***Disclaimer: I don't own Outlaw Star. It is property of the Sunrise/Sotsu agency. While I'm at it, I might as well cover all of my bases and inform you that I can't take credit for Semtex, either***

Young Ceasar Dvorak was excited. He was a few days away from graduating school. Granted he wasn't graduating with honors, but his father was very proud of him. For once, somebody in the family would have a brighter future, his father kept telling him. Ceasar would be the first one in his family to graduate. He smiled as the fading rays of the sun shone down on him during the long walk from school. His father wasn't a rich man, but for graduation night, the two of them and his kid sister, Natalya, would be going to the fanciest resturant on Morenci-9. Of course, Natalya was very smart, and it was more than likely she would be graduating with honors in a few years, but this was his moment. Ceasar looked at his watch. Hopefully his father wouldn't be too upset with him for lingering after school to play one last pick-up game of football with his classmates.

The assassin stood over the corpse of Nestor Dvorak, and kicked the smoking pistol away from his body as a precaution. At first, the man didn't look that dangerous, but nearly everyone on the frontier worlds kept some sort of firearm within reach. The assassin stared back at the two bullet holes in the wall- that was entirely too close for comfort. Nestor's partner was nowhere to be seen. The assassin was wondering what to do next when the door to the house opened and closed. It might be Nestor's partner.

"Poppa! I'm home!" A voice called out .

Twilight Suzuka tightened her grip on the bokken.

Something wasn't right. It was entirely too quiet Ceasar thought as he walked in. It's just too quiet and drafty in here.

"Hello? Dad?! Are you here?" he asked. He made his way through the kitchen. He wasn't downstairs. Nothing really seemed amiss, just so very quiet. But some morbid urge compelled Ceasar to head upstairs and check the hallway. As soon as he reached the top stair, he saw his father laying face-down in a pool of blood on the floor.

"Poppa? Oh no.....God no" It felt like all the life had been sucked out of Ceasar. Everything seemed like it was in slow motion. He ran to his father.

"Poppa? Speak to me...please. Come on....you'll be okay" He checked for a pulse and there was none. Suddenly Ceasar noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. Standing in front of the open window at the end of the hall was a tall dark-haired woman in a flowing white kimono. She couldn't have been much older than him. She loosely held onto a wooden sword in her right hand and surveyed the scene with a degree of deja-vu. Ceasar started to pick up his father's body, and the assassin was caught off guard by what happened next.

"Help me....please! My father's been hurt. It looks real bad...." he pleaded to the assassin.

Time seemed to freeze- Suzuka's kimono flapped in the breeze that was coming in through the window. It slowly was dawning that the woman Ceasar was staring at was the one who did this to this father. There was no time to fear for his own life, because in the blink of an eye, Suzuka was out the window and gone. But he could never forget that face.

FOUR YEARS LATER

Ceasar Dvorak had arranged for a meeting with the Singh brothers at one of the more upscale Chinese restaurants in Heiphong. They didn't know him very well, but they had a job offer for him. Ceasar had pretty much accepted the offer but still wanted to meet and haggle over the price and ask for more specifics. Since they were footing the bill, he figured the least he could do was show up early. Ceasar had ordered a bottle of Quilmes beer and a small bowl of soup when they finally arrived. As per request of the 2 remaining Singh brothers, Hans and Nils, Ceasar showed up unarmed. He only had with him a cellphone and his trenchcoat when their bodyguards searched him. The Singh brothers had more protection than the Viceroy of Heiphong as a general rule, although only three bodyguards had accompanied them to the resturant that night.

"So, do you always hire outside help to kill the last assassin whose services you've used?" Ceasar asked Hans bluntly.

"No, that's not the case..." Nils said defensively

"What my brother is trying to say is that this particular assassin has become less reliable over time." Hans calmly explained. "She flatly refused us on our last offer- not very typical of her. We fear that she may become a liability in the long run. It's almost as if she's lost her stomach for that line of work."

"That bitch may be trying to blackmail us." Nils added

"I see" Ceasar nodded "So you and her must go back a ways..."

"Quite some time" Hans said.

Ceasar cracked a smile. Keep talking, assholes he said to himself. They were practically confessing to hiring the kimono-clad assassin to kill his father. "It seems like you've got plenty of men to spare. Why not send one of them after her?"

"You have to understand" Hans continued. "She may have lost her touch, but she's still a very dangerous adversary. If something should go wrong, we wouldn't want it to be traced back to us."

"What do you think will happen when you shoot at the devil in the back and miss?" Nils added testily. The younger, whiny sycophant Singh brother was really starting to get on Ceasar's nerves. "We've given you all of the neccecary information about your target, Mr. Dvorak. Now we need your answer."

Ceasar paused, not wanting to look too eager to take on the job.

"It's a deal" he said, reaching across the table to shake the elder Sing brother's hand, but giving Nils a wide berth. He noticed a Daewoo pistol in a holster underneath Hans' coat. "Of course, I'll need 70,000 Wong up front". The 2 brothers looked at each other, nonverbally agreeing that it was a fair price. Ceasar proceeded to dial up his account number on the cellphone so that Hans could electronically transfer the funds.

"By the way, have either of you two been to Morenci-9?" Ceasar asked matter-of-factly.

"Morenci-9?" Nils asked.

"Yeah; little copper-mining planet out past Farfallas? I grew up there."

"We have some business interests there, but we haven't been there ourselves" Hans spoke up. "Most of the casings from our munitions come from there".

"Now that you mention it, we had some trouble with smugglers out there a few years back" Nils said- more to his brother than Ceasar.

Hans handed the cellphone back to Ceasar. The display read DEPOSIT VERIFIED: 70,000W. Even Nils wouldn't be stupid enough to blurt out which smugglers they killed on Morenci-9 four years ago. If Ceasar was going to do this, now was the time. Too bad the entree hadn't arrived...

He stood up and slipped out of his coat, handing it to one of the bodyguards.

"Could you place this on the coat rack up front?" He asked the guard.

The bodyguard nodded and walked away with his coat. He was probably used to doing some menial chores for the Singh brothers and their clients and associates. Ceasar waited until the bodyguard was a relatively safe distance away and then pressed a button on the cellphone.

The trenchcoat, which had a thin layer of Semtex explosive sewn into the lining, blew up in the bodyguard's arms, and he disappeared in a red mist. The second one, standing a few feet away along with some businessmen who were having dinner at the wrong place and at the wrong time, were knocked almost clear across the resturant from the force of the blast. The booth offered both Ceasar and the Singh brothers some protection from the blast, but neither Nils or Hans were prepared for what was about to happen.

Ceasar grabbed the knife with the 6-inch blade that he had taped under his side of the table during lunch earlier that day, stood up and plunged the knife straight down into the spot between Hans' neck and collarbone. As Hans let out a startled gasp, Ceasar pulled his body closer and took the Daewoo pistol out Hans' holster. Nils could only watch in horror as the blood drained from his brother's body and Hans tried feebly to pull the knife from his neck- his assailant had struck an artery on his first try. Ceasar flipped the safety off of the pistol and shot the remaining bodyguard twice as he finally turned his attention away from the explosion and towards his employers. He then roughly shoved Hans' dying body onto his younger brother and the two of them landed in an awkward heap in the corner of the resturant's booth.

The horrified expression didn't leave Nils' face. He was almost flat on his back and fumbling around for something- probably a gun of his own- when he saw Ceasar standing over him. Nils was looking down the barrel of his bother's pistol.

"You stupid bastard, you have NO idea who you're dealing with! 150,000 Wong to kill Twilight Suzuka? I would've done it for free!"

"No! Not you..." Nils now had an idea of who Ceasar was.....

"This is for my father!" Ceasar gritted his teeth, exhaled and pulled the trigger.

He put another bullet in the back of Hans' skull- after all, he didn't want any nasty surprises when his back was turned- then pulled the bloody knife out of Hans' neck, and started wiping it off with a cloth napkin before putting it back into an improvised sheath sewn onto his pants.

The men who had ordered the death of his father were now lying in a bloody, lifeless heap in the far corner of the resturant. It was all over in a few seconds, and it certainly wasn't as exhilarating as he thought it would be. However, beside the 70,000 Wong deposit into his bank account, the Singh brothers had given Ceasar what he considered the greatest gift of all- a detailed dossier on Twilight Suzuka, the woman who killed his father.

The scared survivors regarded Ceasar with fear as he calmly walked to the cashier. He had removed the magazine from the pistol and had pulled the slide back all the way, jamming a lacquered chopstick into the eject port and rendering the gun temporarily inoperable. He hated guns.

After tossing the Daewoo on the floor, he paid the terrified clerk 8.50 Wong for his beer and soup and walked out into the night. It was a chilly night. Ceasar didn't have his jacket, but he didn't mind.

Several blocks away, under the bright neon lights of the Odessa Casino, Suzuka was making a killing. The world had an odd rose-colored hue through her eyes, and it didn't have anything to do with the 33,907 Wong she accumulated in just under a half hour. She had picked up on the management's patterns for nearly every slot machine, roulette wheel and dealer. It was almost too easy. The cashier at the window put her ill-gotten earnings into an attache case and handed it over to her. Suzuka took it, and almost reluctantly headed up to the manager's office.

"How did you do?" the manager asked as she handed over the attache case.

"Almost 35,000 Wong." Suzuka remarked

"What?!" The manager looked very disappointed and angry. He thought his security system was sound enough to detect losses like that. "You've been on the floor for just over 20 minutes. How is that possible?" he asked as he started counting the money.

To answer his question, she produced a pair of loaded dice from her white kimono and then removed a pair of rose-hued contact lens from her eyes. The casino's assistant manager was testing one of the dice with a caliper as Suzuka explained to them that the pink tint on the contacts allowed the wearer to pick up nearly any type of marking on the back of a playing card, no matter how subtle.

"You've invested a lot to counter some of the more high-tech grifters and con men, and it is quite effective against those methods, but you're establishment is still vulnerable to some of these old tricks that have been around for centuries." she said.

Suzuka couldn't believe it. Upon returning from the Leiline, she made up her mind that she would stay with Gene, Jim, Melfina and Aisha a little longer-an odd group indeed. Now, she had found work as a professional "High Roller". She had approached the management of the Odessa Casino a week ago and with an attache case of close to a quarter-million Wong and explained how she had basically robbed them blind and proposed that she help overhaul their security. Now she was basically pulling in a six-figure salary by just gambling and relaying to the management her observation on the strengths and weaknesses of their security system. And they certainly were getting their money's worth out of her. No one back home knew what she was doing, as far as they all knew, she was still in the assassination game. Suzuka was a little bemused- it was only the second time in her life she felt as though she could refer to a place as "home".

This was so much better than killing for a living. There was still some uncertainty about her future, since as well as the Odessa Casino was paying her, it was only a temporary job. In the back of her mind, she knew she could always move on if everyone back at Starwind and Hawking Enterprises stopped being of interest to her, but she had to admit that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. It was almost like a close knit- but constantly bickering- family.

Ceasar had made his way back from the resturant to his apartment for a change of clothes. The night still was fairly cold, and in addition to another jacket, he needed a clean change of clothes. Some blood spilled on his shirt in the resturant, apparently Hans'. He had been in the business for nearly three and a half years now. His specialty was sabotage, making specailly shaped explosive charges to cripple or destroy spacecraft, but he also had a penchant for bladed weapons and could create traps with either better than any of his competition. He tried not to think about how many people were on the ships he had destroyed over the years, or how many countless hours of toil and TLC his victims had lavished on their vessels. Most of his targets were merchants and occasionally other assasins. He became what he had loathed- but he saw it only as a means to an end.

"You're a mess!" He said to his reflection in the mirror over the sink as he wiped off the blood. "But that's OK, you should see the other guys."

He looked himself over in the mirror after cleaning himself off and then packed up an assortment of both high-tech and low-tech toys. How long had it been? Four years? A place called Starwind and Hawking was the address that was in the Singh brother's file on her. It was unlike her to stay in one place for so long. This was the closest she had to a permanent address in quite awhile. Time to pay a visit to Twilight Suzuka's new home.