's dad is the one calling the shots here. Either way, the good news is this probably means he isn't planning on pulling a Lance. He's a lifelong military man. Even if he's starting to fall apart now, he is someone who has spent his entire life doing what other people tell him. Your parents sent him here on a mission to get you, he's going to behave." Buster mused, "I had a lot of friends with parents like him when I was growing up, and the ones that retired or joined the private sector always struggled to function outside of that system. I'll never forget watching a middle-aged man throw a temper tantrum because he lived on bases his whole life and didn't know how to pay a pseudonet bill on his own."

"OK, I think I get it." continued Kayla, "I was assuming he was coming here as an official military action, but he's coming here independently with rented equipment. Probably paid for by my parents. Maybe the reason it took this long isn't because they were ignoring me or trying to teach me a lesson, it's because they were trying to go through official channels for a rescue? And they only got desperate enough to go outside of that when they thought I had vanished?"

"Could be. Doesn't change the fact that we have to do something about Buka." Buster concluded the thought, though it made a lot more sense than his theory.

"And we can't kill him." Petro reminded, "If a member of the Nakunan Empire's military goes missing here, even if they're out on their own business, that is going to be an excuse for them to start caring about us. They swept Martenwol under the rug because it was their own failure, but when somebody else is killing their people and they have face to save they are much less apathetic."

"Yeah, if it came down to it I think the people of Big Zig could take down an Anole on their own. There aren't any combat walkers on Redtree but there are a lot of construction equipment and firearms. Plus I know for a fact there are some people here with experience doing guerilla combat against walkers. But there would probably be a lot of casualties. Even if I tried to do it the way I used to and pulled it off perfectly, there could be collateral damage." Buster stopped and looked to the side just a little, "Besides, I've already killed enough people. Buka is the enemy, but I used to be the enemy too. He's still a person, and people have weaknesses. I think we can get him to leave, it's just a matter of coming up with a plan and executing it."

"Well, I don't think I'm going to be sleeping anytime soon." Petro announced, "How about you make us some coffee so we can get started coming up with that plan?"

Buster flashed him a thumbs up with his stout panda paw. "Always happy to help."