Bullets. Hah. Jet considers Faye's last transmission and has to chuckle a bit. He's got bullets, sure. He's got exactly six of them. He loads the gun, fingers of one hand passing over the rough 'RESTRICTED FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE MADE IN ITALY" inscription on the magazine. There's room for three more slugs but that's all he's got, so he loads and holsters it.
The attackers have hacked into the Bebop's computer and opened the hangar doors, an easy task since Edward wasn't around to create new security blocks. Five people are boarding his ship right this moment. Every damned buzzer ever installed in the corners of the ship is screaming it. Even the alarm clocks are going off, and Jet is standing in his room, gun holstered, watering his bonsai trees.
The lights flicker out, in tune with the delay Jet put on them. It's as dark as starless space inside the ship now. Jet flips on his dual night-vision, infrared goggles and puts the watering can down with a clang – silence hardly matters now. In a few minutes the buzzers will quit too, as he'd programmed them.
Jet involuntarily grins in anticipation. His armored boots are gone; with icy bare feet he treads through his room.
His door is open before him. He pokes his nose out, using his peripheral vision to scan the hall.
They're late.
From the hangar he hears a hissing noise - some kind of gas. He ducks back into his room and retrieves a mask to filter it out. Looking like an alien who can't withstand the pitch black, unbreathable atmosphere with his mask and goggles, he runs out of the hallway and with a quick slide, ends up in front of the couch on his side to wait for the door to the hangar to open. Jet begins to grind his teeth in anticipation. The buzzers all suddenly stop.
The sound of the door opening fills the heavily silent room.
When this fight is over, Jet thinks while on his back looking at the ceiling, Faye will leave and he will have to move on, like water spilling down a creek after a bauble of rocks.
Or maybe she'll stay?
Jet wonders what she'd do if he got killed today. She certainly wouldn't take care of his bonsai trees. She'd sell the Bebop, probably. Sell everything he has left. Down to the whiskey. Down to his last six bullets.
So he better be sure to spend them all, his last bit of earthly currency.
Someone takes a step into the room. Jet springs up from behind the couch and stands before the figure entering his ship. With the goggles, he can see the heat signature of a man crouched in the entryway. Jet leans around the side of the couch and fires once, trying to conserve his spare ammo.
Five bullets left, and from the pooling heat trail of blood leading from his now slumped first target, four more intruders to stop. Now that the element of surprise is lost, Jet can't stay where he is; an old couch is not much cover. Jet jumps up and runs bent over towards the hall leading to his room.
"Go to hell!" he hears a woman's voice sob. Then the hangar door slams shut.
Jet's not willing to let them go. It sounds like they're going to leave but that's not going to work. He huffs in frustration at a dead run to the door, and is soon standing in the blood he'd spilled minutes before. It's a good thing for the stickiness reminding him he isn't wearing his boots. He had been mere seconds from kicking the unlatched door in, and he probably would've broken every bone in his foot. Wincing at the thought, Jet forces himself to try some finesse.
With his metal arm he eases the door open with no resistance. Back to the wall, he takes a deep breath, and then removes his goggles. He sets them to record, and then with his metal hand sticks them into the hangar. After a few moments, he pulls them back and sets them back to their normal mode. Watching the recording, he sees there's three people hiding behind one of their ships, and another sprawled on the ground, bleeding. The figure of a woman kneels over the hurt man. One of the men behind the ships has a weird heat signature, like there's something wrong with his body temperature.
A couple shots ring off the metal near Jet, and one careens through the open hangar door. With the advantage of his goggles, Jet jumps through the door when they're done firing and heads right for his ship, the Hammerhead, and dives behind it for cover. In all the darkness, no one even sees where he goes.
A woman's voice cuts through the darkness. The voice is muffled by the gas mask she wears.
"Dad, dad, wake up," she whispers. "I'm going to take him and get him some help."
"Shut up! Pick up your gun, or you don't get any of the money from this job!" a man's voice echoes.
"I don't care about that anymore!" she replies. A man in the shadow of a ship walks out over to her and pistol-whips her across the chin. She never sees him, and falls down next to her father.
Just a bunch of amateurs, Jet thinks. Punks.
"I can't see anything in these goggles," a short man says.
"What are you talking about?!" The apparent ringleader, standing over the woman he knocked unconscious, turns around and snatches the goggles forcibly from the head of the complainer.
"You don't even have them turned on," he hisses.
Jet's got his breath back now and he's had enough of this absurdity. He carefully aims from behind the Hammerhead, with the use of his own goggles. He takes a shot, allows time for the recoil to lightning through his arm, and then dives back down for cover. The goggles in the hands of the group's leader shatter as Jet's bullet tears through them. The three remaining men hysterically waste a couple dozen bullets trying to find the source of the shot.
Four bullets left.
"Damnit, someone is in here! Marnie, get up in that ship and turn on the floodlights already!" The short man dashes up one of the five ships they crammed into the hanger, but Jet lets him have it. Marnie falls to the floor in a crash.
Three.
"Lay down your guns," Jet announces, standing outside of any cover. "You don't know what you're –" a spray of bullets silences him, and he springs backwards to cover behind the Hammerhead. They're way off target and come from the leader of the little group, which is slowly being decimated in the darkness.
Enough of this, Jet thinks. Holstering his gun, Jet lunges at the leader, just in time for the other man left to hit the floodlights in one of the ships. Before the leader can even yelp, Jet connects with his metal fist, right in his opponent's gut. The wind knocked out of him, the man doubles over on the floor in pain. He's reaching for his gun wildly, but Jet kicks it gingerly out of reach with the side of his foot. The goggles are useless now, so Jet pulls them off quickly and looks down at the prostrate man. He's just a young guy, with a blond mohawk, covered in tattoos visible on his back and chest through his mesh shirt. A slight line of blood trails from his mouth and into his gas mask, which has fallen off.
The ship in front of Jet goes slightly up and down on its wheels. Jet notices it just in time to look up, where the last man standing is jumping down on him. He tackles Jet and tries to wrap his fingers around Jet's throat. Using his metal arm, Jet puts all the strength the artificial limb has in tightening his fingers around his attacker's throat. Lying there on the ground, Jet realizes he can't breathe at all. The man choking him has cut off his air completely. Jet looks around wildly, then sees that both of his attacker's arms are like his own metal limb.
His gaze searches the cold, emotionless gray eyes of his attacker. Jet realizes he's just wrapped his metal fingers around the round body armor that goes all the way to the man's chin. Jet kicks wildly in a last minute effort to survive. Everything begins to swim in his vision until he collects every bit of remaining air and strength to swing his fist into the man's face.
The pressure on Jet's throat relents slightly, so Jet punches him again and again with both fists, until his vision starts to spot and turn black. Finally the man falls backward. Jet slides away, breathing haggardly, pulling his gun. But the man has jumped up and dashed out the door of the hangar into the inner living quarters of the Bebop. Jet tears off the gas mask and gasps for air. Whatever they set off in here has since dissipated.
He's young, so young to have lost both arms already, and too young to have learned how to properly control them, Jet thinks as he half-crawls to cover behind the Hammerhead. He's got to catch his breath before doing anything else. He climbs inside the Hammerhead in case the main hangar doors open and a ship comes in; it'd be just too much to suffocate in space after being nearly suffocated by some punk kid boarding his ship without an invitation.
Looking down from the windows of the Hammerhead, he can see his bloody footprints on the floor and the three bodies lying down there, not moving. His Hammerhead is full of bullet holes. It's a big mess that could have been avoided, and it was just going to get messier.