Sayeeda slept uneasily. After the success of their hijacked RIP jump the exhaustion of days of constant work and stress had kicked in. She had barely made it to her bunk before sleep had claimed her. Curious nightmares plagued her. Taya balancing her fathers sever head in a scale. A vision of herself with her arm on fire, flicking it irritably in an attempt to put it out. Saxon making love to her as Terran science officer critiqued her body's performance and Prince Aiden watched with disapproval . Her old troopers lounging among plasma burned corpses while they smoked cigarettes. Briefly she was back in her light attack vehicle as the surf surged over the sides, dragging at the safety release of her harness, only this time it refused to come free even as the water closed over her head.  

She awoke with a start, shaking and sweating despite the relative cool of the climate control system. Irritably, she tossed aside her sheet and sat up grabbing for the bottle of brandy she kept on her bedside table. Finding it empty she hurled it across the room in disgust where it clattered off a bulkhead and landed in one of her boots. 

“For fucks sake,” she muttered to herself and climbed out of bed. Pulling on a pair of exercise shorts and a tan tank top she slipped out of her room and made her way down to the corner of the hold they had designated as the gym. Even with the guns they had stolen from Canek and his mean the space was cavernously empty. Fortunately no one seemed to be around. She wrapped her hands and began to work on the punching bag, circling constantly and delivering powerful jabs and one two combinations in quick succession. The sharp rhythmic slaps of her hands against the bag made a counterpoint to her grunts of effort. As the sweat began to flow she began adding kicks and knee jabs to the routine, pounding the battered old bag hard enough that puffs of dust emerged from the seam at the top. She didn’t seem to tire. Though she hadn’t had much time to think about it, since her encounter with the Terrans it seemed that she was capable of greater and greater feats of endurance. The medical computer didn’t detect any measurable differences in her blood work or in her body scans but she could see and feel the difference. It didn’t seem to be a bad thing, but she couldn’t help but feel violated by the Terrans and she couldn’t help but wonder what it might cost her in the future.

“What did the poor bag ever do to you? Stars don’t you ever give it a rest?” A sleepy Taya asked her, emerging from the crew section wearing a robe and with a towel around her hair and a cup of coffee in her hand. Coffee had been one of the few things they had bought on board on Hahn, other than Indra and the guns of course.

“Never,” she replied, blowing a wisp of hair from infront of her eyes before delivering a lightning fast series of blows that culminated in a spinning kick that shook the mounting bracket.

“You should consider a hobby or something,” Taya observed, taking a seat on a convenient crate. Junebug returned to a balanced fighting stance for a moment before letting her arms fall to her sides.

“There is always some younger out there, someone faster, someone with more talent… and they are probably training,” Junebug told her repeating the aphorisim her instructors had drilled into her.

“I suppose I should take it up then,” Taya said with a grin.

“Only if you want to live,” Junebug replied, the nonchalance in her voice making the younger woman flinch.

“Stars, that's a little bleak” Taya mumbled. Feeling embarrassed Junebug held up her hands and crossed to take a seat on a crate beside Taya.

“Sorry, I get a little dramatic I guess,” she apologised. That didn’t change her opinion, but neither did she want to fight with or scare Taya.

“You want some coffee?” the aristocrat asked, “I made a pot.”

Junebug shook her head, pulled a bottle of water from a crate and tore the seal from it with her teeth before guzzling half of it to quench the thirst her exercise and days of Hahns dry dusty atmosphere had raised. Taya watched her for a moment before continuing.

“Junebug… do you remember your first… you know?” Taya mumbled.

“My first…” Junebug asked in confusion, thinking for a moment that they were straying into areas of sexual remincants that she wasn’t sure she wanted to enter. Then she understood, Taya had just been in her first major gun battle afterall.

“My first kill you mean?” she asked, resisting the urge to scowl. It wasn’t good manners to ask a veteran such questions, but Taya wasn’t a mercenary, at least not by training, and she probably didn’t know that.

“Probably not,” she admitted, “my first couple of actions I was so scared everything is kind of grey. I remember shooting but I’m cursed if I could tell you at what. The first one I remember though…”

She paused to take another drink of water, swished it around her mouth and spat it back out onto the deck. Taya frowned at the unladylike behavior but made no further comment.

“We launched a surprise attack and overan an indig fire base,” she explained, mind far away in the purplish green forests of a distant world.

“Our Tankers torched their bunkers and we rushed them, came over the berm at full power and landed on the other side fishtailing all to hell. A guy ran out of one of the barracks, no pants on, just a jacket and an assault rifle, silhouetted perfectly by the door frame…”

She raised her hands and squeezed her fingers together in a pantomime of firing a heavy stabilized plasma weapon, though Taya probably didn’t recognize it as such.

“First round blew off his knee cap and he fell into the second, right in the chest, pop pop pop,” she explained, lowering her hands.

“Did it bother you?” Taya asked.

“At the time, I was too scared to think about anything other than staying alive,” she explained.

“Afterwards? I don’t know, I guess I’ve done alot worse shit than killing a half naked conscript in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She fell silent and then shook her self alert.

“I keep seeing the man I shot the other day, one second he was alive, the next second blood everywhere,” the girl confided. Junebug lay a hand awkwardly on her knee.

“Hey no sweat,” she told her, “Besides no one is in this line of work that isn’t half a bastard anyway, no doubt he deserved it.” Taya smiled wanly at that.

“Your in this line of work, do you deserve it?” she asked with a slight smile. Junebug grinned wolfishly.

“And how little girl, and how.”

Taya nodded solemly and looked up at her captain.

"Will I be able to stop seeing his face?" Taya asked somewhat timidly. Junebug's face sobered. You didn't lie to your troops, there was no point.

"Only if you want to live."