Junebug raised her sub machine gun at the merc filling the doorway and started to take up the pressure on the trigger. Her conscious mind registered Neil at the last instant and she snapped the weapon vertical in an instinctive safe posture.  The alarms continued to wail in the background but they seemed further away now and no rush of gunmen materialized.

“How did you…” she trailed off uncertain of where to go with the sentence and a rush of relief evident in her voice. For a moment her mind freewheeled trying to construct a scenario that would result in Neil being here and not floating off into space until her tactical conditioning damped the impulse under the weight of the current situation.

“Just when I thought we had decided to give each other some space,” she quipped and tossed the badge underhanded to the pilot who plucked it from the air reflexively. 

“They’re Cops,” she said bitterly hauling the unconcious Nia upright and securing her wrists with cargo tape. The polymer weave had a tensile strength of hundreds of pounds and was backed by a chemical adhesive which could only be disolved with a specialized solvent.

“Uhh…” Neil said eloquently looking at the badge quizzically, “Did you say…” Sayeeda nodded.

“God damn System Gendarmerie,” she confirmed with a sigh. Pieces of data began to organize themselves in her mind, slotting together like puzzle pieces.

“If I had to guess I’d say Cheng is with organized crime of some sort, using us as pattsies to take out the police presence here. He hooked us up with that little intra system tramp, how much you want to bet their is a fusion bomb tucked away in some hidden compartment, probably set to blow once we docked here.” A fusion blast would have destroyed an installation of this size leaving no survivors. Sayeeda silently offered thanks that she had opted for a more covert insertion.

Nia began to stir, moaning softly her hands pulling against the improvised restraints.

“Son of a bitch,” Sayeeda said with dawning comprehension.

“As a bonus he gets to collect the Highlander when we turn up dead, he is the one that owns our debt to the shipyard. Cute, very fucking cute.” Nia’s eyes fluttered open.

“I don’t know who you people are, but you are in a world of trouble,” the police woman declared in a cold threatening voice, a little spoiled by the splitting headache that the chokehold had engendered.  

[@POOHEAD189]