There is Poetry in despair, and we sang with

unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence

of blue and grey.

~AFI, "Spoken Word"

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No mercy have I for you,

No God can save my soul.

It's love and life I fight for

With blade and gun in tow.

~Audra Mae "Bandida"

CHAPTER SEVEN

We Are All Stardust

Katie and sleep were on fabulous terms, with sleep arriving whenever required and giving her the necessary allotment of restorative shut-eye.

This night, however, she woke at the equivalent of mid-morning. Not a slow awakening, but a frightening jolt from deep sleep to wide awake. Alarm shot through her as she listened, expecting the worst. The only sounds were the usual ship noises, which after a time were punctuated by a muttered masculine grumble from the bunk above her. A reminder that instead of Yrta, it was Lance-former best friend who'd ghosted her a decade before-who now shared the tiny ship's compartment with her.

Now what? Was he back? Could she hope for as much?

Should she?

Slipping out of bed, she padded quietly to the kitchen and with the ease of old habit, flicked fingers over the control panel and made a cup of chamomile tea. Behind her Lance slept on, oblivious. In the pallid night lights' glow, his hand, hanging over the edge of the bed, twitched with dreams. Taking a step closer, she studied the ugly scar in the weak light.

"Because the universe expected me to suffer, to atone for not doing shit to save her."

The echoed memory of his words made her sigh. If the universe cared about that kind of thing, Katie had as much, if not more, to atone for than Lance. Pidge Holt, genius, the girl with all the bright ideas, had stood sobbing, clinging to Hunk, small and useless, as Allura marched bravely into oblivion.

In the wake of Allura's death, Katie had vowed to never again to be small and useless.

Lance muttered something that sounded like "platinum ponies packing peanuts" and a need rose in her, startling in its intensity, to touch his hand. She was saved from her weird impulse by the gurgle of tea pouring into the cup.

Teacup in hand, she wandered into the cockpit, sat down and stared out into the perpetual night of space. A quick check of systems revealed a few scattered ships in the vicinity. The remaining tagged ship had dropped out of range, probably turning for Begay, the agricultural colony on the dwarf planet Vesta. With the eyes of science and experience, she picked out Jupiter and Saturn, neither yet much bigger than when seen from Earth.

Sipping her tea, still unsettled by her slight, but burgeoning attraction to Lance, she took her feelings out and studied them in her customary rational manner. It was baffling because she knew her girlish crush on Lance McClain had been just that, a thing of childish fancy, banished by time and space.

At some point, she'd had a crush on all of her fellow Paladins. How could she not? There was sweet and brilliant Hunk, her intellectual equal. Keith, was, well…Keith, but brooding emo had its appeal, even to sensible girls like Pidge. Shiro's appeal, besides his stolid good looks, was the perverse allure of his big brother/father vibe.

And Allura…. Allura was the textbook definition of sophisticated, heroic beauty, if textbooks defined that sort of thing.

For the most part, however, her crushes were innocent, adolescent flights of fantasy, largely sexless.

It was with Lance-goofy, frequently exasperating Lance-that her crush had taken a decidedly more adult tone, turning downright filthy. Or as filthy as she could conjure at fifteen, alone in her bed, discovering the nuances of self-pleasure.

It had been a pointless exercise into angsty, unrequited teen love. Even now, with PhD after her name, and the respect of her professional colleagues, the ghost of heartbreak and jealousy haunted the memory of her feelings for Lance.

Bookish and boyish, Pidge Holt was no Allura.

Allura's gone.

So? Lance and I aren't the same people. We're sort of "gone" too.

She pulled her feet onto the chair, knees to her chest and crossed her arms, resting elbows on her knees. The weight of her mother's death suddenly made it hard to breathe.

I need you, Mom. I need to talk to you about…this. If you were here, I probably wouldn't know what to say, couldn't get the words out. Why does it work out that way? Why do I have so many things to say to you, to ask, now that it's fucking impossible?

Katie had never had any use for superstition or gods, but nevertheless, she sometimes wondered if her mother's death was her fault, the universe making karmic adjustments for what she hadn't done for Allura.

And for what she had done on New Aleppo.

Like every other clusterfuck, it had begun innocuously….

EIGHT YEARS AGO, NEW ALEPPO, GANYMEDE

Katie and Matt Holt's target was a flight school on the southern end of New Aleppo, a sector dominated by office buildings, small manufacturing plants, and curiously, churches and faith centers. No one knew how the holy-or was it unholy?-pairing of commercial and faith began.

In this district of New Aleppo, the icy surface had been overlain with rock and soil, then reshaped with Altean alchemy, topography rising and falling, and buildings towering several stories along narrow, winding streets creating a geography of tight canyons. The overall flavor of the place was that of a colorful medina quarter in North Africa. In space, as elsewhere, names and architecture were the work of whoever had the most money. The first flush of big Mammon into the colony had come from a wealthy Syrian investor.

Katie and Matt stood on the roof of an especially tall building, preparing to rappel down six floors. The ground lay twenty-five floors below. Across the narrow street, a large neon sign proclaimed the opposite building to be the First Colony Church of Christ. Streetlights, installed in the sides of buildings, flooded the thoroughfare below with cold, white light, but at this hour, the envirodome's sunlight gems were sleeping with the rest of the city. Darkness smothered the rooftop except for a few flickering lights set in the roof parapets.

At this height, heat along with the stink of the city below, did its thing and rose, then congregated, trapped by the envirodome.

"Smells like," began Matt, "dysentery and despair."

Katie laughed. "Good one. The best I could come up with was 'farty elevator.'"

Matt grinned, the expression literally mirroring Katie's. When they were younger, their features had been so alike they were often mistaken for twins. In their twenties, both had shrugged off the rounder facial contours of childhood, but even a blind man wearing a welding helmet could see that they were siblings.

They had an ongoing contest to see who could come up with the cleverest descriptions of things. "I win. You owe me a vesa at Rudy's," said Matt.

They both wore tacsuits, the very latest in mercenary fashion. Woven from plastisteel and chrysotile, and fused with Altean alchemy, the lightweight tactical armor could withstand up to a dozen blaster shots, and by Katie's estimations, looked totally badass. Both wore small blasters at their hips.

A helmet should have finished the ensemble, but helmets were for wusses, so both she and Matt opted for tactical goggles equipped with nightvision and Katie's upgraded HUD.

As they tied in their lines, Katie's attention snagged on a small pin, fastened to Matt's collar. Leaning in, she saw the round, exaggerated form of a Gaia santo, the tiny feminine form holding the Earth in her hands.

She snickered. "Really?"

Matt, distracted by a tangle of rope, shot her a puzzled look. She poked the pin.

"Oh, that," he said. "That's from V."

Katie snickered again, and Matt muttered, "Shut up." He threaded and wrapped the rope through the belay device and gave it a hard tug. "That reminds me. When we're done here…Veronica wanted me to give you something."

"What?" A note of wariness crept into her voice.

Matt, fortunately, wasn't much better at peopling than her and didn't notice. "You'll see."

It's not that Katie didn't like Veronica McClain. In fact, in some alternate universe, she might have more than liked Veronica. In this universe, however, Veronica was in the habit of playing hide the banana (Veronica's phrase for it) with Matt. (Matt described their relationship as "romantically incompatible." Katie described their relationship as "dueling dysfunctionals.")

Worst of all, Veronica's sibling was the Paladin Who Shall Not Be Named. Also, Veronica had an irritating habit of naming He Who Shall Not Be Named every time she and Katie interacted. Katie had the suspicion that Veronica was either trying to enlist her help in fixing her FUBARed, kid brother or worse yet, setting them up. Either option was absurd, given that He Who Shall Not Be Named wanted nothing to do with her.

Veronica, however, was intrepid when it came to her overtures of friendship with Katie, and Katie, who didn't have a plethora of friends, appreciated the effort, even if it left her unsettled.

Matt paused at the roof's edge, one foot on the parapet, hot updrafts from below ruffling his hair. The best word to describe Matt's auburn brown hair was "scruffy" as he was several weeks past a haircut. Katie smirked, knowing that Veronica, who had a thing for scruffy, probably loved it. Matt, however, like Katie, was taking a stab at "responsible adult," and had a haircut scheduled next week.

"Ready?" Matt said, and she nodded, eager. She was on summer break from college. Eric, the cute professor from the exoplanetary hydrology department had invited her to New Las Vegas on Mars. She'd almost said, "Yes." Then Matt said he was doing recon on New Aleppo and could use a second. No way was she turning down a chance for adventure with the coolest brother in the universe!

As they began their descent down the building's side, she thought how alike they were. Both preferred machines and tech to people, though Matt definitely had better social skills. And both had an addiction to adventure.

As a senior officer with Legendary Defenders, Matt should have been dropped this task to someone several links down the chain of command-way down. But Matt liked to maintain a hands-on approach to intel gathering, mostly because he thought it was fun.

Ganymede, like Mars and other low-grav bodies, made use of gravity ballasts sunk deep under the surface. Even so, the gravity was 90-percent of Earth's and Katie found rappelling a bit like floating on dense seawater. Her body, perpendicular to the building's side, felt light and buoyant.

Between stories, two from their target, Katie held her arms out, hands fisted and proclaimed in a stage whisper, "I'm the king of the world!"

"King of the dorks, more like," hissed Matt. "Be serious."

"I am seriously the King of the World."

"You and those prehistoric vids. Maybe reference one where the protagonist doesn't die."

"I think the dying is what makes it romantic." She and Matt continued down, each stopping on opposite sides of a window.

"Nothing romantic about dying. You know that." He gestured at the lock on the window. "Do your thing, Pidgey." Below, a NAPD car, painted red and black, hummed quietly along the street. They froze and waited for it to pass.

By Katie's standards, this bit of breaking and entering was a pale imitation of her "thing," since it required no effort on her part. She pulled her datapen from her pocket. Like most datapens, it was about 15 centimeters long, 2.5 centimeters diameter, and with triangle-shaped cross-section. It projected a holoscreen and had an additional halo-keypad. Hers was accented with brass and a green leaf pattern.

Of course, Katie's datapen had her special upgrades, including a second time crystal that augmented the quantum processor's number crunching power. She linked her pen to the lock and it powered through ten million permutations in under a nanosecond.

"Nice," said Matt, using his own pen to scan for life signs and electronic sensors. "Clear."

Before unlatching the window, she opened her handy wrist toolkit and extracted a tube of friction-free. After spraying the window's hinges to prevent squeaks, she eased it open, slid into the room, and unhooked from the rappelling line. Matt did the same.

They were in the flight school administrator's office. Matt's intel pointed to the school and its administrator, an Altean named Vrannis, as the focal point of an expansive arms smuggling operation. As of late, Vrannis and other arms dealers had cut all electronic chatter, relying instead on old-fashioned communications-paper and image crystals-much of it in Titan and Shadow Titan.

Matt, not much of a linguist, asked Katie along because she was fluent in both variants of Titan. Katie's fluency was a necessity borne out of a work-study job with Genesis, a MIT-based initiative to assemble a genomic library of crop species introduced to Earth from alien worlds. Technically, it was illegal to bring foreign flora into the solar system, which meant Katie and her pal Yrta, spent a lot of time trawling black markets where Titan was the language of commerce.

"Minimalist" was the word that came to mind as she surveyed the room. A desk and chair sat a few meters from the window, facing the door. Two more chairs were placed in front of the desk. One wall had a large sketch board with a process chart scrawled on it. A large filing cabinet hunched on the left side of the door. A janitorial trolley, filled with mops, cleaning solutions and a laser washer sat to the right of the door.

Her brother immediately made for a filing cabinet, while Katie sat at the desk. A package of Repper Nuts sat, unopened, on the desk's surface. Her stomach rumbled, but Katie didn't touch the package. The snack food, an Altean favorite, tasted like the bastard offspring of Vegemite and liver, with the texture of dried toothpaste. Alteans were beautiful people with ugly taste in food.

Instead, she switched on the built-in haloscreen. The password lock a sad joke, she bypassed it in seconds and made a face at the screen's background image. "Ew!"

Seeing her face, Matt joined her. The image was a collage of naughty: Alteans of all genders engaged in sex ranging from vanilla missionary to positions that seemed biologically impossible. "Hey!" she protested as Matt slapped his hands over her eyes.

"Odin's sweaty balls," he muttered, "that's an eyeful." Matt had no religious inclinations, but had adopted a habit of swearing in the Martian Nordda neofaith.

"Leggo! I'm an adult. I know how sex works!" She pried Matt's hands from her eyes.

Matt squinted at the screen with its hundreds of small, but detailed graphic images, his head tilted like a quizzical dog. "I'm not sure that's how sex works."

"Maybe," Katie said wryly, "you and V aren't doing it right."

"I am not having this conversation with my kid sister."

"Prude." She said gestured at the screen. "Description?"

"Uh, the Altean library of porn?"

"I was thinking Altean Karma Sutra."

Matt shrugged. "You win that one." His lip curled and he said, "Might not want to touch anything on that desk."

"Double ew!" Katie synched her pen to Vrannis the porn collector's data so she could snoop with minimal contact.

"That image isn't surprising," said Matt, from the cabinet where he paged through files. "The only chatter we've intercepted from him is porn. Beside weapons, he's also selling skin pix."

The two siblings searched for several more minutes. Finding nothing in Vrannis's data files, Katie opened desk drawers, glad to be wearing gloves. Thankfully, the drawers contained nothing more than loose change, a pack of marijuana vapes and a half-eaten sandwich.

Bored, she rose and joined Matt at the filing cabinet.

Without a word, Matt dropped a sheet of paper on the top of the cabinet. She scanned the contents, written in Titan. "Looks like a grocery list."

"Really?"

"Unless bread, juniberry wine, and sloe gin is code for carbines and mortars, then yup, groceries." Bread, booze, and weed and porn. An arms dealer's four food groups.

In response, Matt handed her three more papers, these written in the logosyllabic glyphs of the sign language known as Shadow Titan. It took her a few minutes to work those out, as she wasn't that fluent in the written form. "Invoices for reconditioned hopper parts. From a Tinkerer named Tavid."

"Damn." He flipped through another file folder, paused on a sheet, before folding it and starting to slide it into his backpack.

"Wait! What's that?" She snagged the sheet from his hand and pulled a face, finding it in Altean. She couldn't read much Altean but recognized one word, a name. "Allura. What this about?"

Matt shrugged, suspiciously dismissive. "Just the usual 'Allura Lives' cult crap, time has come, blah-blah-blah."

"Time has come? For what? To kill—?" She shut up, noting the speculative look on her brother's face.

"I thought you didn't care."

"I don't," she huffed. "The Hel with him." In her head, she sighed. If lies really set pants on fire, she'd have third degree burns on her butt cheeks.

She ran her fingers over a large section of filed image crystals, her fingernails snapping on the material. "Vrannis loves his dick pix."

"That's mostly what's in here." Matt rubbed the scar on his left cheek, his ochre brown eyes narrowed with thought. Katie pulled out an image crystal and studied it, her brain suddenly going fizzy with an idea.

Feeling like a literal lightbulb had appeared over her head, she returned to the desk. Standing, some distance from the screen, she squinted the images out of focus, reducing them to vague shapes. "New description," she said, a huge smile splitting her face. "Erotic Rosetta Stone."

"What?" He joined her again, and then laughed, understanding. "The images, they're the code!"

"Yup." She beamed with delight as her brother hugged her. "Gimme a second." With a few swipes, she was uploading the image to her datapen and modifying her code breaker to parse glyph shapes from the naked bodies. Letting her pen do the work, she shoved it into her pocket and began to help Matt steal the stack of image crystals.

The quiet was broken by a long series of light thumps, almost like popping footfalls on the outside wall of the building. "Loki's sweet tits!" said Matt and it took Katie a second to understand the sound. Matt's hand clamped on her forearm and he tossed her toward the door, falling over her protectively.

Energy rent the air as hundreds of small, nano thermite charges obliterated the outside wall. Katie felt her brother's body shudder as the percussive blowback from the explosion hit him. Instantly, she began clawing at her brother, pushing him back, her hands and eyes scanning his form for injuries.

"I'm fine," he said, scrambling to his feet and reaching for the door handle.

"Not so fast, Matty," said a gravely male voice. Katie blinked through the smoky haze of obliterated concrete and plastisteel. The gaping wound in the building was blocked by a ship—mini-hopper, probably—and several people were climbing from it into the office.

The speaker was a middle-age man, brown hair cut short and spiky and tipped in blue. His face was scarred and lined, but his body thick with muscle. He smiled warmly at Matt, though his hazel eyes were icy. He duel-wielded two bayards, both trained on Katie and Matt. Five other mercs arrayed themselves around the room, bayards and blasters fixed on the siblings.

"Blasters on the ground," he said, gesturing with a bayard at the blasters on their hips. "Kick 'em over to me."

Katie glared defiant murder at the man, but Matt said, "Just do it, Pidge." Outgunned, but still feisty, she dropped her weapon to the floor and lazily toed it a step away.

"Put more effort into it, girlie," the merc snarled. Matt shot her a "behave" look and she kicked the blaster hard, aiming at the man's feet.

"Phineas Anero. How the Hel are you?" said Matt conversationally, although his posture was anything but friendly. "And…Kadim Guard, isn't it?" A tall dark man with sandy brown hair and a nose ring gave Matt a slight nod.

"I'm giddy as a rat in a cheese factory, Matty boyo. Especially seein' as how you've gone and sorted my little boggle."

Phineas Anero. Katie scrolled through her memories of conversations with Matt. Arms dealer. Boggle? "Vrannis is your competition," she said. "And you've been trying to crack his communication code."

Phineas' smile widened, revealing a missing tooth farther back in his mouth. "Right. Thanks for bringing your little sister, Matty. We was counting on you to do the figurin', but girlie is so much faster."

"We haven't figured anything out," lied Matt. Katie, her face set in neutral, scanned the room, noting the locations of every merc and their weapons. Icy heat, weirdly malevolent, inched up her spine and stirred in her blood. Involuntarily, she shrugged, trying to shake off the eerie sensation.

Kadim held up a rectangular box that Katie recognized as an ancient recording device, the sort that used magnetic tape to capture sound. He pressed a button and her conversation with Matt echoed in staticky resonance through the room. "Erotic Rosetta Stone…."

"We rigged the room with one of them ancient coms," said Phineas. "I think they was called phones."

"Smart," said Matt. In her head, Katie agreed grimly. Their sensors were calibrated to pick up modern tech, not ancient crap that relied on metal diaphragms to capture sound and wires to transmit. Energy, almost sentient, moved through her, and she felt a weird stripping away of emotion.

"Now iffen your baby sister would just give us her datapen, we'll be on the bye-bye."

"Just like that?" said Matt with a cold smile.

"Just like that."

One of the other mercs, a small woman with huge forearms, muttered, "Porque parler? Aller da travail-cuchille!" Another merc, a man, echoed her words, his free hand sketching violent plans in Shadow Titan.

Katie's blood ran cold, knifing through the odd calm that she'd felt seconds before. At her side, Matt, outwardly calm, was no doubt making his own calculations even though he didn't understand Titan.

She took in the room again, her brain marking the precise distance to each merc. 5.2 meters; 8.1 meters; 4.8 meters….

How am I doing that? The flow—yeah, it was the flow-eased into her limbs, claiming territory and vibrating with anticipation. What the Hel?

She shook her head, trying to clear away what could only be called blood lust. Should she let them know she spoke Titan? "He's lying, Matt. They're planning to kill us."

"Mayhap we don't kill girlie," said Kadim. "No bounty on her. Mayhap we play with baby sister."

"Leave her out of this. If it's me you want, fine. But let her go." Matt held his hands up in surrender.

"Oh, I want ya, Matty." Phineas strode forward, halting a stride before Matt. "Just not all of ya. Didn't ya hear? The Federacy put a molto Mammon price on that handsome head."

Katie's heart lurched. The Federacy was a loose collective of arms smugglers, united only in their hatred of law enforcement and the Legendary Defenders.

Phineas gestured with a bayard at Katie. "Kill her. Get her pen."

Fear, not for herself, but for Matt, vibrated at a molecular level in her body. The alien energy simmering in her blood expanded decisively and then dove into her cells. It wormed deeper, into her mitochondria, fueling battle rage.

No! In a nanosecond's span, her thoughts roiled. There had to be a nonviolent way to work this out. This isn't happening. Time slowed as Phineas' trigger finger moved on the bayard, the weapon's aim on Matt.

This isn't happening.

This isn't happening.

Then it happened.

The other, the mysterious thing swimming in her blood, elbowed aside both disbelief and Katie, and then took over. The distances she had somehow calculated filled variables in equations of violence. A luminous, crackling, electric-blue halo outlined every merc.

Nothing mattered except protecting Matt. She shifted her weight, tangled Matt's legs in hers, and brought him down and out of the way. A plasma blast scorched a line on her tacsuit. Ignoring the blasts, she dropped low and reached into the janitor trolley, hand closing on the laser washer. It hummed at her touch on the power button.

She took more fire, but the tacsuit bore the brunt of it. Brain running lightning-fast computations, she anticipated and evaded most of the fire. Slipping under Phineas's guard, she squeezed the laser washer's trigger and raked it across his throat, slicing, then frying flesh like a well-done steak. A gushing artery painted crimson on her goggles and she shoved them off her face. With every target outlined in a blue halo, she didn't need them anyway.

She had both his bayards in seconds….

The mercenary team underestimate her. Of course, they did. What good was a Voltron Paladin, the smallest Paladin at that, without her lion?

Choking on their own blood, they all realized their mistake.

Katie Holt would never again be small and useless.

There'd been no other choice. They would have killed Matt, and her as well. When the merc pointed the bayards at her brother's head, Katie's thoughts were forged into a blade, cutting through the possibilities, her brain coolly charting angles of impact, trajectories and a perfect geometry of claret mayhem.

Us or them. The choice perfectly binary.

For months afterwards, she'd catch Matt studying her with a kind of fearful awe. It broke her heart, but better he look at her that way, than not all.

She'd do it again. And therein lay the question that nagged her in the quiet of the dark night: was her mother's death the universe's adjustment for her willingness to do anything, even kill, to protect her family and friends?

Mom, you once said that when we die, we become stardust again. You had all the answers; if I had just listened.

If you're stardust, then you're part of the vast universe now, and I'm closest to you out here in the black.

Katie closed her eyes and asked her mother and the universe for absolution for a history of violence, past and future.

*Titan/slang translations*

Mammon: Lots of money

Vesa: Beer

Santo: A religious symbol of a saint.

Gaia: A neofaith that originated in the early 22nd century. Typically depicted as a saint type figure.

FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair

Porque parler? Aller da travail-cuchille: Why all the chit chat? Let's get to the knife work!

Molto Mammon: Really big money.

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Yeah, Veronica and Matt. I see them as a the kind of extremely career-oriented couple who want the comfort and safety of "friend" sex without the drama of a defined romantic relationship.

Thanks for reading my story!