Warnings: None
Queen of this Backwater Moon
Chapter 02:
"Bad Idea"
As bullets ricocheted off the rocks above Jet's head, he finally remembered why it was a bad idea to listen to Spike.
Not that he'd forgotten Spike's penchant for following bad leads and running headlong into frays without plans, per se. Jet might've been the Bebop's resident old man, but no matter what Faye might say, he hadn't gone senile just yet. It's just that they'd spent time apart, and Spike had come back different. Quieter, with sharper eyes and less desire to speak, following Jet's order when tracking bounties without complaint or even snark—and frankly, that alone was creepy enough. Spike, obedient? Say it ain't so.
So when Spike said he had a lead, and when a spark lit behind his mismatched eyes for the first time in months, Jet didn't have the heart to ask questions. Jet steered the Bebop toward a remote moon off Jupiter in the pursuit of a small-fry tech thief named Killian Marco. Sucker had a decent bounty on his head, but nothing so big they could expect serious competition. Perfect for putting Spike back in the game, Jet thought. Local source said Marco had been spotted in the area, probably on the way back to his home on this terraformed asteroid-turned-moon called Marius CT-174—a backwater hole-in-the-wall not even listed on tourist maps.
Which is why Jet had been more than a little surprised to find an entire battalion of cruisers hovering just above the moon's thin atmosphere, artillery at the ready—which is also why he hadn't steered the Bebop out of the way of said artillery in time to avoid a hit. The retrofitted fishing vessel had plummeted to the moon below before Faye could even find her voice to scream obscenities at the five ships that broke from the pack and chased them to the moon's dry surface.
Seems Marco was a popular guy, after all.
And like Jet said: It was a bad idea to listen to Spike.
But Spike wasn't there just then, now was he? And Jet would do better to focus on the thugs shooting at him rather than on blaming his absent crewmate. Priorities. Jet had them, even if Spike didn't.
Anyway.
Jet crouched behind an outcropping of stone at the foot of a tall rock formation shaped (for lack of better comparison) like a hand reaching right out of the cracked desert, tall columns of stone stretching fingerlike toward the lilac sky and yellow clouds roiling high above the terraformed earth. Faye would probably mock Jet for talking flowery, but the only other things he could think to compare the big rock to were those big sandstone mesas in you always saw in old westerns and John Wayne movies—yeah, that's right, from Old Earth's Monument Valley in what was it, Arizona? Arkansas? He never could keep the United States straight, anyway, and Faye already made enough fun of him for being an old man without knowing he liked classic cinema. With the finger comparison he'd stick.
Another bullet ricocheted off the stone; Jet fired back blind, robotic arm barely even feeling the recoil. Jet pressed his organic fingers to the earpiece he'd managed to snag before fleeing the burning Bebop. "Anybody out there?" he asked.
In his ear, the radio crackled with static.
Where Faye and Spike and Ed and Ein had gotten off to when they fled the smoking wreck of his ship, Jet hadn't a fucking clue.
Cursing, he chanced a glance over the top of his rocky hideaway. Dozens of the mesas dotted the parched earth in all directions, masses of stone dark against pale dirt, and they all looked pretty much the same: completely useless. A column of smoke drifted from behind one mesa maybe five hundred feet away, black and oily and thick. The Bebop, obviously. Shot down and burning. No signs of life or civilization in any direction (and that tracked with the brief view of this barren desert moon he'd gotten as they crashed), aside from the two gun-toting morons he'd spotted crouched some yards off behind another bit of bulbous rock. Just two, with a cruiser parked a ways behind them on the desert floor. Which meant there were three other cruisers in the area, as unaccounted for as the rest of the Bebop crew.
If he could commandeer that ship, blend in with the enemy, get a jump on them when they were unawares, then go find his friends—
Jet raised his hands into the air, Walther P99 dangling by the trigger guard from one metal fingertip.
"Now, now, fellas," he called during a lull in the gunfire. Tone jovial, casual, nonchalant, he said: "Why don't we cool our heads a minute, see if we can work this out?"
The gunfire stopped.
There followed a pause.
Cautiously, Jet peeked over the top of the rock.
The thugs spotted him, yelped, and opened fire.
Jet jerked back down again with a grumble. "Guess they're not really the talking sort."
Not that the attempt at a ceasefire hadn't been without some success. He'd gotten another look at the thugs when he peeked over the rock, noting their black body armor and helmets with dark visors—ISSP gear, instantly recognizable to Jet, only it bore no ISSP crests or colors. Gear of police quality, but definitely bought aftermarket. Perhaps even black market. And the cruiser behind them bore a red crest depicting a large drill emblazed with the word "CygmaCorp" in brilliant orange and violet letters. Garish. Hard to forget.
Especially since he'd seen the same logo on the ships that had shot them out of the sky.
Jet had no idea what CygmaCorp might be, on account of never having heard of them. He had no idea what they were doing here or why they'd attacked at first sight. But he filed the name of the organization away for future reference, committing that tacky logo to dutiful, vengeful memory.
Nobody touched the Bebop without Jet's permission. Nobody.
Now, Jet hadn't had time for much before the Bebop went down, but he hadn't been called the Black Dog of the ISSP for nothing. He'd grabbed the bug-out bag hidden under the flight deck of the Bebop's bridge on his way out the door, before he had to scatter away from the others as gunfire arched in their direction. He grabbed a ribbon of instant firecrackers from the bag's depths and pulled the catch, wincing as the explosives let off a series of short, harsh pops that sounded (to any untrained ear, at least) like a gun going off. Low-tech, sure, but if it worked it worked. He set the firecrackers on the ground, ducked low, and crawled away from his hiding spot on hands and thighs, listening as the "firefight" raged on behind him.
Definitely not ISSP, then. Dumbasses couldn't tell the difference between firecrackers and guns.
Leaving the thugs occupied with a phantom enemy, Jet allowed himself a satisfied grin and picked his way around the edges of the gigantic rock formation, sticking close to the shadows at its base as he circled the thing—circled it the long way 'round, hooking back toward the thugs and their own hiding spot. He glanced left and right whenever he got a good vantage point, scanning the horizon and the dozens of other mesas for a shock of bright blue jacket, livid yellow hot pants, or flaming red hair.
He didn't see any of those things.
He saw only a dark wall of cloud to the west, rising black and ominous against the pale purple sky.
Jet paused when he spotted it. The roiling black cloud stretched from the ground to even above the tops of the mesas, enveloping the mesas one by one in its dark mass as it made its steady way toward him across the dry, cracked plains. The yellow clouds in the clear purple sky shuddered and rippled, and when the black wall reached them, they dragged downward like bubbles through a straw and disappeared into the dark cloud below. Above it all loomed the bloated bulk of Jupiter itself, dominating the western sky like the watchful eye of some great and hungry god.
A sandstorm.
Fucking great.
But that was the desert on a probably unstable terraformed planet for you, Jet guessed, not to mention his rotten luck.
"Never should've listened to Spike," Jet muttered, and as if summoned by his words a wind kicked up, hot and biting and full of grit. Jet shielded his eyes with one hand and spat a mouthful of dirt onto the stone below his feet. He'd have to make this quick, find a place to lie low until the storm passed. He just hoped the others saw the storm in time and took cover before it hit.
Continuing around the rock formation took only a few minutes, no more time spared for the ominous wall of dust heading his way. Ears trained on the gunfire still pop-pop-popping right where he'd left it, Jet rounded the entire formation on silent feet until his mental map of the terrain told him he'd gotten close enough to take a shot. Jet sketched a map in his head of where the two thugs with the guns should be and, back pressed tight to rock, peered around a boulder toward their position.
Jet saw movement.
Jet struck.
No time to think, no time to plan; the firecrackers would run dry soon. A black figure moved amidst brown stone and Jet raised his gun, training it on the man in a motion born as much from training as from instinct. He squeezed the trigger in that same glide and pull of practiced muscle, Walther P99 roaring as a round left the chamber and cut the air toward its intended target. The man screamed, lurching to the side, but Jet's sharp eyes noted that he'd only hit the thug's shoulder—not a killing blow. He raised the gun again as the thug stumbled back and headed for the cruiser, sight trained between the man's retreating shoulders.
Something crunched behind Jet's back.
He turned.
Atop a jut of rock crouched the other thug, gun raised.
Jet had time to think only one thing—that the corporate jerks had had the same idea he did, circling around to mount a surprise attack—as he raised his gun and tried to beat his attacker to the gunfire punch, but he knew it wouldn't make a difference. The asshole carried a handgun and the barrel had already been leveled, a leering face behind the weapon promising Jet's death with a single pull of the trigger. Still, Jet tried to raise the Walther, and time seemed to slow as the enemy's arm flexed, muscles contracting one by one, finger bearing down on the trigger millimeter by excruciating millimeter—
Over Jet's shoulder, thunder boomed.
The thug yelped and fell backward in a spray of blood.
Jet didn't move. He stared at the boulder before him, at the top of it where the thug had fallen out of sight, without comprehending.
That thunder—where had it—?
Jet's survival instinct did what his conscious brain could not, and turned his body to face his newest threat.
Of all the things Jet expected to find behind him, she did not rank among the number. Spike coming out of the blue with a well-placed shot, perhaps, or maybe even Faye with a glib comment on her tongue, but certainly not this woman. She balanced atop one of the shortest fingers of the tall mesa, banner of tawny hair tumbling on the wind, one foot propped up on a bit of stone, hands clasped around the gleaming form of a long shotgun—a shotgun trained on Jet, currently, and that probably would have alarmed him had he not noticed just what the hell the woman was wearing. To his horror he beheld a long off-white robe belted at the woman's trim waist, train flapping in the wind, fabric parting over the curve of her bronzed thigh before cascading nearly to her ankles. The robe gaped open nearly to her navel, too, baring a stripe of coppery skin and the side of one breast for all the world to see, and then the scorching wind blew and nearly knocked the robe off one of her broad shoulders—
The woman gasped, clasped the front of her robe, and wrenched it firmly shut.
Best as Jet could figure, he probably should've been politer about ogling, even if he'd been ogling out of a sense of concern. Wearing a goddamn bathrobe in the approaching sandstorm sounded like a monumentally bad idea, in his humble opinion. Still, perhaps he got what was coming to him, staring at her slaw-jawed the way he'd been—because in exchange for staring at her nearly-bare chest, the woman raised the shotgun higher and shot him square in the middle of his own.
Just desserts, Jet supposed, before everything went quite black.
Notes:
And we begin in media res. Thought about a chapter in which they discuss the bounty and get shot down and whatnot, blah blah blah, but felt like too much exposition. Wanted to start with tight focus on Jet. Don't worry, he'll see the rest of the crew eventually (spoiler: Jet ain't dead and neither are they).
We meet the OC proper next chapter, too. It makes me laugh that all Jet had time to notice was her manner of (admittedly odd) dress before she FUCKING SHOT HIM.