The Queen's Honor Guard
by Nyohah
II.
"Any particular reason you picked this place?" Li Wei Yong asked when the Templar landed, thankfully ending their time of uneasy silence and brooding.
"It was a panic situation, okay?" said Rah Cai Yue. "It was the easiest place to get to, so here we are." He stood and glanced through the viewport with a shrug. "Maybe we can use the cliffs for something."
"It's some place to start at least," agreed Wei Yong. "And we do have plenty of scrap metal to work with," he added, remembering the colonists' dilapidated houses.
Cai Yue grinned. "Right to work, then?" he asked, a weary tone belying his expression.
"As much as we'd all like to just go home now, we have ships to repair before that can happen, and a base to set up if we're going to repair those ships."
Tieh Chen Yi spoke sullenly. "I don't see why you didn't just make the portal to Mandalore. And then we'd all be home now. It is a place we've all been, after all."
Cai Yue shook his head. "A portal like that, ignoring physical position entirely and basing its location upon memory, takes far more time and energy. All I did was reopen the one we came through, which took about a third of the time as it would have to do it your way, and we still took quite a beating. I doubt we'd have made it home had we tried."
"So how long's it going to take us to repair these ships?" Chen Yi consented with a sigh.
"That depends on whether this place is sufficient to support us and whether the people here leave us alone."
"The people who attacked this colony were from off-planet, right?" said Hua Quy Ling.
"Who knows?" said Wei Yong. "Either way, I doubt we should stay here too long."
"Right to work, then," sighed Lian, pushing himself out of his chair with exaggerated effort and pointedly ignoring the glare his action prompted from Captain Lan.
"Cai Yue," Zhen said rather than rise with others, "if we knew exactly where a really close planet was, do you think the damaged ships could survive a trip through a portal?"
The priest raised his eyebrows in surprise, then tilted his head to the side, "Well, I guess they might. I'm not the engineer here."
The Queen's Honor Guard turned to Yen Sa in unison.
"Not the most damaged ones, of course, but most of them could, sure." He nodded.
"That's reassuring," said Ming, "but have we all forgotten our earlier problems? We don't know of any close planets, let alone exactly where they are. The star charts we have are nothing but how the constellations look from the colony. Helpful for figuring out what direction to head, but no planets are marked."
"No, my queen, you're wrong," said Yen Sa, not withholding a silly smile. He pressed a button on his box and a breathtaking display of a galaxy burst into life above it. "I guess you all thought my latest find was some useless light device again, right?"
The hint of bitterness in the statement distracted Wei Yong from the display for a moment, but he stared, fully transfixed on the display, with the others when Yen Sa pressed more buttons and the map focused on a single planet.
"This is actually where we were before," explained Yen Sa, "I can bring it up easily because it knew that was where it was when I found it, and I think it still thinks it's there."
"It thinks?" asks Chen Yi.
"Well, actually I think they had it attached to their navigational computer, but it could have a great deal of intelligence itself. We really don't know what their computers are capable of. Far more than ours, I'm sure."
"This is the whole galaxy?" Wei Yong asked.
"Yes." Yen Sa glanced at Zhen and corrected, "well, not the whole galaxy, but most of it, certainly."
Zhen smiled back widely, an obviously false, overdone expression, a gesture that Wei Yong didn't understand.
"It might take a while," continued Yen Sa, "but I know I can find this planet, and some nearby habitable ones, one of which will hopefully make a good place to set up a base."
"I think this is the best news I've heard since we got here," said Wei Yong. "Yen Sa, you get to work in here. Everyone else, outside." Wei Yong turned and stepped toward the door, then stopped and exhaled deeply as he saw Lian step aside with a snide expression to let Lan Yiao Nih go through the doorway first. "Uh, Lian—"
"Lian," Kei Sa said, "get some paper and help Yen Sa."
"I don't really need help," said Yen Sa looking up from the map a little uncertainly. "And I don't think any of you could—"
"Yes, you do," interrupted Ming. "Lian, you can use the back of our paper maps, if you need to."
"Anything you say, my queen," Lian said, though his malicious smirk couldn't rival the one Lan Yiao Nih had perfected years before.
"We don't need this," Wei Yong sighed under his breath as he left the Templar's bridge.
The damp chill in the air only made things more miserable. Hours of shoddy attempts at building something useful had passed. Too many hours, and Rah Cai Yue was certain that the cough he was developing would not just go away when he was exposed to blessedly dry air on the Templar again.
"These caves are mildewy, all right," he muttered to himself, "but they're certainly not nice."
"What was that?" called Lan Yiao Nih from further back in the cave.
"Just my pathetic grumbling," he answered, watching the glow of the captain's sunstone shift in the darkness and descend further.
"It's actually pretty dry back here," the captain said. "Well, relatively speaking anyway. I think we could probably get a whole ship-full back here. They'd be squeezed, but they'd get over it."
Cai Yue stepped forward and looked down at the drop to the level the captain explored. "Yeah, well, is there anything really interesting down there that requires my attention? I'm not going down there if I don't have to."
"What?" asked the captain, walking back to the steep incline. "Are you scared of a little cave?"
"You do realize we left the only person who would have wanted to do this in the ship."
"Oh, the slacker?"
Cai Yue cringed as the captain's expression soured into one worse than usual. "Yeah, the slacker. Sorry."
Captain Lan stepped on a boulder at the bottom and in three quick motions was climbing to his feet beside Cai Yue at the top.
The priest took a reflexive step backward at the spontaneity of the captain's movements, then forced a nod. "So we could get a ship-full in here and station some guards by the opening, and then the guards could get slaughtered from the outside but hopefully they could kill enough to make it worth it—"
"And then the colonists could all be trapped in a nice wet cave when they bomb the opening and it collapses."
"Yeah." Cai Yue grimaced, nodding his head several times. "What are we doing here?" he sighed.
"Hopefully someday we get to kill a lot of these people for attacking our colonists." Yiao Nih crossed his arms and smiled mirthlessly.
"Lofty goals," Cai Yue said, turning away.
"I suppose you think it was my fault the pirates escaped, too."
"I'm sure you locked them up as well as any of us could have," Cai Yue said. He breathed slowly, then continued, "You did, didn't you?"
"Yes," Lan Yiao Nih hissed. "Yes, I did." He turned from the priest, walking swiftly to the cave's entrance and pausing when he reached it only to grab the rope and begin his descent.
"I hope you did," Cai Yue whispered, following him at a much slower pace. A traitor was the absolute worst development he could imagine. Everyone else in the foreign galaxy seemed to be working against them; to have another, someone on the inside, was almost inconceivable. Everyone seemed determined to drive the Mandalorians away, except perhaps the alien they had encountered in the market near the first colony they rescued. He had been hostile, but more so to the humans than the Mandalorians, prompting Cai Yue to believe that it was his normal attitude toward everything. Calyaar, had he said he was? Not that it mattered; they had no chance even if a single alien hadn't hated them on sight. No chance as it was, and if there was a traitor... He prayed that the captain was entirely honest.
It was only as he neared the bottom of the cliff that he realized a ruckus had developed in the abandoned colony. He literally slid the last ten feet, a jolt traveling up his body as he hit the ground, causing his legs to ache momentarily as he began his run.
Nearly everyone was armed, most with their steel weapons, some of the army with the confiscated gun-type weapons, which they pointed with insecure glances about to see how the others were holding theirs. Cai Yue brushed through the crowd, reaching to his back to draw his sword but finding only the thick cotton of his coat. Regardless of his lack of weapon, he continued toward the center of the commotion. He stopped beside Ming, who breathed heavily, holding her double-bladed staff in front of her as a barrier.
"Please," said a human from the group that had been surrounded by armed Mandalorians. "Put away your blasters and those...swords."
"Why should we?" hissed Ming, her jaw clenched. "How do we know you're not armed?" She seemed on the threshold of collapse, thrust into a situation that she wasn't sure how to handle. Cai Yue quickly glanced over the honor guard assembled around the humans who stood with arms raised. No Kei Sa, no General Li.
"Lady, do I look armed?" snapped the human.
"You certainly have them," muttered Zhen, receiving an elbow in the stomach from Hua Quy Ling as the only reply.
"We don't know what you could be hiding. We have no reason to trust you." Ming's muscles were tensed to such a point that Cai Yue wondered why they didn't all cramp.
"Look, you're the ones who are always armed with the elements or something like that, not us!" The man was beginning to lose his composure, his words meant for reassurance turning into shouts. "We humans are helpless without our weapons!"
Cai Yue whispered in Mandalorian to Ming, "Why's he trying to make us think he's harmless?"
She shook her head in a restricted motion but with enough vigor to send stray hairs whipping in both directions. "Why are you here? If not to attack us and force us away like everyone else, then why?"
"This place was abandoned and now you're all milling around and you expect us to not notice? Look, we don't know who attacked this place earlier, but it wasn't us!"
"How does he know we were attacked?" Cai Yue whispered again.
Ming nodded her head once.
"Maybe," said a deep-voiced human from farther back in the group, "it was those clones."
Cai Yue heard the sharp hiss of Ming's breath even as he felt his own heart jolt.
Clones? As in evil abominations of nature created by evil to fulfill their evil ways? The choice diversion of such fiends as the Sorceress Ennir and the successor to her powers, Shang Tsung?
"Ming..." he whispered in warning.
She shifted her balance, flexing her hands and re-gripping the staff. "I don't care who you are," she said carefully, "why you've come here, or what you may claim to know. You leave. Now."
"Look—"
"Now." Ming spun her staff twice in a second, cleaving out a piece of turf that landed near the feet of the human.
"You people are insane," said the human as they retreated, eventually disappearing into the forest outside the colony.
Yuen Ming watched them go, her eyes remaining fixed on the woods even a minute after the humans had vanished. Neither her body relaxed nor her grip on her staff.
Cai Yue stepped forward to face her. "Ming." He raised his eyebrows after a second of silence. "Ming. Ming," he repeated.
"Ming," echoed Li Wei Yong, running beside Kei Sa from the base of the cliffs.
She jolted and turned, throwing her staff to the ground with excessive force.
"Sorry," the general said, as they neared, seeming wary of her anger. "We didn't know."
"I felt something," Kei Sa explained. "But it seemed to hover like a distant threat, not an immediate one. I apologize, my queen."
"I'm not sure you were wrong, Kei Sa," said Cai Yue. "I don't think it was an immediate threat."
"The humans were here, weren't they?" asked the general.
"Yes, but they weren't armed." Cai Yue kicked the displaced grass back into place and Ming shuddered, grabbing her husband's arm for support as she fought the nausea her mutilation of the grass had caused, her mind finally clear enough to feel it.
"They weren't attacking?" Li Wei Yong helped Ming regain her balance. She threw his arm away as soon as she had recovered.
"I think they wanted us to trust them, for some reason. It all seemed far too suspicious for my liking."
"And the clones," added Hua Quy Ling. "They still have Ennir's clones."
"I find that hard to believe," said Cai Yue. "How many millennia has it been? No, the problem is who has Ennir's type of power and can make these clones?"
"So even this galaxy isn't free from the evils of the Demon," said Tieh Chen Yi.
"Maybe the person making these clones is someone related to Shao Kahn," said Zhen.
"What?" asked Cai Yue, and everyone turned to the tall fighter.
"Yen Sa and that map of his," he explained. "He pointed out that maybe we're from the blank spot in this map and this is the only habitable galaxy. And if that was the case, then Shao Kahn wouldn't have conquered galaxies, so where did he come from? Maybe here. Maybe there's more like him."
The honor guard stood in stunned silence.
"Zhen," sighed Cai Yue, covering his face with his hands. "I think you just erased the last traces of our feelings of well-being."
"I think you just made it impossible for us to just leave and forget about this place," said Li Wei Yong.
"Yeah, way to go," Captain Lan said, slapping the taller man a little too hard on the back. "Now we can't go home."