Kyra looked up at her new found ally, the hard edge his aura was obvious even without the look of a man who had been in tight places and lived to tell about it. She turned the carbine she had looted over in her hands checking the load automatically. Rifles were not her weapon of choice, though she was familiar with them as part of her training. If she were ever in a situation that she needed that kind of range things had gone badly wrong.

“I was hired to… perform an audit, I guess you might say,” she responded. The Syndicate, one of the larger criminal organizations in this part of space, expected a certain amount of graft in any operation they ran. Afterall, who would trust a man who didn’t skim a few credits here and there, but this relaxed attitude ended once it started to cut into their profit margin. Kyra had started her career as an intelligence officer the Union had been willing to use jaysers to gain an edge in wartime but with the war over all she had to look forward to was a dead end job, or just a dead end. Getting out had not been easy and it had used up every credit she had been able to beg borrow or steal. Contracting for the Syndicate was better than starving, or had seemed so. She should have figured that the fact they were trusting this to an outsider meant they didn’t trust their own people, a fact that her situation illustrated perfectly.

“Unfortunately it seems someone tipped these bastards off,” she went on, nudging one of the unconscious men with her boot. The man didn’t move and Kyra wondered if she shouldn’t drag them into the forest and cut their throats. It would certainly have been the safer course, but murdering an unconscious man wasn’t something she wanted to do unless she had no other choice.

“I came in on a bulk freighter, stowing away, and they just marched right on and snatched me up,” her face twisted in irritation. Her first job blown before she could even get started, though the very fact that it had happened proved that the Syndicate had bigger problems than it had figured on. Someone had tipped the locals off.

“And I don’t think they are really miners, no scuff marks or dirt on their fatigues, the look like they came right out of central supply,” she glanced down at the yawning pit of the open cut mine. The freighter had set down on the landing pad and a vast cloud of dust kicked up by its plasma thrusters was billowing out from where it had touched.

“Which I suppose raises the question of just what the hell is going on down there,” she mused, looking around for but not finding a set of binoculars or some other visual enhancer.

“As for why they were so spooked… I heard some radio chatter while they were interrogating me about someone shooting up the town. I think they thought you were my back up,” she said, lies, as always, coming easy to her. With an impish smile she tapped her temple with her index finger.

“That makes me the mastermind. So your turn, just decided the constabulary here was overstaffed?"