ALEJO: Alejo leans in towards the fire, warming his hands. “Anyone else feeling like us just patching up and leaving doesn’t sit right?”
MILLICENT: Millie exhales loudly and leans forward. “Oh thank goodness.”
TUELLER: Tueller shrugs wordlessly.
MILLICENT: “We’re the madcap damn the consequences crew and here we were, _minding the consequences_.”
MILLICENT: “I say we get back to damning them.”
TUELLER: “People die.”
TUELLER: “Sometimes people we care about, even.”
ALEJO: Alejo looks at Tueller for a long moment. Then nods once in solidarity.
ALEJO: “We should make the loss mean something, no?”
Chapter 43
TUELLER: “You put money on me?”
ALEJO: He nods. “’Course.” Smiles.
TUELLER: “What’re you using for money?”
ALEJO: “I did a little pickpocketing of my own and a few shell game, Titan-street-rat tricks to put together a few funds. If you lose, though, I’m gonna be leveraged in some real bad ways. So . . . please don’t lose.”
TUELLER: “I’ll need to ransom my armor if we lose, too.”
TUELLER: “So I’ll try not to.”
Chapter 42
STORY: “Dragon.”
ALEJO: His eyebrows raise.
TUELLER: “That’s a new one.”
STORY: “They’re real, apparently. And they live here. So. I’m gonna lie down.”
STORY: “Jenny?”
STORY: She nods hurriedly. They both go have a seat and try to chill out just inside the treeline.
ALEJO: “Huh.”
MILLICENT: “No!” Millie punches Kahn on the shoulder
MILLICENT: “No way!”
TUELLER: “I wish we didn’t lose all of our alcohol.”
STORY: Figgan looks up at you. “What’s a dragon?”
TUELLER: “Flying lizard that shoots fire.”
STORY: She nods. “Huh. All right.”
STORY: Akilah just stands there, with her arms dangling at her sides, and drops her briefcase, walking silently into the woods.
ALEJO: “Was that our only tent?”
MILLICENT: “Dragon!” Millie’s almost dancing
Chapter 41
STORY: Loll looks around. “Where is the test master?”
ALEJO: “Incapacitated.”
ALEJO: He looks sidelong at Tueller. “This is gonna get real interesting, real fast.”
TUELLER: “Well, hopefully a steadily increasing amount of interesting.”
TUELLER: “Exponential, not logarithmic.”
TUELLER: “Or maybe the other way around.”
ALEJO: “You’re the smart guy.” Alejo glances back towards Millie. “ETA, Doc?”
Chapter 35
MILLICENT: Millie comes over the comms. “You’re about to have company. But if you’ve disabled Tigralt’s friend, he should be able to disable the security bot.”
MILLICENT: To the silence, “Tigralt, I mean. Tell him I said hi.”
ALEJO: “He’s gonna have a hell of a hangover headache after the takedown Tueller just gave him,” Alejo says into the com, in response.
TUELLER: “More of a migraine. Comes from the top of the head.”
MILLICENT: A long pause. “Were you guys listening when I said this was an inside job in the briefing?”
TUELLER: “We’re inside now.”
MILLICENT: “I seem to remember there was some kind of squabble over the last cruller.”
TUELLER: “Let’s do the job.”
STORY: Figgan shrugs.
MILLICENT: Millie shrugs.
STORY: Somewhere, Kahn sighs unhappily.
TUELLER: “No, I don’t know what you mean.”
ALEJO: He stands and walks over to Tueller. “I think you do.”
MILLICENT: “I think he means the nigh ceaseless killing.”
ALEJO: “But I agree we need a better chain of command. That’s absolutely true.”
TUELLER: “You’ve killed more than I have, Millie.”
MILLICENT: “Which is, admittedly, why I shouldn’t wear the big hat either.”
TUELLER: “Well, we might be about even.”
MILLICENT: “It’s not a race.”
TUELLER: “It’s a marathon.”
ALEJO: “Yup. Yup. And you both are very smart. Very capable. Amazingly vicious.”
MILLICENT: “We had a meeting last week and decided we’d like to be called indomitably pragmatic.”
Chapter 32
STORY: The guard gives you a narrowed eyelids look, Alejo.
STORY: “He security?” he asks Tueller.
TUELLER: “_My_ security, yes.”
ALEJO: Alejo plays the role, stiff and somber.
STORY: He nods, letting you both pass.
ALEJO: “You know I’m getting very drunk, right,” Alejo mutters, once they are past the guards.
Chapter 30
MILLICENT: “The next time we lose a member of this crew you will put aside your personal feelings and make an announcement. The same goes, but less so, for significant assets like ships and technology.”
STORY: Kahn laughs. “Next time.”
STORY: “Because there’ll always be a next time.”
TUELLER: “We’re a crew. Not slaves. Free to come and go.”
ALEJO: He spins to Millie. “She just left!” Then he turns to Kahn. “Yeah, okay. Enough of your shit. You know it’s a lot more complicated than that I strung her along.”
STORY: “Pretty simple from here.”
TUELLER: “Gotta shit or get off the pot, man.”
ALEJO: “That from the man who clearly understands romance and love.”
STORY: “Go fuck yourself, captain.”
MILLICENT: Millie blows a whistle that she’s wearing. “Stop this childish backbiting immediately. This is a crew meeting. You may discuss your relationship problems in private.
TUELLER: “I can’t see, was that aimed at me?”
MILLICENT: Millie blows the whistle again.
TUELLER: “Seems like it could have been aimed at me.”
Chapter 29
MILLICENT: “I think friends talk about these sorts of things and I would very much like to think we were friends.”
TUELLER: Tueller is silent. Not dismissive. But silently thinking.
TUELLER: “We are friends. Millie. I don’t want you to think what we’re not.”
TUELLER: Another pause.
TUELLER: “But I don’t know who I am or what I can say right now even to myself, much less to my friends.”
ALEJO: “And I’m sorry, Jac. I’m probably just being a fool, as always.”
STORY: “And this is what you always do.”
ALEJO: “Jinx.”
STORY: “Jump to the new thing. Ignore the old one.”
STORY: “What are you running from? We’re free. We got free. You can stop running.”
ALEJO: He looks at her for a long moment. “When’d you get so damned wise?”
STORY: “I do a lot of listening.”
ALEJO: “Maybe I should be listening more to you.” He leans forward. “You’re not wrong.”
STORY: “Not right enough, though.” She leans back and looks away, frustrated.
Chapter 27
TUELLER: Tueller rolls around and punches it hard, holding onto spines like it’s a pommel and pummeling it as he goes.
TUELLER: He snaps off a spine and stabs it into the neck of the lusus and drives it deep.
STORY: Tueller basically rides this creature as it flails around the room, punching it with unnatural force in the spine until he stabs it and it stops bucking him and settles, dead, on the ground.
TUELLER: Punching it with his glove into the general region of the brain.
STORY: You’re surrounded by dead fish.
STORY: Tux stands. “Shit! That was amazing!”
ALEJO: Alejo sort of just collapses to the floor, in a half sit, half just faint. “Well damn. That actually worked.”
STORY: Jac taps on Tux’s console. “You got an alarm there.”
Chapter 26, Part I
TUELLER: “Can you guys…not tell Loll? This is…going to complicate things.”
STORY: Kahn mimes turning a key in front of his mouth.
TUELLER: “I really do like cows, though. That you can talk about.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods, “Is it the number of stomachs?”
MILLICENT: “I’ve always found the number of stomachs to be remarkable.”
STORY: Kahn shakes his head and starts walking.
TUELLER: “Yes. It’s the number of stomachs. That’s definitely it.”
STORY: He may be laughing at his captain.
MILLICENT: “Four.”