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 40
TUELLER: “You want back in?”
TUELLER: “To that?”
STORY: She doesn’t answer, exactly. “Do you ever think about the people on those moons?”
STORY: “How they’d fare without us?”
STORY: She shakes her head. “I dunno, T. I know it was mostly stealing from other bad people, but I think I did more to help people back then than I have since I left.”
STORY: “Is it better to be happy or useful?”
TUELLER: Tueller doesn’t pause at all. “Happy.”
STORY: She nods. “Yeah, I guess.”
Chapter 36
TUELLER: “We’re doing all this, but if Loll says stop, we’re bugging out of here for as long as we need to, no pun intended.”
TUELLER: “The pun was on ‘bugging.’ They’re insects.” Tueller explains.
TUELLER: “Not sure that was clear.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods. “I have no problem adhering to Loll’s wishes and I got your joke.”
MILLICENT: Millie smiles, trying to be encouraging. “Very funny!”
TUELLER: “Please don’t patronize me just because you’re eight times smarter than me.”
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 31
MILLICENT: “Good evening, Mr. ’Ndrangheta. It’s polite to wait for an invitation to sit.”
STORY: He looks down at the menu, scanning it in a sort of general way. “I wonder if Tueller explained to you why he’s my nemesis and not just another man that I’ve killed.”
STORY: He reviews the wine list on the back, scoffing. “If I were to publicly confront him, that would make things complicated for my family. And if I were to kill him, well, that would make things complicated for his family, which, in turn, makes things complicated for my family. So we circle each other, swatting now and then, both daring the other to finally cross the line.”
STORY: He puts the menu down, making clean eye contact with you. “You, however, my dear, are not afforded the same protection.”
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 28
MILLICENT: “So, on the one hand the grell have the capacity to turn a large part of the galaxy into the third act of a horror movie. On the other hand the nahar have imprisoned an entire sentient race, used them to develop their technology, and literally eat them.”
STORY: Zura and Vorlou look at each other, the first time this has happened since you entered the room. They both nod. Vorlou: “More or less, yes.”
MILLICENT: Millie looks to Tueller. “I just want to be clear that solving a moral dilemma of two entire races isn’t what I had in mind when I proposed this job.”
MILLICENT: “This is outside of the scope of our original task and I intend to invoice accordingly.”