They get dumped at a space station, a trading port, where some outdated Freelancer armor schematics with a built-in failure state buy them repairs to their Pelican. By unspoken agreement, York and Tex part ways when they're urged to leave the ship by their nervous mechanics. There'll be time for strategizing, for talk, later. Right now, they've got a few hours to kill.
Tex squares her shoulders. She's always been—at least, she thinks she's always been—at home in a crowd. The anonymity appeals to her, now more than ever, with the skin between her shoulders itching at the lightness of her civvies. The armor would be too conspicuous, Delta argued, and Tex was inclined to agree, although she's pretty sure this grubby little station is so far off the Director's radar that they could send up fireworks that spelled out "YES HELLO FREELANCERS HERE" and they still wouldn't be found before they'd had ample time to repair, restock, and refuel. It's entirely possible nobody's looking for them at all—the explosion when the port thruster had given out was pretty spectacular. Maybe they were presumed dead.
Hell, 'presumed dead' is an upgrade for some of us. At the thought, she grins in such an alarming way that a woman walking past does a double-take and nearly walks into a wall.
She ends up perched on a stool in a shitty little bar, because it's the one place on this forsaken station that doesn't have a window out to the stars, and also because nothing works for washing down existential angst like cheap whiskey.
She has plenty of vague memories of whiskey and bourbon, but she's not sure whether they were built into her programming from day one, or whether she'd just sort of... extrapolated from the knowledge that Allison had been a girl from Texas who'd loved motorcycles and picking fights. It seems like a reasonable combination.
She wonders if Allison ever strolled out to a bar in the middle of the night, figured out where the assholes sat, which was their barstool. Wonders if she ever sat there, grinning in the face of their territorial rage until someone cracked and threw the first punch.
She'd win her fights, of course. She'd always win, except for the one time it mattered most. But hell, nobody's perfect.
Tex has started thinking of these ventures into hypothetical memory as a sort of fugue state. She's never sure she's entirely conscious when they're happening, and she always comes out of them feeling dazed and unreal.
This time, she snaps out of it with someone's shirt balled up in her hand, swinging back for a second punch. He's holding a knife in his hand. There's blood on her civvies. Her breathing is fast and hard in her ears, and looking past him, she sees the bartender huddled in a corner, carefully wrapping a knife-wound in her thigh.
Omega uncoils in her mind, stretching languidly along her nerve endings, and she grins.
She hits the knife-wielding bastard hard enough to break his nose and send him stumbling to the floor, then spins, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She can't get drunk, not really, but she can feel the buoying energy of the alcohol, the manufactured, placebo buzz. Genius over there has got buddies, at least a dozen of 'em, just this side of bright enough to break a bottle to use as a weapon without also embedding shattered glass in their own hands. Place like this attracts a lot of crime, she figures. Couldn't hurt to do a little something about it.
They're sizing her up, smart enough to be cautious after what she did to their buddy. But hell, she could take these guys out in her sleep.
I don't need your help, she remembers, and wonders whether that was Allison speaking. Yeah, you know what? Fuck what Allison would do. This could be fun.
She opens an internal, tight-band commlink, without breaking eye contact with the asshole warily circling her from the left. "Hey, York," she says. "You want in on a shitty bar fight? Yeah. Figured you might."
"That your backup?" snarls Asshole, Stage Right.
Tex just grins at him. "Hello, boys," she says, sweetly. "You have no idea what kind of trouble you're in."
By the time York shows up, they're down to three or four, but Tex graciously lets him handle them while she finishes her drink. He seems to need the stress relief.
The whiskey tastes like gasoline, but the bartender insisted it was on the house once she realized Tex was going out of her way to throw the troublemakers away from the bottles behind the counter rather than into them. Tex isn't about to pass up free booze. She's also more than a little tempted to just shrug off the last of Project Freelancer and offer up her services as a bodyguard for this place—it'd be good money, and money means nobody's gonna be able to control you.
She spins on her barstool, idly, and watches as York closes with the last guy, smiling and keeping up a steady stream of friendly chatter to cover his wince. They've both let a few hits slip through; there's a tear in the artificial skin across her ribs that stings like hell, and he's apparently doing his level best to ignore a deep slash along his forearm. She suspects they're both being a little sloppy on purpose. Nothing like pain to make you feel alive.
Yeah, and did Allison feel that way? Is that why she charged forward against orders? Why she always stayed away from home if she could help it?
Tex scowls at her drink, rubs at the cut across her ribs to feel the twinge—but no blood, she notices. There's never any blood.
When he's done knocking out the last guy, York slumps onto the stool next to her, clutching his bloodied arm with a grimace. "That's gonna leave a mark," he says, and smiles winningly at the bartender. "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a first-aid kit?"
Wordlessly, she hands over what looks like a standard-issue military IFAK. Tex raises her eyebrows, but the bartender only shrugs, watching with grossed-out interest as York injects biofoam into the wound. Tex slides her half-full glass across the bar to York, who downs it in one gulp. Then he rests his forehead against the bar and says, "I don't want to go back," so softly she almost misses it.
"Good for you. I need to go back," says Tex, and smiles wryly when the bartender just gives up and hands her the rest of the whiskey bottle. She takes a long swig. "There's someone who needs an extraction. And I'd like to try and save whoever... whoever's left." She raises the bottle to York. "Never abandon your team."
York sighs, heavily, and rubs his face, which only succeeds in smearing blood around. "D thinks Wash might be dead. They sure as hell didn't let anybody see him after the implantation went south, and I heard him screaming. And Carolina..."
Tex says nothing, just stands up, tosses a credit chit at the bartender, and strides out of the bar, ignoring York's call of her name, stepping over bodies along the way. She walks for a while, aimlessly, drawing worried looks whenever anyone notices the slash in her shirt, the blood on her knuckles, but nobody bothers her. Nobody stops her.
She wanders to a halt somewhere in the bowels of the station—sure as hell smells like the bowels of something, anyway. Machinery and rubbish heaps, a dingy accumulation from the folks who managed to get to the station but couldn't afford to leave. She leans against a wall. She wonders how long it'll take the cut in her side to heal without Freelancer's mechanical staff around to fix it. She doesn't even remember what that process entailed; in her mind, she'd always spent some unspecified amount of time in Medical, and she'd come out feeling fine. She wonders how many other things they fixed while she wasn't quite conscious.
She also wonders, vividly, whether Allison ever took a hit like that, whether Allison bled all over her pristine uniform before they'd found her, whether she'd tasted blood or died too quickly.
A rustle of sound drags her back to the here and now. Tex watches a pile of snack wrappers rustle, forces her strung-out nerves to relax. Vermin are plentiful up here; some particularly bright individual must've brought them up here as pets. Or maybe it was for revenge in some convoluted feud. A plague on your house...
The rustling dies out. A small, furry face pokes out of the pile, whiskers twitching. At first, Tex is convinced it's a rat, but it's pitch-black and its eyes are a brilliant gold. It takes her a moment to realize it's just a particularly scrawny cat.
She crouches down, holds out her hand. The cat flattens its ears, burrowing a little bit back into its filthy den. "Yeah," Tex mutters, drawing her hand back. "Same."
But she watches it for a while, until the giant pupils get smaller and the animal slowly goes back to snuffling for food in the mess, and then she shuffles back to sit with her back against the wall and stare up at the ceiling.
They've got to go back. She does, anyway. She's got... an obligation, toward Alpha. He's as much a victim in this as anyone. She thinks North might be persuaded to help, with Theta on the line and all, and she has no reason to doubt York's commitment, but the rest are... complicated.
You've got an obligation to someone else, Tex. Don't forget her.
She feels sick, suddenly, curls over her drawn-up knees and presses her forehead into them, breathing hard and fast and shallow. "What the fuck," she whispers, softly, because who the hell builds this into their grand design, their magnum opus? Nausea. Fuckin' guilt that gnaws. Green eyes bright with pain, a limp body plugged into endless monitors, the visceral agony of her knuckles connecting, the echoing silence that follows the screaming...
An inquisitive chirp draws her back. She looks up, shakily, and sees the little cat nosing at her combat boots, gnawing on the laces. "Oh, great," she says. "We gonna share a touching moment where I have an epiphany about the value of life?"
The cat blinks, hunkers down, and coughs up a hairball all over her boot.
"Eugh," Tex says. "Yeah, okay, that's about what I figured." The little beast permits a quick scritch behind its ears before it darts back into the darkness, and then Tex is getting to her feet, rubbing at the implant port at the back of her neck.
She's startled when she looks at her chrono and realizes exactly how much time has passed. Their repairs have gotta be done by now.
She calls up York, and after half a minute she finally gets a breathy, dazed, "'lo?"
"Time to go," she says.
"Didn't mean what I said," he slurs. "'bout not wanting to to to go back. I gotta. I wanna save them all."
"Yeah, buddy," she says, distractedly, trying to retrace her steps to the bar. By the sound of him, York's gonna need an escort back to their ship. "You do that. You can climb that whole mountain."
"I can," York says, a little belligerently. "I got Delta. I got you."
Tex closes her eyes for a moment, just a moment, then starts walking. "Yup," she says. "Whatever the hell I am, you've got me."