unebug lay in the pile of garbage. The leather coat had saved her from being torn to rags against the rough concrete. Nothing seemed to be broken but she would be a mass of bruises in a day or so. Assuming she survived of course. The pistol and the case were both lost in the detritus for now. Screaming civilians were pouring out of the club from which gunfire continued to boom. The Hex might had had a particular target in mind, but firing off into a crowd of which dozens were armed criminals was a recipe for disaster. Unsteadily Junebug pushed herself to her feet and then took a running dive at the Hex. She hit him between the shoulder blades, staggering but not knocking him from his feet. Her arm wrapped around his neck, in what, for a human would have been a choke hold. THe scaly flesh felt like she was trying to throttle a concrete pillar.

“Damnit bitch this is nothing to do with you!” the Hex snarled, raking back at her with its claws. Junebug coiled herself around its shoulders, fouling its attack with her legs and arms. She elbowed it in thead in an awkward blow that did little more than irritate it.

“The hell…” she began before the Hex whirled, smashing her against the wall. Breath exploded from her lungs but she held on, clinging grimly to its neck and upper back.

“It dosen’t…” she wheezed and reached down and plucked a grenade from the creatures belt. It was a dull gray cylinder with a red and grey stripe. Familiar to Sayeeda as a bunker busting fuel air model. She clicked the arming switch but held down the fuse release. The grenade would spread a mist of hydrocarbons through the alley before igniting with a secondary explosion which would probably be sufficient to bring the buildings on both sides down on the jellied remains that the initial concussion would leave.

“Now we are going to talk about this like civilized people…” There was a howl of drive fans from the end of the alley and a screech of metal on asphalt. A hover jeep screeched into the end of the alley, trailing a sheet of orange yellow sparks  as friction killed the forward momentum against the roadway. The back of the jeep was packed with gunmen, all wearing Gnarlac’s colors.

“Its them!” one of gunmen screamed and began to swing a pintle mounted plasma cannon to face down the alleyway. The blast of the weapon would cook them all in a heartbeat and there was no way to dodge the bolt of ravening plasma. Even an incompetent couldn’t botch the shot badly enough that it would matter. The Hex growled his muscles bunching beneath her. Junebug tossed the grenade overhand, still clinging to the aliens back. One of the gunmen, a human with greasy blond dreadlocks caught the bomb in one hand, the other cradling an EM slug thrower and tried to throw it back. The gunman had seen too many holos, the internal accelerometers registered the attempt and the bomb went of with a crump, followed a half second later with and apocalyptic flash of heat and light.

Things were confused for a time. Junebug tried to put the fragments of the last few seconds, minutes, back together in her mind but was rewarded only with nausea and fragmentary images. Looking down she saw she was straddling the Hex. The alien’s tongue lolled and yellowish liquid, maybe blood, leaked from one of the things four nostrils. Her mind filled in a blank of tumbling through the air, still entwined with the Hex, smashing Neil to the ground like a bowler picking up a spare. The end of the alleyway was a collapsed heap of rubble and thick black smoke rose in an opaque pall. For a moment everything was silent save for a pattering rain of falling masonry, like ferroconcrete hail. A chunk the size of a fist hit the hex and the creature flinched, its slitted pupils irising wildly as it attempted to focus. She saw Neil brining himself unsteadily to his feet.

We have to get out of here. Junebug thought/said. The effort of communicating made her nauseous and she sneezed violently from the settling dust f the explosion. The air reeked of petrochem and the products of incomplete organic combustion. Gnarlac doubtlessly thought that this was some attempt to double him. A reasonable enough suspicion and one she had just reinforced by blowing a jeep load of goons into their constituent protein strings. The gangsters knew where they were and they knew where the Highlander was. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

“Taya,” Junebug thought, her mind forming the name with crystalline precision. There was a crackle in her mastoid, perhaps a response but nothing she could decode. The Hex was rising unsteadily. Gun fire thrummed froom the end of the alley, idiots emptying weapons into a two story tall pile of crumbled masonry.  They would do better to lighten the load and send some jeeps over the top but then, if they were professionals, they wouldn’t be hired muscle in the ass end of nowhere.

“Taya we have trouble, seal the ship and let no one on board,” Junebug said, still unsure if she was transmitting. The Hex shook like a dog beneath her but she kept her balance with the unconscious grace of a veteran tanker. She should stand up or roll away but even the idea of such a radical change in motion made her vision dim. She dropped her jaw and breathed out equalizing the pressure in her ears with a painful pop. At least nothing vital seemed to be broken They were in a dead end alley with no obvious way out. Junebug looked upwards, it was  a long climb even if the smoke provided a screen from shooters on the other side of the obstruction, an impossible one if they had optics that could pierce the smoke. She looked down a the Hex she still sat astride. 

“Like civilized people,” she repeated, trying to figure out how to deal with the Alien if he didn’t see reason.