/* Big Country "Far From Me to You" _Why the Long Face?_ (1995) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE STAR-CROSSED Part V: Ockham's Razor Benjamin D. Hutchins (c) 2010 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2356 DENEB COLD STORAGE COMPANY ROSEMUND CITY DENEB III, DENEB SECTOR_ Business registration records for the Rosemund City spaceport district listed the Deneb Cold Storage Company as defunct, though its charming old-fashioned red brick warehouse stood as something of a landmark. Though the company was no longer in operation, the building's owners, a real estate holding company with the whimsical name of Bolthole & Hideout, Ltd., maintained it in good condition, with the bold white lettering on the uppermost of its three stories clearly legible from the spaceport's main concourse. Automated security systems stood guard over the premises, though in this neighborhood, they didn't see a lot of work. Everyone knew there was nothing of value in there, anyway. Never really had been, even when the company was in business. There were easier ways to get hold of a truckload of imported beef from New Brisbane than to steal it from a chillhouse. Those various burglars and unlawful enterers who had passed on trying the Deneb Cold Storage Company's security would have been startled to learn that the building was -not- empty, and indeed that there were at least two pieces of very valuable equipment within. One of them, a VF-1FS Hyper Valkyrie starfighter, would have been unwieldy to abscond with and difficult to fence, but the other was specifically designed to be portable - and there were quite a few people who would pay a handsome premium to get hold of a genuine pre-Sonset Wedge Defense Force FTL processor, an authentic piece of Zetan overtechnology. Admittedly, it didn't look like much. Someone who hadn't been briefed would, upon seeing it, probably have dismissed it as junk. Who built personal computer chassis out of painted metal any more? A person could do himself an injury trying to carry that out of the third-story window. And that plastic door on the front, that was strictly 20th- century. Behind the door, one of the most sophisticated machine intelligences in the galaxy woke up from a long nap and, with the electrophotonic equivalent of a yawn and a stretch, looked around to see what was up. The answer, Vision was slightly nonplussed to learn, was nothing. She replayed her sensor logs of her last conversation with Gryphon to make sure she hadn't misremembered what he'd said - not very likely, but ironically, with a cognitive structure as advanced as hers, just possible. "I'm just making a quick run to Omega and back for this auction," he said. "Shouldn't be more than three or four days." "Yeah. Because nothing ever goes wrong on Omega," Vision countered, but Gryphon only smiled. "Of course something's going to go wrong. That's what makes it Omega. But it won't be anything I can't handle. I know most of that place's tricks by now. Just stay here and chill. If I'm not back in six months, send the Marines." It hadn't occurred to her at the time that he was making a stupid joke about leaving her behind in a defunct refrigerated warehouse. Now she rolled her eyes and checked her timestamps. She'd gone into sleep mode for 180 days just out of pique, knowing that if he got into a jam and called on her, the priority code would wake her anyway. He hadn't, but he hadn't returned either. That didn't bode well. Vision opened the building's illicit tap to the planetary network, vaulted the firewalls on the Deneb Colony Authority's subether tap to the galactic Internet, and fired a detection process into the Terminus sector's main comm relay. A few moments later, this returned the most efficient ghost route to the quasi-legal servers on Omega. A couple of backchannel manevers later and she was into the station's darkest of grey systems, the private communications node of the queen viper in that particular den of snakes. Aria T'Loak didn't seem particularly surprised to have the face of a deceased New Japanese pop star from 20 years ago suddenly pop onto her desk's main data display, but then, Aria had made her living for a long time by never seeming particularly surprised by anything. She merely glanced at the intruder and said, "Vision. What can I do for you?" "Where is he?" Vision asked without preamble. "You mean you don't know?" Aria replied dryly. "I thought you saw all and knew all, especially where he's concerned. Has his guardian angel been napping on the job?" "Don't jerk me around, Aria," Vision snapped. "I wish I had better news for you, dear," said Aria with unconcealed insincerity, "but I'm afraid you've really dropped the ball this time. My best information is that he's dead." "Dead? How?" "Some of the freelance boys here decided to splash him as he was leaving the Black Dragon auction. He jumped to hyperspace with his Ranger shot full of holes and hasn't been seen since." She shrugged. "If I'd known he was going to do that I'd have asked him to sell me that quarian before he left. Shame to waste such promising young talent." "Okay, you've lost me. What quarian?" "He bought a quarian at the auction. Kind of an impulse buy, you might say. You know how he was about bringing home strays," Aria said with something that might almost have been a nostalgic little smile. "Just a kid, but she had a quad, as our krogan friends like to put it. She tried to get into the Black Dragons' secure inventory area, goddess only knows what for. Trying to steal something valuable enough to take home, I suppose. Anyway, she would've gotten away with it if it'd been anybody but the Black Dragons. They bagged her and sold her off as the last item in the auction, and your boy bought her on his way out. Last seen flying off to fight some merc pilots with her sitting in his lap." She smirked. "It would've been cute if it hadn't been so fucking stupid." Vision sighed. "That's just crazy enough that I believe you," she said. "But you'll pardon me if I don't take your word that he's dead. He's made it out of tighter spots than that before." "Hyperspace is a cruel mistress when there's a hole in your motivator core," said Aria, "but please yourself. Have a look at our ATC, comm logs, whatever you want. Not like I can stop you." "It's not like you to give anything up so graciously," said Vision, but Aria only laughed. "There are two parts to never losing a fight," she said. "One is to make sure you always win the ones you start. The other is never to start one you know you'll lose. Knock yourself out, sweetheart. Just don't come crying to me when you run out of straws to clutch at." Scowling, Vision said, "You're all heart, Aria," and terminated the connection. "Ta," said Aria unconcernedly to the empty screen. /* The Crystal Method "Keep Hope Alive" _Vegas_ (1997) */ Vision did take the asari crimeboss up on her offer to rifle Omega's logs, such as they were; like everything else about the station's administration, they were haphazard and incomplete, but there were a few glimmers and nuggets of potentially useful information to be found. Gryphon's exit vector from the Sahrabarik system, for instance, hadn't been anything like on the correct route for a return to Deneb. In fact, all things being equal, he'd probably have ended up somewhere driftward of the Terminus. With that in mind, she started trawling through the communications traffic of the larger mercenary groups she knew had significant presences on Omega, all of whom had joined in the attempt to take Gryphon down after his dogfight with the two freelancers. Unsurprisingly, the comms for the Blood Pack revealed nothing useful; most members of the Pack barely knew which end of a walkie-talkie to talk into, much less how to send intelligible text messages. The Crimson Lance's traffic was all impenetrable officialese about Atlas Corporation's colonial holdings in the region. The local Eclipse chapter was up to some interesting things with traffic in red sand and dust, giving Vision a few entertaining cycles' worth of distraction as she siphoned off a chunk of their profits and redirected most of the merchandise to law enforcement, but nothing about Gryphon. Settling doggedly into the rhythms of a serious galaxy-wide datamining job, Vision broadened her search parameters and started looking for anything anybody operating in a ten-sector light cone counterspinward of Omega might have logged in the last month about anything that might have something to do with Gryphon, however indirectly. This gave her a raft of false positives, as she'd expected, but deep in the heart of the tangled mess of data that resulted, something twinkled at her, catching the corner of her metaphorical eye. It was a Blue Suns report from one of their small fleet of starships to their home office on Zorya, and it contained a number of cryptic references to a "special acquisition target" in the Scandia-CN38 system. Apparently the Suns had found something there, orbiting the third planet of the system, that they thought was worth putting down a stake in without notifying the Federation - not uncommon in semi- organized areas like the Kresge sector - but they were having some trouble getting a firm hold on it. There were bitter complaints about the paucity of resources allocated to seizing "Resource Delta", which from context Vision guessed was a moon, and references to a "yokel resistance". From that Vision gathered that there were already established colonists on the moon, though a quick check of the Federation Colonial Authority's databases listed no active settlements in the Scandia-CN38 system at all. Wildcatters, then, in all likelihood. Whoever they were, they had balls to stand up to the Blue Suns, but that was none of Vision's business. She was about to discard the thread and move on when something in the next report in the chain jumped out at her. About six months ago, a new player suddenly entered the picture on Resource Delta. An unknown small spacecraft crashed there, and those aboard had survived. Whoever it was took out the Suns' only gunship on the scene when it was sent to investigate the crash site, then joined up with the colonists. A few days later - tipped off, Vision was interested to note, by an agent inside the colony identifed only as M - the Suns had mounted a main-force assault on the colony while its security officer was away... ... only to be driven off by a concerted colonist resistance orchestrated by a quarian... ... and the timely arrival of a Cyclone rider. "Gotcha," said Vision. It took her 120,392 nanoseconds to breach the innermost circle of the Blue Suns' headquarters computer on Zorya, 20,000 more to demand everything the system had on the operation on Resource Delta, and nearly a full second to digest everything that came back. When that process was complete, she knew three things beyond what she considered a reasonable doubt: Gryphon was alive and stranded in the Scandia-CN38 system; He had royally pissed off the Blue Suns' leadership, even though they didn't know who he was; and They were (after dicking around for several months) mounting a second expedition to re-take Resource Delta in greater force. That expedition would be leaving Zorya tomorrow, so there wasn't a lot of time. She couldn't interdict them remotely - maybe slow them down a little, if she fooled around with their materials requisitions, but that was the kind of thing live system operators would work around quickly enough. Computers could be fobbed off with excuses indefinitely, assuming they had no intelligence of their own, but even the dumbest organic sapients would eventually get impatient. What she needed more than anything else was a pair of hands... and hands were among the few things she didn't have. She pulled back from the Blue Suns system, erased any trace of her presence there, and turned her attention to the undernet bulletin boards that had gotten her creator into this mess in the first place. HELP WANTED... WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2356 BLUE SUNS INTERSTELLAR OPERATIONS DEPOT NO. 3 ZORYA, ISMAR SECTOR_ Randokrad looked up from his work terminal at the sound of the door, saw Brejik stomping toward him, and sighed. A day just wasn't complete around here lately without Brejik storming into the motor pool and saying, "Rando, what's the fucking hold-up? We were supposed to go today." Rando sighed deeply and replied in his heavy, monotone voice, "Not even bothering to disguise annoyance: The special supplies have not yet arrived from Carentan. They are en route as we speak. Sarcastic excitement: If you know a way of intercepting a hyperspace transport and getting its cargo here faster than it's already coming, please go partners with me in developing it so we can both become incredibly wealthy." Brejik ground his teeth. "Christ almighty, Rando, we've been sitting on this goddamn mission for months. I -finally- get the green light from the brass to go back and teach those farmers a lesson, and now we get held up because the -supplies- are late?" Rando would have shrugged if his massive elcor shoulders had been built to allow it. "Unsympathetically: There have apparently been some computer problems at Carentan Depot. The shipment was supposed to leave yesterday and it did not. That's not my problem." "Yeah, well, if this mission gets called off because you couldn't get our shit on the dropship in time, it's -gonna- be your problem. Six months I've been waiting for this chance." "Exaggerated patience: Then another day is hardly going to kill you. Calm down or go bother someone else. I've got work to do." Brejik snarled and stormed out through the side door into the equipment room, where the troopers of his squad were triple-checking their gear at his insistence. "Hardware's late?" asked Desh. "Yeah," Brejik grunted. "Rando swears it'll be in tomorrow. If not, there's gonna be hell to pay." "Think it's gonna be worth waiting for the shipment?" "It fucking better be. It cost me six months of kissing Relkan's ass." "Hey, Brejik, I thought you liked batarian ass," Groz called from across the room. "And Cardassian, and asari, and Minbari... " Desh muttered. "Fuck you guys," Brejik grumbled. "Just make sure your gear's good to go. Skids up at 1400 tomorrow." CLUB AL-RIDHADH, DENEB INTERSTELLAR SPACEPORT DENEB III, DENEB SECTOR_ Club al-Ridhadh was smoky, dark, and full of the formless thump of universalist techno, like most such third-echelon spaceport clubs throughout the galaxy. It wasn't the kind of place business travelers got a drink in while waiting for their connecting flights to Salusia, but it served an important function in the economy of the port all the same. In a place like this, no one would look twice at a greying- haired, battle-scarred old man in orange-and-white body armor with a blaster pistol on his hip. This was where all the hunter-investigators, mercs, and freelance security types came when they passed through Deneb on their way to less fully tamed systems. The man paused just inside the doorway and scanned the room with mismatched eyes, one dark, the other ghost-blue. Seeing the red light above the door to private room 7, he crossed to that door, punched the authentication code he'd been given into the keypad, and entered, keeping a hand near his weapon. Places like this were good spots to set up ambushes; he'd done it himself a few times. He had no reason to believe that anybody was after him right now... but he had no reason to believe nobody was, either. The room, little more than a circular booth with its walls continued all the way to the ceiling and a tiny vestibule, was empty. The man checked for other entrances, ceiling hatch, what have you; found none; seated himself so that he could cover the door. He'd give the person who'd invited him to this meeting five minutes and then clear out. People didn't keep a man like him waiting. A moment later, the holographic projector in the middle of the table glowed to life and displayed the image of a human woman, perfectly resolved, at about one-sixth scale. She had the same face as the woman in the vidmail that had been his invitation to this meeting. "Zaeed Massani?" she asked. "That's me," he replied. His voice was hoarse, as hard-traveled as the rest of him looked, and had more than a trace of a Crown Colonies accent. "You looking to hire a gun?" "Actually, I'm more interested in your hands, but it may come to that," the woman said. "I picked you for the job because you've got experience, you come highly recommended, your past clients claim you're ethical for a merc, and you've got a well-documented beef with the Blue Suns. How'd you like to throw a monkey wrench in one of their secret schemes and help out some colonists at the same time?" "I don't usually take colony jobs," Zaeed told her, "but if it means getting a crack at the Suns, I might make an exception. It won't be cheap, though." The table ejected a small datapad from the slot facing Zaeed's seat. He took it, looked at it, and the eyebrow above his pale eye arched up his scarred forehead at the sight of the number it displayed. "How does that grab you?" the woman asked flatly. "You've definitely got my attention," said Zaeed. "Maybe we should meet in person." "We -are- meeting in person," she said. "You can call me Vision. Got any problems working for a machine intelligence?" Zaeed regarded her holographic form for a moment, then smiled. "Lady, for what you're offering to pay, I wouldn't care if you were Patina, Queen of the Junkions," he said. "I'm in. Give me the rundown." SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2356 GOODYEAR_ Gryphon and Tali were taking it easy in their garage, tinkering with assorted bits of Ranger and desultorily discussing various points of the prospective escape ship's design, when Garrett Redding suddenly burst in through the side door, red-faced and breathless. "Deputy Harris!" he blurted, then reined himself in long enough to nod politely to Tali and pant, "Ma'am." Turning his attention back to Gryphon, Redding went on, "Doc Solus and Sheriff Chen need you at the security office right away." Gryphon straightened up from digging around inside the Ranger's one remaining engine and wiped his hands on a rag. "What's up, Garrett?" "Dunno. Doc just said to run an' get you. Said it's an emergency." Gryphon and Tali exchanged glances. Without a word, Tali took her scattergun from its rack by the door and stowed it across the small of her back. RENSSELAER RIDGE (10.2 MILES DOWNSPIN OF GOODYEAR)_ Alice Hernandez lay flat at the top of Rensselaer Ridge, her eye to the scope of her prized Atlas Cyclops rifle. She, most of all the colonists bound for Zodokren on the Goodyear Sojourner, had been disappointed to find that Halo had no wildlife, because since childhood she had been a hunter. In her youth, she'd tracked game and bagged trophies on upwards of two dozen worlds, including some of the toughest, wiliest, most dangerous creatures in the galaxy. The one trophy she'd kept from that illustrious career was a krayt dragon pearl - valuable, yes, but nothing she would ever part with. It was a relic of the worthiest opponent she'd felled in a long career of paradoxically doing battle with and revering nature. What she was looking at through her scope today was considerably less noble than that great beast, and considerably less valuable too. It was a man, tall and swarthy, dressed in the armor of a Blue Suns centurion and supervising at least three dozen men as they disembarked from a Dakota-class dropship. He clearly had no idea she was out there. She clicked forward one mag level and recentered her crosshairs on his forehead. At 1300 yards, it was a tricky shot, but not impossible. Not nearly. Alice might not have had anything to hunt on Halo, but that didn't mean her rifle had spent the last ten years on the shelf. If she had to, she was confident she could take this guy out. That wasn't her job, though. "One dropship, Dakota-class," she said into the boom mic attached to her headset. "Infantry disembarking now. Looks like platoon strength. Body armor, standard weapons. Couple of guys with what look like GENOM heavy repeaters. ... What are -those- assholes waiting for?" "Say again?" Chen's voice said in her ear. "The infantry's forming up, but there are a couple of guys with SMGs hanging back by the dropship. Engineers, maybe. They're... ... aw, -crap.- Base, the Blue Suns have brought armor. I repeat, ARMOR. They're offloading a Saladin hovertank." Back in Goodyear, Chen looked up from the commset, first at Mordin, then Gryphon. "Well," said Gryphon philosophically, "now we know how they plan to counter our Cyclone." "Hell, we've got nothing that can stand up to a -tank,-" Chen said. "They could flatten the whole town with that thing." "Well. We don't have anything that can take it on head-to-head, no," Gryphon agreed. "But that just means we'll have to outmaneuver them." He turned to Tali. "We better get ready." She nodded. "Right." Brejik Pak could barely believe he'd finally made it back to Delta for his long-awaited revenge. Six long, humiliating months, waiting around at HQ while the brass - for which read Vido - decided whether this lead was worth following up. In the end, the outcome of Vido's deliberations was never really in doubt; even if this ring wasn't so obviously valuable, a slight like the Suns' previous defeat could never be allowed to pass. The only question was whether Vido would permit Brejik to lead the second assault, give him the chance to redeem himself, or... not. Fortunately, the Suns' cruel commander had been in a charitable mood, or maybe he was just dazzled by the avaricious vision of what a find like the ring could mean for his outfit. Archaeologists and science dorks across the galaxy would be clamoring to get their hooks into a relic of an unknown ancient civilization, and once these yokels were driven off and the Suns registered the find for their own, they'd have to pay Vido through the nose for the privilege of coming out here and looking around - and pay him again for "security" while they were here. It was the perfect racket, the kind of opportunity that came along less than once an average lifetime. And Brejik had almost screwed it up, so he was lucky to be walking around with his lungs where they belonged and not hanging out of his back pocket. He knew this. Also that he wouldn't get a third chance. Not that I'll need one with -this- baby, he thought, patting the slope of the Saladin's armor he could reach from the commander's cupola. If that asshole with the Cyclone is still here, he's gonna wish he'd never decided he could screw with the Blue Suns. Aerial recce drones had provided him with a nice overview of the town, which looked like about the same nowhere shithole it'd been when he was last here. They were approaching from the other side this time; this was rocky canyon country, not like the mountains and hills to the colony's upspin side, and the approach here was almost like driving up a road. Brejik turned his cupola to take a full 360-degree view of the situation. The platoon was spread out in good order, his best riflemen and the two heavies riding on the Saladin's skirt covers, the rest in a neat right echelon or trailing behind; the engineers rode their rugged little trail motorcycles behind the lot, ready to sprint forward and deal with obstacles or hang back and provide a rearguard, as developments warranted. Distance to objective, six miles. "No screwing around with ultimatums and trying to intimidate the yokels into surrendering," Brejik announced on the Suns tac band. "Not this time. This time we roll right into town, take out the Landmaster, kill that Cyclone asshole and anyone else who shoots at us, flatten the town hall, and -then- maybe we'll think about letting anybody who's still alive give up." "Hell yeah," said his driver. "What about that alien piece who stonewalled Kastrel last time?" Brejik smirked. "First we'll find out what she looks like under that helmet. If she ain't too revolting, well, we'll see. Hell, even if she is, we can always turn her around." The driver and several of the other Suns on the freq laughed. Major Pak was not a man who was known for letting a woman's looks get in the way. Rumor around the squad was that he'd once nailed a Cirenian, and they didn't even -have- faces, not that you'd -call- faces. Four and a half miles away, Tali'Shukra nar Kythera tuned out the Suns tac band and switched her omni-tool to diagnostic mode. Time for one last check of her equipment... and she didn't feel a burning need to listen to any more of -that-, thank you. Tali was not, by nature, a bloodthirsty woman; but she would have had to admit, if you had asked her right then, that she was rather looking forward to killing Major Brejik Pak. Five miles away, Gryphon switched his CVR helmet comm to the encrypted Goodyear Security freq. "Redstar One, in position," he reported. "We're good to go here," Chen replied. "Barricades up and manned, noncombatants bunkered down." "Redstar Two," came Tali's voice. "They just passed my position. Inbound in force." Gryphon smiled. "Showtime." Brejik hadn't been entirely sure what to expect from the colonists, but one thing he -hadn't- been expecting was for his primary target to come out and -meet- him. He knew the guy had balls, but only a -maniac- would challenge a Saladin on a -motorcycle,- transforming or not. Brejik's Class-20 autocannon could reduce the crazy bastard to a pink mist with a single hit, and with the Saladin's maneuverability, he'd get one. "He's just -sitting- there," said the driver. And so he was, maybe 200 yards away, at a narrow spot in the canyon "highway"; sitting astride his Cyclone in his grey armor, one foot on the ground, like he was waiting for somebody. As the Saladin swung into view, he raised one hand from the handlebars in a casual greeting. "He's got balls, I'll give him that," said Brejik's gunner appreciatively. "Waste him," Brejik snarled. "Easiest shot I've ever made," the gunner replied, then fired. The man on the Cyclone wasn't there. For a second Brejik thought that meant they'd hit him - until something glinted high up in the sky and, looking up, he saw the sonofabitch was in battroid mode, just reaching the peak of a booster jump. "Holy shit, a standing mode switch," the gunner remarked. "This guy's a pro." As if to punctuate the point, a pair of micro-missiles spiraled down from the now-falling figure. Perfectly aimed, they wiped two of the Saladin's passengers right off the fenders. Brejik couldn't decide whether to admire the Cyclone rider or fly into a murderous rage, so he did both, the latter never having been a hard thing for him to do anyway. "Chase that motherfucker down!" he roared. "He can't run from us forever." /* Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers "Out in the Cold" _Into the Great Wide Open_ (1991) */ That's it, thought Gryphon as he grounded hard and pushed the Cyclone into a power-assisted sprint. Forget about your mission. Follow the rabbit. He tapped the boosters again, diving behind a boulder just as the Saladin's cavernous main gun spat fire and obliterated it. When he emerged from the dust cloud he was back in cycle mode, tear-assing for a tributary canyon a hundred yards ahead. Brejik didn't hesitate to order pursuit, and his driver, who was both afraid of him and just as vicious, didn't hesitate to comply. Tali had plenty to do. She'd only learned how to operate a motorcycle a couple-three months ago, and now she was riding hell-for- leather across uneven ground while keeping an eye on the tactical plot her omni-tool was displaying and making sure she didn't get lost in the canyons at the same time. This was multitasking of a whole different order from compiling a drive controller kernel, patching an atmospheric processor duct, and managing an energy distribution matrix all at once... but it was also a lot more exciting. Up ahead, a figure in Blue Suns armor shot out of one of the side passages on a compact trail cycle - one of the Suns engineers, peeled off from the left-behind infantry to scout ahead. Brejik wasn't -all- stupid. He knew he didn't have proper recce data for this canyon system; he'd only bothered to have the drones map the direct route to Goodyear. He wanted to make sure the Cyclone rider wasn't leading him into a trap. And since that was exactly what he was doing, Tali would just have to make sure that this guy didn't file a report. Pressing herself even lower to the Bartley's tank, so that her helmet was entirely behind the bike's little windshield, she opened the throttle still further with her right hand and snatched her scattergun from its magnetic mount on her back with her left. The weapon unfolded and powered up, vibrating gently in her hand to let her know it was ready; she pulled even with the Suns engineer. He noticed her suddenly, flinched so violently in surprise that he nearly crashed - his left hand went to the side of his helmet in the instinctive gesture of a man keying his comm - - too late. Tali lost control of the Bartley as the Suns bike's fuel cell cooked off, slewing sideways and going down hard, but its armor and her own prevented any serious injury. She was on her feet in moments, checking that everything was in place. Her encounter suit was built to withstand hazards up to and including combat, so even without the CVR modifications she and Gryphon had made, it would probably have handled a minor motorcycle crash without much problem; as it was, she was only slightly scuffed and winded. She stowed the Bryar, picked up the Bartley, climbed back aboard, and gunned it up the canyon. Now she was behind schedule. That wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. Brejik's gunner nearly tagged the Cyclone rider three times during the first part of the chase, before the canyon got twisty enough that line-of-sight was only intermittent, but they were staying with him, even reeling him in a little in the straight parts. "He doesn't know where he's going," the driver yelled back over the roar of the hoverfans. "See how he hesitates at the bends? That near-miss with the boulder must have rattled him. One good straight stretch and we'll have him!" "Save your ammo," Brejik told his gunner. "This goddamn gulch can't go on forever. Soon as he breaks into the open... " The Cyclone hesitated, nearly skidded out on a patch of loose gravel, then plunged around a left-hand bend. Brejik's driver stood on the vector fans, expertly skidding the Saladin around the corner so that its fixed armament would be aimed dead straight on the other side... ... to find that the canyon had come to a dead end. The man on the Cyclone pulled an impossible-looking J-turn - Brejik really did grudgingly have to hand it to him, he knew how to ride that thing - and halted facing the Saladin as it swept into view. "Looks like you just ran outta room," Brejik crowed through the Saladin's PA. "One of us did," replied an unfamiliar voice on the general comm band. "-Steady- sonofabitch," said the driver, impressed. "Hold her, Desh," the gunner said, pressing his eye into the rubber cup of his cannon sight. "I wanna make sure he don't suffer none," he added in an exaggerated hillbilly accent. 150 yards away, Gryphon sat with one foot on the ground and his thumb on the mode control, thinking, If we got the timing wrong on this, I'm going to feel really stupid for about a nanosecond. Then he saw a flicker of movement back at the box canyon's last bend and knew that they hadn't. Hopefully. Brejik's gunner's sneer was threatening to warp his face permanently when he got his firing solution exactly the way he wanted it and prepared to pull the trigger - - and then was wiped off his face by the look of surprise that sprang up when an alarm squealed on his panel. "Laser designator!" he cried. "Right aft - " "What - " Brejik blurted. Uncommanded, Desh stomped left vector, intending to spin the Saladin on its axis and present its forward armor to whoever was back there lasing them. If one of the colonists had sneaked up on them with a Mauler antivehicle missile or something, they might just be able to knock out a lift fan from back there. With its fixed forward cannon, the Saladin was designed to make slashing head-on attacks, wheel, and come around for more; even more so than other tanks, it had most of its armor in the front. But what the hell, they'd be turned around long before a missile could reach them. The three seconds it took the SPARTAN Laser to charge up and fire after she pulled the trigger were the longest of Tali's life. Despite the ascending whine of its systems and the brightening glow of its charge indicator, she had just enough time to entertain the notion that she'd damaged it dumping the bike and it wasn't going to work, in which case she'd be a sitting duck for that monster autocannon in just about -another- three seconds. She could see the vanes of the Saladin's vector fans move, actually sense its mass shift as it dipped slightly and began to rotate. And then she couldn't see anything, because the laser vomited a beam of such intense red light that her visor automatically flicked to black for 750 milliseconds to keep her from being blinded. It returned to transparency in time for her to see the whole aft armor structure of the tank melt and crumple inward, glowing yellow-hot - it reminded her of the cheesy special effects in those monster movies Gryphon liked, where the filmmakers would take blowtorches to model tanks and then play it back at high speed - before the vehicle's HBT cells cooked off in a spectacular blue-orange fireball. The shockwave raced back up the canyon and might have slapped her clean off her feet but for her Bartley battroid's gyros. Gryphon wheelied his Cyclone triumphantly and rode it through the rain of debris, bits and flecks of the Saladin pinging off his armor, then skidded to a halt next to her, his jubilant laughter ringing in her ears. "-Perfect- shot!" he declared, reaching up to clap her on the shoulder. "-Beautiful!-" Tali secured the SPARTAN Laser on its mount and then dropped her Bartley back into cycle mode. "Some kind of quip about who's taking it from behind now is hovering just out of my reach," she said darkly. "It's probably just as well." "OutSTANDing," Gryphon said, and then with enormous satisfaction, "Base, this is Redstar One. Mission. Accomplished." "Roger that, the rest of 'em know it, too," Chen replied. "They're bolting for the LZ." "Dammit! I was hoping they wouldn't figure it out that fast," Gryphon said. "I -want- that dropship." He clapped Tali on the shoulder again. "Come on!" They rode as hard as they could, pushing their Cyclones to the limits of their performance and themselves to the edge of their skills, but in the end, it wasn't enough. Setting the ambush for the Saladin had forced them too deep into the canyon maze. They arrived at the edge of the wash where the Blue Suns had landed just in time to see the Dakota lift off. "Shit!" Gryphon snarled, slapping his Cyclone's tank in frustration. "There goes a loose end we couldn't afford." Tali regarded him thoughtfully, but said nothing. After a few moments glaring up into the sky after the dropship, he sighed and settled back into the Cyclone's seat. "Ah, well. At least we put the run to 'em again. Hell, maybe they'll decide this place isn't worth the trouble and leave us alone." So saying, he toed the Cyclone into gear, turned around, and headed back to town. Tali sat looking pensively into the sky for a moment longer, then followed. She didn't believe what he'd just said, but that was all right; she knew he didn't believe it either. Gryphon had cheered up by the time they got back to town, and once they were there it would've been hard to sustain a bleak mood anyway. The citizens of Goodyear knew they weren't out of the woods, but they also knew that they'd just won a major victory. They'd boxed the Blue Suns' ears solidly and sent them packing from Halo for a second time, and this time they'd done it -without- the firefight spilling into the town itself. As such, once assured by Mordin that the Suns had left the system entirely, they were fully prepared to party. In his day, Gryphon had attended more than his fair share of victory parties. He'd been the commander of a very successful fighter squadron for a very long time, and that wasn't even counting the various ground operations, special missions, sporting competitions, and amateur talent festivals he'd participated in during his career. By comparison with some of those, the shindig that unfolded that night at Charley's was a relatively tame affair, but all the same, there were 225 people in Goodyear and they were -all- in the right mood. What resulted was sort of half Viking feast and half high school dance, with copious food and drink, loud music, dancing, and a lot of laughter. The big room at Charley's, scratch-built behind the tavern's standard prefab frontage, was specifically designed to hold everyone in town - it was where the Goodyearites held their annual town meeting - and it certainly seemed like everyone was there tonight. The security people were celebrating the fact that the firefight they'd feared hadn't materialized; the civilians were celebrating the fact that their town was still in one piece; everyone was celebrating the fact that they'd get to see another beautiful morning on Halo, albeit possibly not the very next one. Sometime after midnight, having completely lost track of time, Gryphon found himself sitting at the end of the bar with a schooner of Charley's really rather lovely kristallweizen at his elbow and a pretty redhead whose name he couldn't quite remember hanging on his arm. "Seriously, are you, like, -married- to her or something?" the girl - Harriet, that was her name, Harriet something - was asking. "Huh?" Gryphon replied. He wasn't sure he'd heard her right, what with the music, and most of his attention was taken up by the peculiar spectacle of Mordin Solus with cans on, deejaying. "I said, are you, like, -married- to her or something?" Harriet asked more loudly. Gryphon still wasn't sure what she was on about for a moment; then he shook his head and said, "Oh, uh, no, not really. We're just, uh... " He searched his mind for some concise way to summarize what he and Tali were to each other, and failed completely on account of there wasn't one. Or at least that was his theory. "... Friends," he concluded lamely. Speaking of Tali, where the hell was she? She'd been celebrating right along with everyone else for the first part of the evening, albeit without the food and drink part, but at some point in the last half-hour or so she seemed to have disappeared. He scanned the room - she ought to be easy enough to pick out - but no, there wasn't any sign of her. Had she gone home? Without telling him? He was having a good time, but if she'd wanted to call it a night he'd happily have gone back with her. She didn't have to leave alone. "Oh," said Harriet. "So, then, you're not... -doing- anything tonight?" "What?" Gryphon asked distractedly. "'Cause if you're -not,-" Harriet went on, toying coyly with a curl of her hair, "I can think of a few things we could get up to that would... " She trailed off, her face going blank with surprise. This was not that odd, since it was only the same thing everyone else in the room was doing. The entire population of Goodyear had suddenly stopped talking, stopped partying, stopped everything, and all of them were just facing the door and staring. Tali'Shukra had returned to the party... ... and she was dressed accordingly. She was still wearing her encounter suit, of course; to enter this room without it would have been pure and simple suicide. But over it, instead of the adapted CVR-3 parts she'd had on earlier or her usual, familiar sashes and wrappings of snug, meticulously embroidered grey-violet fabric, she had on a dress, body-hugging above the waist, ruler-straight and ankle-length below, with short sleeves and long gloves that left a few inches of black duraplast visible between and a slightly more elaborate version of the customary hood covering her helmet and its atmosphere supply lines. Like her usual accoutrements, the dress and its accompanying pieces were a subdued grey-violet color, though perhaps weighted more toward violet and less toward grey than the others. The fabric was richer and heavier, edged with what looked like gold, and the intricate spirals and circuit-diagram-like patterns of the embroidery gleamed in pale gold as well. She'd even contrived to add gold-toned accents to the sleek lines of her helmet, on the little flanges flanking the "snout" at the front. Tali advanced slowly into the suddenly silent room, thankful that no one could see the flaming blush she felt on her face. As it so often did, the anonymity of her visor gave her a boldness she might not otherwise have owned. Probably from that, combined with the effect she knew the dress was having, she felt an uncharacteristic sway creeping into her gait - nothing overt, nothing flagrant or trashy, but a subtle announcement that, encounter suit or no, she was a fit young female of her species and she was damned proud of it. Gryphon sat and watched her walk toward him for a few moments, then slid off the barstool and gently moved Harriet's hand off his arm. "Excuse me," he said quietly to no one in particular. "I think this dance is for me." "... Yeah," Harriet agreed, still staring in astonishment at the quarian. "I, uh... wow, yeah, I think it is." As he watched the two converge in the middle of the suddenly vacant dance floor, Mordin Solus smiled and punched the keys of his sound system. /* François Couperin "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" _Pieces for Harpsichord, Book 2: 6th Order in B-flat major_ (1717) */ The song he played was a simple 18th-century French piece for harpsichord, entirely out of place at a victory party in a small farming town on the edge of a 24th-century nowhere, and yet it seemed to fit the moment perfectly somehow. Gryphon knew how to dance to this sort of music because, strangely, it was one of the things you learned as a midshipman in the Imperial Morita Navy. And Tali, well... she improvised and adapted, as quarians do, and if her technique wasn't perfect, it hardly mattered; no one here was going to hold her to the standards of a Moritan drawing-room dancing master. Gryphon was too busy being caught up in the cadence of the music, the curiously mechanical ebb and rush that substituted for the dynamic range the harpsichord didn't have - which made it harder, but oddly satisfying, to dance to; the sensations of dancing with this remarkable creature in his arms; the ghostly silver reflections of her eyes. And everyone else in the room was too busy just watching them flow across the floor. The more imaginative colonists could almost picture the man they knew as Dan Harris in some ancient uniform instead of his battered jumpsuit, the dashing young officer come to pay court to his sweetheart, the spartan little colonial tavern as grand ballroom. It wasn't a long song, and soon - all too soon - it was over. As the last quavering tone tailed off into silence and the two stood still, forehead to forehead, in the center of the room, the moment teetered in the gap between one second and the next. Mordin let it balance there for just exactly long enough... /* Mott the Hoople "The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll" _The Hoople_ (1974) */ ... then touched another key and broke the spell entirely, bringing the people of Goodyear out of their collective trance and sending them flooding back onto the dance floor so that they'd be in position to get down once the piano intro was finished. Charley's, and the colonists, rocked to the classics for the rest of the night, and the dashing young officer and his sweetheart rocked right along with them. Dawn was peeking in around the edges of Spare 14's window blinds as Gryphon sat on the edge of the bed, yawning hugely. "We missed the Shipping Forecast," he said. Tali looked back at him over her shoulder from the closet, where she was hanging up her dress. "I don't think that's going to be a problem today, of all days," she said. He chuckled. "Probably not," he conceded, swinging his feet up and lying back. She climbed up next to him, settling down in what had become her usual spot, and rested her head against his shoulder and her hand on his chest. Through the tactile pickups on her glove's fingertips, she could feel the warmth of his skin, a little warmer than usual tonight because of all the activity (and presumably the beer, though now that she thought about it, she didn't really know if alcohol affected him). He put his arm around her and idly traced a finger up and down one of the seams of her sleeve. Tali sighed. "This isn't really very fair to you," she said. "Mm?" he replied. "... This," she said, making a vague gesture. "I mean... except for really special occasions, this is about as heavy as a quarian date gets, but... it has to be frustrating for you. Unless... " She hesitated, then said all in a little rush, "Unless you don't think of me that way, in which case I don't know why you don't run me off." Gryphon hitched himself up on an elbow and tilted her visor toward him slightly with his thumb, so that the light from the window would stop falling across it and obscuring her eyes. "What brought this on all of a sudden?" he asked. "You have to ask after tonight?" she replied. "It's just... I feel like I have to face it now. The way you make me feel. I didn't really want to admit it at first, even to myself, and then I was afraid of how you'd react, but after tonight I thought... I mean... " She shook her head. "Forget it. I shouldn't have said anything. This was -stupid.- I can't even show you my face, much less let you... touch me. And yet every night I climb into bed with you, and every night you let me. You hold me, trust me with your secrets, share your life with me. There are human women who are... available... here; I saw you with one tonight, and you brushed her aside just to dance with me. Me, who you can't even kiss." She looked at him for a long moment, the ghosts of her eyes searching his face. "And I don't understand why." He didn't answer right away; just gazed thoughtfully at the shadow of her face behind the visor, his expression gently pensive. "Are you familiar with the philosophical principle called Ockham's razor?" he asked. She shook her head. "'Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,'" he said. "Plurality should not be posited without necessity. In other words, you shouldn't assume something needs a complicated explanation when a simple one will do." "Meaning... ?" Tali asked. "Meaning I danced with you because I wanted to. I hold you because I want to. I share my life with you because I want to." Gryphon smiled. "Whether I can kiss you or not." "Oh. I... oh." Tali seemed to grapple with that for a few moments, then said, "It just... seems so strange. You don't look it, but you're so much older than I am. You've seen so much, done so much, and I'm just a child. And an alien." "You're not a child, Tali. Yeah, I'm older than dirt, and thanks for reminding me, but you're old enough that your own people think you're ready to make your way in the universe - and you do a damn good job of it. You're smart. You're brave. You're... -good.- And you're beautiful." He pinged a fingertip gently against her visor. "Whatever you look like in there," he added wryly. She made a sort of sniffling laugh and said nothing for several minutes. Gryphon was starting to think she'd fallen asleep when she said softly, "Thank you, Benjamin. I can't... I can't put into words what that means to me. Not in your language, anyway. But I want you to know that... " She paused, struggling to articulate what she was thinking, then went on haltingly, "If you change your mind... if you decide you need to... to look elsewhere for the things I... I can't... give you... I'll understand." Gryphon chuckled and turned toward her, pulling the covers over them and gathering her to him, edges and all. "I've got all I want right here," he said. There was more to say, of course, much more. About the precarious nature of their situation in Goodyear, about all that they were leaving unfinished in their lives by staying - Tali's pilgrimage, Gryphon's quest for answers, the near-certainty that those vectors would lead in opposite directions. He knew that if he returned to his life as a fugitive, he could hardly expect her to go with him. She knew that if she returned to the Migrant Fleet, she could never do so with an Earthman in tow, much less the galaxy's most wanted criminal. Both of them knew they'd have to confront all those things, even if they -did- somehow contrive to bring the colony's Blue Suns problem to a successful resolution. But that was for some other time. /* The Traveling Wilburys "Handle With Care" _Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1_ (1988) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presented UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE Star-Crossed Part V: Ockham's Razor To be continued in Part VI: The Moral High Ground E P U (colour) 2010