Chapter Text
Blackwater
Goose fired the laser rifle: head shot. :Shit, only a graze.:
Howling, Killbane fell, and Goose fired twice more on the bigger ST before Killbane hit the slope and began tumbling. From around the curve of the hill, he heard Flyboy shout.
Morven's grip loosened infinitesimally as she glanced at the comm, and Niko turned and bent forward to unlock her shoulder joint, then rose back up to strike Morven in the face with the heel of her hand.
The female ST reacted with near-blinding speed—but Niko had twisted loose.
Morven struck. Niko reeled back, her ears ringing from a glancing blow to the side of her head, but she dropped automatically into a roll that let the ST's next strike swish harmlessly over her.
Niko gained her feet again, launched a lightning kick—and tossed the handful of gravel she'd snatched up as she rolled. Morven, dodging, swore as her feet skidded on the tiny stones. She lost her balance and fell hard on her side—and Niko was on her, grabbing at the ST's close-cropped hair and jerking up—and down. Morven's head slammed into the stone floor, and she lay still, stunned.
Niko clocked her again to make sure, spun, and launched herself out of the cave.
Goose dodged another rifle blast from Troy and dashed a little further up the slope.
:No gun, and Killbane's got my badge,: Niko sent.
He felt her recall his memory of Killbane falling, felt her scrambling over the ridge, staying out of Troy's line of sight, toward the unconscious ST.
Troy fired again, closer now. Goose snarled, hit his badge, and ran into the open.
"Try me, Flyboy!"
As the gun spoke, Goose charged.
Killbane lay face down at the bottom of the slope. Even as she scrambled toward him, Niko could see the scorched, oozing wound on the side of his head, and one more across his ribs. One outflung arm still held the heavy-duty laser rifle. She tried to sense whether he was awake, and frowned. I can't be sure—need my badge.
It's in his shirt pocket.
She scooped up a rock, tossed it. It bounced off his shoulder: no reaction.
He was bulkier in frame than Goose and quite heavy. She grunted, heaved, and flipped him onto his side. As she fumbled in his shirt pocket, she heard Goose shout—
:I can take this pissant pilot boy—:
—and heard more laser fire from upslope.
A hard hand clenched around her wrist. Killbane's eyes opened.
"Bad move, bitch." He clenched his teeth, then moved his jaw in a motion she'd seen before.
He's going to create a gas pellet.
Her badge, smooth between her fingers, was warm from the heat of his body.
Niko grinned, a feral grin, Shane's grin, and slammed a bolt of psi energy straight into his vagus nerve. Killbane, suddenly and utterly nauseated, flailed, let go of her wrist, and began vomiting helplessly into the gravel. She followed up with another bolt that knocked him nearly unconscious. Bending, Niko scooped up his laser rifle and nudged him in the side with her toe.
"Don't call me 'bitch.'"
She dashed upslope.
Goose, bathed in laser fire, laughed. His biodefenses flared, sheathed his body in silvery smooth metal, and suddenly the laser felt just like rain on his bare skin.
Troy swore and turned to run.
:Coming, Goose—:
Like the two hands of their one self...
Goose leaped after him and spun in a kick that sent Troy reeling. Niko, running up the hill, fired neatly from the waist, and Troy, off balance and unable to dodge, screamed and fell as the heavy-duty laser blew straight through his leg.
Goose caught him, knowing, because Niko knew and he needed to know, that Morven was down but would probably wake soon; that Killbane was struggling back to awareness. Goose put pressure, just so, on a nerve point in Troy's neck, and Troy spasmed and went limp.
Goose laughed again, just for the beauty of the teamwork.
:Better than sex,: he teased.
:!.....:
"You're no fun, Niko."
Face flaming, she glared at him. Quickly he cuffed Troy's wrists behind him, then let the unconscious ST down onto the hillside.
:Killbane's trying to get up.:
Goose turned almost casually and fired the laser rifle. Killbane, his biodefenses half activated, turned and began lumbering up the hill. Goose frowned and fired again.
:Let me—:
For the first time Goose felt her using her powers—not through his own perceptions, but through hers. He caught his breath, sensing the energy she manipulated, sensing the invisible blows that scorched through Killbane's brain and central nervous system. The strangeness of it touched a chord in him. "Getting harder," she muttered absently, brushing the back of her hand across her forehead. Goose watched the bulky Supertrooper, nose suddenly dripping blood, fall limply to the stone and roll once more to the bottom of the slope.
"Remind me never to piss you off again," he said aloud, but he let her see his wonder, and she grinned at him.
"And the final touch..." She detached a grenade from her belt, primed it, and tossed it at the hill just opposite where Killbane lay. They both crouched; the explosion shook the ground under their feet and loosed a pile of rock that left Killbane half buried. "He'll be out for at least an hour—and then he'll have to dig himself out. Again. Morven will be awake fairly soon, though," she said. "Are we going to arrest her, too?"
He shook his head. "We'll have enough trouble just getting Troy back to the ship."
Niko frowned. "Can we? That's a long hike, Goose."
"Be a lot easier if Elma could come pick us up."
She broke into a trot, heading back to the cave. "Morven may have remote control of her cracking software," she tossed back over her shoulder.
"Let's find out, shall we?" He grinned and hoisted Troy over his shoulder.
Niko winced as Elma let fly a stream of profanity.
"I said I was sorry!" Goose protested.
"I wasn't saying it to you," Elma answered, her prim tone utterly at odds with the curse she had just uttered. "Take that, you creepy pile of code!" Over the comm they heard a squeal as Elma's anticracking software erased chunks of Morven's program.
Morven, sitting against the wall of the cave with Niko's rifle pointed at her, raised her eyebrows. "So you gonna take me in, boy?"
"His name is Gooseman," Niko snarled, startling herself.
Morven only looked at her with a knowing smile.
Goose shook his head. "No. You're not wanted for any violent crimes. You wanted a ship, you didn't get mine—but Flyboy here won't be needing his any more." He bared his teeth at Troy Marx, more a snarl than a grin, and Troy snarled back. "But if our paths cross again, I won't guarantee my answer'll stay the same."
"Ready for takeoff, Goose," Elma announced.
"Come get us, girl. We're more than ready to get the hell off this rock." Goose turned to Morven. "Do me a favor, lady. Go do your smuggling someplace far away, and don't ever shoot anyone. I'd rather not see you ever again."
The female ST rose to her feet. "Feeling's mutual, R-Gooseman." She strode out of the cave without looking back.
Niko watched her go. :We could have taken her in, Goose.: He was silent, and she turned to look at him.
:Yeah, probably. But... I'll find her sometime.:
The heaviness of his thoughts struck her to the quick. A memory rose up: herself, in a dark, near-freezing room in an abandoned Texarcota hotel, saying, "It must be hard, having to arrest—" She had broken off, but she'd known Goose understood.
"Not really," he'd said. "They're renegades, aren't they?"
Niko knew suddenly that he had lied that night; understood, to her very heart and better than she ever had, what missions like this cost him. Smoothly she pushed the knowledge away from the bond, not wanting to hurt him. Any more than he's already been hurt, she thought sadly, bitterly. And for what? She studied Troy Marx, who hunched sullenly against the wall and glared at her. They call him "Runt." They treat him with such venom. I've never seen a single one of them that treated him like anything but an outsider. An outsider they despise.
How lonely he must have been. Must still be...
With a deep breath, Niko tucked away the part of herself that hurt for him and met Goose's eyes with hard-won calm. "Shall we, Ranger Gooseman?" she asked drolly. "I can hear Elma's engines now."
His mouth quirked, and he hauled Troy Marx to his feet. "After you, Ranger Niko." To Troy, he added, "Don't make me stun you, Flyboy. And if you're really smart, you'll avoid making her mad."
Niko shouldered the pack and, rifle at the ready, followed Goose out into the sunlight.
Epilogue
BETA Mountain
Niko stood on her balcony, gazing across the starlit Gibson Desert. Her loose robe stirred in the wind. In the quiet, Shane's thoughts tossed in her head like the susurrus of distant waves, and she felt him moving steadily toward her through the dim-lit residential hallways. He raised his hand to press the buzzer, then hesitated as her front door slid open. She let a trickle of laughter sound in his head.
:Come in, Shane.:
He stepped through the doorway and headed straight for the balcony. :This is...: "Weird," he finished verbally as he slid the outer door closed behind him and came to stand by her at the railing. "It seemed strange enough out there, when it was this or dying, but here, at BETA, where everything else is normal but this..." He thumped a fist lightly on the balustrade once, twice. "Is this what it's like being a telepath? Having other people's thoughts in your head?"
She grinned. "Until you get some practice screening it out, yes. But at the same time it's different. The pairbond link doesn't feel like any scan I've ever done. It's on a deeper level, Shane, it's more intimate. I did tell you about Shaya and Ran."
"Yeah." He shifted his weight. "It was an interesting story. Passed the time on the trip back. Better than listening to Flyboy curse, anyway." He fell silent, staring down the side of the mountain.
Through the bond she felt the eddies and ripples of his emotions: discomfort, awkwardness, a hint of sadness, and again that current of desire that heated her cheeks and made her grateful for the darkness.
Goose chuckled softly suddenly, and she glanced over.
"I see pretty well in the dark, Niko." There was no mistaking the teasing note in his voice, and she blushed furiously. He let a smile crease his lips, but soon his thoughts turned serious. "You said we could dissolve the bond by just withdrawing. Is that right?"
Niko schooled her thoughts against a not completely unexpected sadness. "That's right."
He stood looking at her.
"What, Shane?"
"Yeah," he said softly. "Just withdraw. Close the drawbridge."
She grew still at the conflicting emotions that whispered through the bond, knowing that this fight was one in which she could not involve herself. In the face of his loneliness and of those hints of desire, it was an act of will not to reach out, not to offer comfort, intimacy—the intimacy she had so wished for, for so long.
His choice, she whispered to herself. He has to ask. You are the one who suggested the bond. You are the one who created it. For you to ask to keep it comes too close to breaking the Law. And it would be unfair, and an invasion of his privacy, to act on your knowledge of his emotions when he doesn't have the practice to keep them away from you. You don't know everything he feels, in any case. Desire? Yes... but desire can exist in many forms.
Only if he speaks, Niko. Only if he asks.
He glanced sidelong at her, forehead creasing. "You okay, lady?" he asked diffidently. "You seem kind of tense."
She forced a smile. "Just tired, Shane, that's all."
That crooked grin swept across his face, and Niko felt something in her catch. One golden eyebrow twitched, but the grin held. "Tired, yeah." He sighed. "I'm tired, too." He stared down at his hands again. "Tired," he muttered.
She felt it then, the gentle and inevitable going out of the tide that was Shane's presence in her mind, that gleaming presence, so like the edge of a bared blade, that left aching, empty loneliness in its wake. She held herself tense from chasing after it like a small child, focused on her breathing—in and out, in and out, Niko, just breathe, in and out—and did not notice the tears on her face until he reached one gloved hand to brush them away.
"Tears, Niko?" His voice was rough. There was no echo in her mind, no presence, no hint of his feelings.
In the farthest inner hold of her self, a very small voice whispered, Lonely. She whispered back, I know. Wait.
She didn't tell it for what.
"The records didn't say it would hurt," she admitted in a small voice.
"You okay?"
She saw then the grip of his far hand on the railing—clenched as desperately tight as the hand of a man about to fall. She drew a deep breath.
"I will be. What about you, Shane?"
He was silent for a long moment. She looked up at him.
"Yeah," he said quietly, and without meeting her eyes he turned to go. His hand on the sliding door, he paused, his back to her. "We did pretty well out there. It was good to have you along." Another pause. "Did you mention this all in your report?"
Niko felt her lips curl in a secret smile. "No. Did you?"
"Are you kidding?"
The laugh burst out, startled out of her like a small bird flushed from a tuft of grass. "Well, now we have that settled... Go to bed, Shane. You got even less sleep on this mission than I did."
One green eye caught a gleam of light as he glanced over his shoulder and smirked. "Sure, Ma," he said, and was gone before she could even retort. Faintly she heard his steps on the stairs, and then the front door opened and shut.
Niko snorted softly and turned back to the desert night. Grounding and centering, she concentrated.
:Ariel, I have news for you...: