All For One, Kasern Season 2, Episode 1

[Galvin Schueto]

Galvin finally relaxed after following the beautiful woman. She had put him on edge. He sat patiently listening to everyone talk. Things seemed to be going well. Just about any woman would put him on edge but he wasn’t about to show that just yet.

"First things first. We've got new faces. Peace," she nodded towards the new mechanic, "and Galvin," there was another nod here.

Galvin nodded to her in return and listened to the woman talk.

"I guess I'll be the first to speak then. Zira I am all for it. Let’s get this party under way. In my opinion there is no time to waste."

Galvin sat there waiting for everyone’s reaction at this point he figured he had over stepped his bounds, but was willing to take the punishment.

[Claudia James]

Claudia sat in her chair, her eyelids drooping as she half listened to what Zira had to say. It was just so gorram hard to stay awake, let alone alert and she made a mental note to talk to the doctor about getting off those rutting painkillers or at least getting something to counteract their effects. She'd have taken care of that herself if only she still had her backpack. But that was gone, along with everything else that had ever mattered to her.

“...name of Duke.”

Duke. That rang a bell and she looked up, blinking a few times as she tried to focus on what the acting captain was saying. Badger's name came up too, a name you could hardly avoid knowing when you dealt with brokering contracts and fixing jobs for and between crews. But Duke and Badger? Claudia hadn't been aware of that connection. But then, she'd never met either one of them and only knew of their respective reputations from her own Cortex connections.

Once Zira was done speaking and one of the other crew had voice an opinion, she spoke up, raising a hand to draw attention to herself. “Don't know if you even want to hear my opinion, but I know Duke, that is... I know of him,” she said, speaking softly as she gave a look around the table, then focused back on the dark haired woman. “Mostly, it's hard to pin down whether he's reliable 'n trustworthy. Some say he is, others say he stiffed them and made of with the larger part of the loot. Then there's them that are saying he ain't right in the head and say they wouldn't accept one o' his deals if it were the last deal in town. There's even a rumour going round that he's the first mate of some ship, but I never got a name of one. Hell, I ain't never even heard rumours what his real name might be.”

She moved her hand in a kind of hopeless gesture. “I guess what I'm saying is... You all should ask yourselves how important this job is and how badly you need the money 'fore you go into business with someone who's managed to make his reputation so wide and varied.” She looked down again, at the blank screen of the CorPad that lay on the table in front of her, feeling drained of energy having said so much and she suppressed a yawn before she finished. “You might get more – or less – than what you bargained for.”

[Brun]

"I guess I'll be the first to speak then. Zira I am all for it. Let’s get this party under way. In my opinion there is no time to waste."

So the new guy was a go-getter. That was good to know. Brun shifted slightly so his position even more closely matched Melissa's, a tiny smile starting under his mustache. The team was gonna get on just fine, and the big man suddenly discovered he was, mostly for some accounting, having positive thoughts about the whole mess.

“I guess what I'm saying is... You all should ask yourselves how important this job is and how badly you need the money 'fore you go into business with someone who's managed to make his reputation so wide and varied. You might get more – or less – than what you bargained for.”

"Claudia's right, after a fashion." Brun agreed wholeheartedly with the wounded women who seemed to already have become one of them, "We don't know this Duke fella from a boil on Badger's butt. Could be he's nothing but trouble and we'll end up more down the hole than we started, but..."

He glanced around the table, that grin tugging once more at the corner of his mouth as though spiting his every attempt to remain stalwart, "But hell, that's the risk with every job out here. And how many of these things have we taken on where everything's on the up and up? Remember that Dropcase Cookie? Or that 'simple jailbreak'? Nothin' we do ever goes according to plan." He fired a glare towards Garrett, "Anybody wanna count up the gose we stumbled on back in Santo?"

"Point is," burly shoulders shrugged and dark grey eyes danced, "We take this job, we go in and do the shiny as best we all can, and, if Duke gives us any trouble, well, we can work it out..." Pursing his lips, Brun gave an audible click of tongue against teeth and a whistled whine, imitating the sound of a pistol priming for firing, "Won't be like fightin' for what's ours is any kind of new. I say we go for it, Z."

[Piecemeal]

He stayed to the back of the room, part out of habit part out of logistics: his weighty mechanicals made balancing in a chair...problematic. When he did so happen to come to rest on his laurels, his backstop of choice was a bench or booth seat. He watched the going ons with the mild interest that came from conversations that only marginally concerned him: his soldier'n days were through, he was slower than blackstrap molassas on St Albans and made about as much noise as the proverbial bull in the marketplace full of porcelin. In his mind, Peace had one job: keep the ship flyin'

His camera eye flicked between thermal imaging and it's ordinary feed of sometimes grainy visual input idly: it was a newer model camera that he had scrounged on 66. Apparently it had been a security model before he had gotten his hands on it and was capable of low light as well as the mode he had been playing with for the last couple of minutes. Probably for early fire protection. He watched the fields of red, yellows, oranges and blues paint a different picture for his brain. Peace had read somewhere that telling falsehoods produced a different pattern than truth and he resolved to look that up again, cuz there was a lot of reds in a room where everyone was supposed to be just relaxing and talking.

But back to the matter at hand. After it was quiet for an acceptable moment he cleared his throat, his deep growly voice sounding especially harsh in close quarters without the sound of the ship's engine to talk over. "The secondary power converter hasn't seen much use since the Exodus I reckon," he rumbled, "and the primary shows some heavy wear. I'd like to get the back-up upgraded or at least serviced just so we don't wake up one morn and find ourself stuck out in the black with nuthin' more than us flappin' our arms for propulsion." He shrugged his shoulders in rough imitation of the other big man in the room at the end of his speech. "So unless someone in the room has a cred account that ain't already so far overdrawn that they're sending fellers with a middle name of 'the' in their handle to call on you, I'd say we have to take the job. Just to stay out of Ma Fuhn"

And, he added mentally, his supply of Aenestitin was getting low and he was going to have to come up with more of the industrial grade pain killer soon. His chances were much better for that planetside than out here. Really win/win for everyone involved.

[Zira]

Zira nodded towards Peace. "Thanks. Didn't know we were in need of that much repair." At least not of the ship kind. Ian always took care of her.... No. Now's not the time to go off on that subject. Her thoughts were muddled again, but she tried to push through them and move forward with everything.

"Claudia, thank you for the insight. And Brun and Galvin? We might need shooting on this if it starts to fall apart around us. I would like you two to keep close and have weapons on you at all times once we hit dirt and start this all. You're going to be our main defense, along with anyone else who can carry a gun. Understood?"

She looked over at Rom. "I don't plan on go-se hitting the fain during this job, but we all know how well that has worked out for us in the past. If worst comes to worst, do you have all the supplies you'll need to treat most any injury or do we need to pick up more? If not, that'll be the first order of business once we land."

Looking around the room once more, Zira looked each crew member in the eyes before moving on to the next one. "We have bulletproof vests now. We are going to be wearing them for this job. And for everyone after that. I love you all like family and I don't want to lose any more of you. Dong ma?"

[Ben]

Ben sat at the end of the table, one of his dangling legs swaying slowly with the rhythm of the engine's pulse through the vessel. Bored face squishily propped up against an even more bored hand, he eyed the occupants of the room as the big'uns talked to one another.

The Galvin guy seemed nice enough, but Ben didn't like him. He never liked anyone new, because the benefit of someone new was almost never worth the effort of figuring them out. New people had new secrets and new habits to worry about, and there was always the chance they were some crazy person just waiting for the right moment to snap and kill everyone, though Ben wasn't really convinced anyone aboard was free and clear of that potential craziness. He often feared that Delilah was plotting to murder him in his sleep, but no one shared his suspicions.

Peace was an oddity for sure... Ben had been taught that putting toys in your body was very dangerous and makes you too easy to track and spot, but this guy was teeming with them. He wondered whether the man had put them in his body by himself, or if perhaps the whitecoats had done it for him. The whitecoats were always hypocritical like that: saying one thing but doing another.

"You're going to be our main defense, along with anyone else who can carry a gun. Understood?"

Ben's eyes wandered back and forth, still assessing the occupants of the room as Zira spoke. He'd learned by now that, even though he could carry a gun, that they probably wouldn't give him one. They'd probably make him just stay on the ship with crazy-girl and a fuddy duddy babysitter and have all the fun for themselves. Maybe Delilah would go into a needle-mad frenzy and kill the babysitter, then he could have some fun. Stupid big'uns never let him have any fun anymore.

Bored legs still swaying, Ben tried to keep his eyes from closing as his mind drifted into the whispers, which were busily discussing power converters amongst themselves.

[Romulus]

"You know, it's funny, Griffon," Romulus said, cracking open an eyelid to glance significantly at Claudia, at the raised redness of her eyes and the yielding of one shoulder to the other. "No matter where we go, it always seems to be inhabited by people who all seem to think we're breathing too much and not bleeding enough."

He grinned. "So yes, be a good idea to go fetch some tonic while we're ashore, else I'll have nothing better to do that sit around and knit doilies, and I can't be held responsible for my actions after I get my hands on a pair of crochet needles."

[Saskia Vass]

And it made absolutely no sense to her, but she continued to listen. There were boasts. They said things she barely heard, in the lukewarm, stifling closeness of the galley, questions, are you sure? until she was deaf with it. And she looked up at their captain with her mouth half-parted, closing her eyes and opening them, again and again, against the forced tread of her breath.

The answer was on her breath, and it was too late to hesitate by the time she thought to. "I-" she nearly began, nearly said, and stopped, and the words filled her.

She tried not to remember what it was like to laugh like broken glass, and smile back when Lance took her hand. How sweet the wine had been. How warm the gown had been on her skin. Tried not to wonder whether he would ever forgive her, when she left, leaving nothing behind on Kasern except him, and that was fine by her. Her marks would be more like gouges, anyway.

Are you certain?

I am not. I am not anything, she finished, assertive for her closed eyes. She was doing what felt best, and wondered if she thought it it an apology.

[Delilah Vass]

"Be okay," Delilah piped up, head pillowed on Brun's shoulders as she hung off the back of his chair, legs arched, suspended by his weight and her laughter and it never occurred to her that he'd let her fall. "We family." Piece's eye whirred and glared, a rich red that reminded her of Carter when he'd fought the faerie. "I am too old to dance, and my voice is too gruff to sing. But I still laugh and love when I’m with her." Someone had said that. Her eyes suddenly felt wet. "Family help family. Right?"

[Duke Righteous]

Three Miles Outside of New Paris, The Brown Company Apiary

"Now, New Paris is a place that I respect," the Duke said, pacing in front of the window of a large office with a moss green carpet that muffled his bootsteps. Outside, spread before the office tower like the poppyfield of the Emerald Castle, were hundreds of beehives, containing millions of bees. "All those clowns over on Sihnon think just because we orbit their jive asses, the rest of the 'verse does too. You ever been to the Companion's Guild, Mr. Brown?"

The owner of the complex, with thick, caterpillar eyebrows overshadowing tiny blue eyes, nodded rapidly from behind a wide oak desk. "Two days to negotiate a contract. It was... a back and forth affair."

The Duke gave him two quarters of a smile. "Those costumed street-walkers are suave talkers, I know ya dig. Smooth as a baby's behind wrapped in buttered silk." A third quarter joined the first two as his smile broadened. "But through that silk they fart like every other turkey in the 'verse."

Mr. Brown, a minor player in the Righteous game about to unfold on New Paris, nodded dutifully, but it was obvious he did not see the point.

"Those hussies that Pimp Guild calls Companions could easily fricassee my plans, brother Brown. There'll be one on every arm of every major cat in that theatre, and if our new recruits aren't up for undercover, they'll see through suit and gown, tear us up from the ground, and lay the hammer down, ya dig?"

"I do."

"You what?"

"I... I dig."

"Solid, Mr. Brown. Solid." For a brief moment, his words and expression went dark. "I don't want them whores messing with my show."

In the blue Bernadette sky, the spark of red hot atmo breaking signalled the arrival of sister Zira. Without skipping a beat, he turned to face the other man and smiled, "make sure the tarmac's clear for our guests, s'il vous plait?"

Herman Brown, ruthless business owner whose control of the highly demanded honey industry placed him as one of the richest men on the planet, left wordlessly to follow the orders.