Bit of Both: Wayward Son, Renegade.
"I'm just saying, that in the movies, the hero just saves the day!" said Quill, grunting and sweating as he struggled to get the doors to the warehouse they'd taken over from the Watts open. "They never have to actually go through all this shit afterwards to actually rebuild the place they save! Did Arnie have to re-establish a government for the island he blew up in Commando? Did Val Kilmer have to re-build the kingdom's economy in Willow? No, they just got the girl and walked off into the sunset. You don't see them bustin' a gut afterwards with no help from the authorities! I mean Nova has an army and they won't lend it to us until we build a working democracy form the ground up? This is bullshit!"
"Yeah, my heart bleeds for you." said Rocket, his voice flattened and attenuated by the coms as he guided the hovering Milano through the doors with the low susurrus of the landing engines and occasional piccolo hiss and fart of RCS thrusters. "I mean, it's really, really unfair for you that this situation you've somehow frickin' got yourself and more importantly me into is one we're all expected to clean up, whilst Nova just has the small job of, yanno, rebuilding the city you crashed a kilometre long ship into."
"I am Groot."
"Yeah, we should have demanded medals! I'm all aghast that Quill can even breathe in the face of such ingratitude an' crap from Nova. How dare they make him put the hard work in! What's the world coming to when you can't just waltz into a disputed territory, declare that you've oh golly gosh saved them all, and expect Nova to provide an army for you to rebuild it?"
"Hey, 'Put the hard work in and fix this place democratically so Nova will lend us that fleet' is on my to do list, okay? Cut me some slack."
Rocket laughed. "It ain't on the list. I'm still waiting on my backup osmotic membrane, so I'd know."
"He is correct." added Drax, from the other door. "The to-do list seems un-altered since you wrote it."
"Well, feel free to add it to the list after 'Hope real hard that Yondu pisses off on his own accord 'cause we've got no way to stop him until Nova Prime pulls her finger out her butt and helps us!'"
"I am Groot."
"Yeah, where has all the justice in the world gone? I- Ahahaha, excuse me… perhaps you should write to your member of parliament about Nova's attitude, seen' as you're such a fine upstanding citizen!"
"This was hard enough toil without the laughing." muttered Drax, straining with the other sliding door as Rocket inched her in.
"Least it's not a fake laugh." muttered Quill, as the Milano brushed past him with less than an inch to spare. "When it comes to the guys who are on their way to kill us, and will be here in less than forty hours, then somehow he finds the funny side of life."
"What can I say? I'm just a glass half full kinda guy." muttered Rocket, watching his manoeuvring tolerances like a hawk as Groot sat on the dash and stared.
"Only if someone else is paying for the drinks." muttered Gamora, guiding Rocket down with precise, practised banksman signals: they had decided to hide the Milano and cut her power, to prevent Yondu picking up on her energy profile and homing in on their exact location, and that meant getting it under cover and the core shut down. As Rocket lowered the landing struts and nudged her to kiss the floor as gently as a mother with a new-born, Gamora spoke up as Drax and Quill begun to push the doors closed again.
"And whilst I hate to agree with him over anything, Rocket has a point, Peter. We've gotten off pretty easy so far. It's not even like Nova Prime said she wouldn't help, just not until we can get Knowhere some sort of functioning government and signed up to a trade deal."
"Pity we'll all be dead before that can happen." said Rocket cheerfully, killing the engines. "Unless boy genius there has better than one-eighth of a plan up his sleeves."
"Rocket, I'm pretty sure the only time I've had an eight of anything up my sleeve is when me and Krygan got baked on Nepeta pollen and I had to hide my stash from Yondu. But it's cool, I'll think of something… what was that, Rocket?" said Quill, as Rocket muttered something that sounded remarkably like "chicken-brain" under his breath while climbing out from the cockpit, Groot under one arm.
"Nothing. I still wanna try my back-up plan, anyhow," he said, shifting his grip on Groot protectively
Quill sighed. "Rocket, I know you're scared for him, but seriously, we can't just load Groot into a pod and fire him at the next M class world. For a start, I doubt Yondu would hurt him, I've never seen him harm a kid, and I'd be the one to know, and secondly, if we do somehow survive this, I don't want to have to go all Search for Spock to get him back! It'll be fine: worse that can happen is he'll take Groot on as part of his crew like he did for me, and I turned out pretty good." said Quill, wiping sweat from his forehead as he leaned on the sliding doors and unwittingly covering himself in an unlovely amalgam of dust and door-grease. Rocket shuddered.
"Urrrrrrh! Fates forbid. Getting fired at the next planet seems frickin' kinder. Least if he crashes n' burns it's literally not into an emotional man-child. You got a little something on your face, by the way."
"Where?" asked Quill, immediately putting a hand on one cheek and covering it with filth.
"To one side, no up a little and left. My left, dummy, no… perfect." said Rocket, once Quill had finished covering himself in tiger-stripes of gunk. "So Yondu won't hurt Groot, you don't think. Leaving aside your famously bad judgments of character and the famous unpredictability of hillbilly pirate kings and assuming for one incredibly stupid second Yondu and his 'ain't-never-tasted-no-Terran-boy' crew let Groot live, I'm sure that'll come as a great comfort to me in my new life as a novelty furry toilet-paper cover and antenna decoration."
"Who says I'm a bad judger of character? I saw potential in you guys didn't I?"
"Yeah, feel free to say how that's working out for you, captain. Still got a little something." said Rocket, gesturing to his own face with an errant finger. Quill went to touch his own face as indicated, before catching a glimpse of his refection in the highly polished flanks of the Milano.
"Oh come on! Really, Rocket? Impending death wasn't good enough for me so you try to send me to my doom looking like Shere Kahn?" said Quill, cleaning his face on his shirt and treating a perfect Turin shroud of grime.
"It does perhaps illustrate a trusting flaw in your nature unbecoming your criminal choices in life." said Drax. Gamora nodded.
"He has a point, Peter, are you sure that you're not letting your feelings for Yondu cloud your judgement on this? He'll kill you if you cross him. You know that, right?"
Quill sighed. "I guess. Yeah, I know he kills people who play him false, it's what he does. But he still raised me most my life. I know he'll kill me if it's that or lose the respect of his crew, but I still don't believe it."
"Yeah well, believe this: I was raised by me, mostly, and I still don't trust me. Everyone's got feelings for people, don't stop them killin' 'em." said Rocket. "Look at the stats, most killers knew their victims, and I don't intend to become a statistic any time soon. Quill, I like you man, but answer me this, if our backs are up against the wall and one of our lives is on the line, could you kill Yondu to save one of us? 'Cause if the answer ain't yes, or if you don't know, then I'm not sure I want me or Groot hanging around to find out. I don't mind risking my life for you to save the universe, much, if ya' all pressure me. And it's that or get murdered by pirates, but getting wasted by Yondu over this piece of shit head ain't exactly the way I planned to go, so if that's how it's going down you can count me out."
They all stood dejectedly as they digested this, and as Quill looked from face to face, he could see that Drax and Gamora had their doubts too. He took a deep breath.
"I don't know if I could kill Yondu. Not gonna lie, and I find the prospect more than a little unsettling. But guys, I'm gonna have to ask you to trust me."
"Why?" asked Drax.
"Because that's what friends do." said Quill, dumbly. "Because we're a crew, and if we turn on each other now we won't have a hope in hell of making it out of here alive."
They all stood there for a moment, taking in just how hopeless everything was.
"So, you really have a plan for how you want to clock out?" Quill asked Rocket. The raccoon nodded.
"Crushed to death in my sleep when one of my many giant stacks of credit-slips falls over and drowns me in money."
"…Really?"
"What can I say? I'm a realist." said Rocket, looking forlornly around the dilapidated warehouse they had killed to make their home and might just die trying to defend. He hitched Groot up to his other shoulder, and nodded to the doors.
"You better get those closed, boss, or Yondu's gonna be all over us. I'll check the sensor grid. Who knows? Maybe he'll have given up."
"Cap'n, we're picking up no energy signatures that match the Milano, no orbital defences that weren't there last time we dropped by, an' life support is running at ninety-six percent previous capacity, so either folks decided they could do without their safety margin in O2 or they ain't got no routine maintenance done since the Collector pulled out and stuff starting to shut down. No additional weapons signatures, only basic sensor sweeps an' no sign of a welcoming committee coming out to join us." said Kraglin, looking up from the sensor suite on the helm of the Galley. "Don't look like our boy Quill's putting up a fight. Who knows? Maybe he's given up, cleared off someplace else."
Yondu shifted an iota on his control-chair, desperately aware of how numb his ass had become staring out the viewport at that damned orbiting head as his pants slowly tried to squeeze the life out of his crotch. "Privileges of command, boy. A fucking uncomfortable chair an' less comfortable calls that go with it, all yours to make." He'd said that to Quill once, he remembered, when the boy was around fourteen and beginning to make trouble in a way that, directed properly, could be useful.
Well that sure as shit turned out well. he thought, glumly.
"Kraglin, you ever known Quill to run from a fight when the running was good? Based on past experience with our boy there, I'd have estimated that his odds of putting down roots grew proportionally with the odds of getting his lil' Terran ass handed to him in installments."
"There's that," admitted Kraglin, switching away from the sensor sweeps. Given the low temperature of space, passive heat sensors would pick up most ships long before they got within shooting range. As a result, unless you had internal heat sinks or directional radiators to beam your waste heat away from the enemy, stealth was pretty much a crapshoot and so both the Ravenger fleet and Knowhere had been banging away with active radar at each other since they dropped out of FTL on the basis that if they couldn't hide from each other then they could at least annoy the fuck out of their respective navigators by continually bombarding them with data. So far Knowhere had yielded only an automated response recorded by the Tivan Group and automated landing guidance beams being shot out to guide them into port. Hardly the response you'd expect from a hostile station, as Kraglin pointed out.
"True." said Yondu, staring out of the viewports as if Knowhere was just another bobblehead to add to his collection. "But those nav-beams are also lighting up pretty as a life day cake should someone decide to take objection to our bein' here and open fire. Ain't no difference between the technology that guides a ship in to land on a sub-unit and the tech that guides a missile in with the same accuracy."
"So why ain't they fired?" asked Kraglin, a mite nervously. Yondu considered this.
"Well, way I see it there are three reasons within the realms of possibility. First-off, they probably known that if they did, we'd spot the location of their weapon battery before the shot hit us and the ship's systems would automatically retaliate, triggering similar actions from the sister ships and so on and so forth until that big ol' head's got a new opening to get skullfucked. Secondly, given that this is Quill we're talking about, if he ain't high-tailed it already then he's planning something stupid… no doubt fine and noble looking, but basically dumb, and I reckon he'd want us all in one piece on that there station to see it first-hand 'cause he's not gonna want to make a stand up fight out of this with us, seeing as we're old friends an' he wants to prove that he's trickier than us."
"And thirdly?'"
"Thirdly? Hell, Kraglin. Only ship he's got is the gods-damned Milano. That station didn't have any defences so to speak of last time we were here, and given that any weapon system that could scratch us at this range would be bigger than the ship he'd have to transport it here with, I'm gonna go with thirdly, I don't reckon he has any anti-ship systems or we'd have heard about it by now." said Yondu, swivelling his chair to side in a decisive, and captain-ly manner that he hoped would restore some circulation to his tortured nethers.
"Yeah, that seems about right." said Kraglin, checking their course. "Looks like we'll be in little after breakfast. You want me to get the cook to send you up a tray before we land?"
Yondu considered this.
"Sure, but go easy on the eggs. Never sat well with me, killing someone after a meal of eggs."
Kraglin nodded. "Seems unfitting. Eggs bein' a symbol of new life and all."
"Well, wasn't quite thinking that philosophical, more concerned with getting gas, but I'll give you that point."
Kraglin watched Yondu sympathetically as he swayed awkwardly in his captain's chair and stared out the window.
"Captain, you mind if I speak freely?"
"Humm?" said Yondu, distractedly before his ears caught up. He looked around the bridge. It was still stupidly early in the morning, by the reckoning of ship time (keeping local time on planet after planet was too much hassle, so like most crews the Ravengers just adopted their own time system and to hell with the rest) and other than him, Kraglin, and the chief engineer Trelzar trying to fix something or other (bionic eye poking cheerfully through the hole cut in the welding mask for it) they were all alone.
"Course. As first officer, it's your prerogative. Just don't say anything dumb. Momma Udonta didn't raise no-one to suffer fools. That and saying dumb things was how Trelzar lost that eye." Plus if you're gonna say what I think you're gonna say, the smaller the audience the better.
Kraglin frowned. It wasn't relevant to what he was about to say, but his interest was piqued.
"Thought he lost that eye in a bar-fight with a Badoon warlord?"
"He did. Never said he said the dumb thing to me."
"I still reckon there's something wrong with any species where the males don't show no interest in their females except to make war on them every decade or so." said Trelzar, welding away happily. "Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if he prefers the company of males he should have the balls to say so."
"Yeah, but saying it to his face was a bad call, drink or no drink. Don't matter. He's dead now, his own knife in his skull with your eye-jelly still on it. I'm not saying that stupidity in my presence is a guarantor of the loss of eyeballs, otherwise I'd have the first all-blind crew in the galaxy, but it is hardly conducive to the retention of 'em." Yondu paused, aware the conversation had gone off track. "Definitely no eggs. So, Kraglin, speak up."
"You okay about doing this to Peter?" asked Kraglin, bluntly. "You seem to be taking this awful hard, and yeah, it is pretty convenient that someone is willing to pay us to get even with him after he done robbed us. But he was one of us for over twenty years, and something about all this don't sit right. It's too convenient and besides, you know the last crew this Count Barf or whatever he's calling himself sent to deal with this was? Wade and Belamy Watts. I ain't sayin' Peter shouldn't pay for where he's done you wrong, boss, he's done us all wrong. But finishing off what the Watts brothers started, that's gonna leave a bad taste in the mouth."
Yondu looked at the troll-doll on his command console for a long time.
"Yeah, but not as bad a taste as goin' hungry or getting marooned post-mutiny like the Watts were. That orb would have set us for life, and Pete gone took it from us. He stole the very food out of our mouths twice, and he undermined my authority both times. Captain's gotta do what a Captain's gotta do. Fact I kinda admire the balls on the kid to pull off a switch like that right under my nose isn't gonna stop me from admiring them in a jar on my console, Kraglin." he said, looking out at Knowhere as it spun ever closer. "Sure, I miss the little scamp, but he's gotta learn that there are consequences to breaking faith with the likes of me." said Yondu, stroking his arrow thoughtfully. "And I'm afraid that it's gonna be a sharp lesson."
Quill threw a bundle of cabling over the Milano to Gamora, who caught it and ran it to a socket in the far wall: without the fire-power to take on the Ravengers in a fair fight, Quill had decided to let them split up searching Knowhere for them, and then lure them into a series of battles around the Collector's old headquarters where hopefully they could take Yondu and enough of the officers captive to force the rest of the crew to back down or piss off. Then they could sit on Yondu and the rest until they met whatever unreasonable standards of democracy Nova Prime required before she could help. It wasn't much of a plan, but it sure beat trying to have a gunfight in the main drag with nearly two hundred heavily armed pirates. Re-writing the internal sensors so that they could only be used from the Collector's base would be vital to stop Yondu just scanning the station and finding them in seconds. Between that and a booby-trapped cache of fuel at the main docks, and they might have a chance
Drax was already over there, building barricades, Rocket was everywhere at once, swearing non-stop and working his furry little ass off trying to solder a dozen things at once, and Quill reckoned they might just be done in time, if Groot would stop demanding airplane rides of him at inopportune moments. 'That said, he could be saying that Yondu was right behind me for all I know,' thought Quill.
All in all, they were doing pretty damn well when the proximity alarms went off.
Quill paused in unspooling cable for Gamora (and wondering whether or not she'd kill him if he made a joke about her "taking a length of hard line" from him, or just castrate him with a fork), looked up and said, "What the hell?" Gamora reciprocated rather more succinctly, and a shower of sparks and inventive and anatomically improbable suggestions from inside the maintenance panel in the walls gave Rocket's opinion on the matter.
"The actual das'ted fuck? That's the outer marker alarm. The Ravengers have gone long past that, someone else must just have dropped out of FTL!"
"Perhaps they brought friends." muttered Gamora, sourly.
"Unlikely. Probably more bounty hunter scum like Rocket have arrived to claim the bounties on us." said Drax, over the coms.
"Hey! Firstly, there are no bounty hunter scum like me, there's just me. The rest wish they could be like me!" said Rocket, crawling out of the wall paneling reeking of grime and burnt fur and with cobwebs stuck to his whiskers, "and secondly, Count Bligh closed the books on us when the Ravengers took the job. No-one else is coming!"
This triggered a momentary pause before Quill, Gamora, and Rocket ran to put the sensor panel back on so they could see what was happening. Having man-handled, woman handled, and raccoon-handled it back onto the wall, they all stared at the tiny built-in pict-screen.
"Wait, are we the red dot?"
"What red dot?"
"That one!"
"The grey dot? No, we're the green dot."
"Okay Rocket, firstly, it's shit like that that makes me doubt your colour acuity, which given you've just re-wired everything is some scary shit, and secondly, why the fuck are we getting closer to the red dot? Shouldn't the station be stationary and the dot moving?"
Gamora and Rocket took the panel off the wall, and turned it the right way up.
"Okay, better…." said Quill, ignoring his moment of embarrassment and squinting at the reading from the new arrivals. His face sunk like the Lusitania.
"Shit. It's that Nova relief fleet. Just in time to sit and watch us get our asses kicked. Goody. "
"Surely this is a fortuitous turn of events, given that they represent our salvation." asked Drax, over the com.
"Salvation my furry ass, Drax. They won't lift a finger to help us without that trade deal, remember? Just a nice audience to our messy lingering deaths." said Rocket, looking at the dots on screen with a disgust he usually reserved for watching Quill and the other bald-bodies eat.
"Yes. I know that." said Drax, as if explaining things to a small child. "You know that. Nova knows that. Yondu has no way whatsoever of knowing that."
The rest of the team stared at each other stupidly for a moment, and then broke into identical evil grins.
"Shall you call them or shall I?" asked Quill.
Yondu watched the Nova warships move smoothly into an attack formation and then hold at a good stand-off distance, just outside of weapons range, waiting. Mostly he was pissed off by that, in fact he was fucking seething with the idea that because of Nova, Quill was getting away from him again, but if he was totally honest with himself, and he'd never say this out loud, not even to Kraglin, he was a mite relieved not to have to do this with Quill, and even a little impressed that the boy could arrange for a whole attack-squadron to show up in fine style in the nick of time.
"Cap'n? Quill is hailing us. The Milano's old frequency." said Kraglin.
Yondu ground his teeth in anger. Damned if he was going to be mocked by the boy, but the sudden arrival of Nova ships had brought half the crew to the bridge, some still eating breakfast, and he'd not look weak in front of his men.
"Track the call. On screen." he snarled, sittng on his captain's chair with a swirl of long-coat. "Quill!"
"Yondu. Hey, no first name terms? I'm shocked. Look, firstly, I told you not to open that orb, and I'm real sorry about all that but, yanno, glowing stone of doom, destroyer of the universe and all that. Didn't want to leave it with you guys just in case it got all pirates of black water and shit. No hard feelings, bygones be bygones and all that, eh? We've got a plan to get all this brain and bone and head gunk sold off to our friends Nova over there, and we'd be really happy to cut to a share in it by way of making up, but first we'd appreciate it if you'd power down your weapons and get out of orbit of our shit. That'd be real nice. …Yondu, you there pal?" asked Quill, sitting with his crew minus Drax (who was finishing barricades) in the common area of the Milano. He'd decided that if they were going to hide out in the Collector's HQ if this didn't work, then visibly broadcasting from there was a bad call.
"Pal? You dare boy? You dare? I ought to rip off your skull and shit in your brain, you treacherous little double dealing son of a bitch!"
"Hey, don't bring mom into it just because you know you've lost!"
"Lost boy? Hell. You even know that that means?"
"Well if you say it like that, it means that there are too many goddam vampires in Santa Monica, but generally, yeah, I know what losing means I've been doing it for most of my life, and now for once it's someone else's turn, so don't come crying to me that you don't like it. I'm sorry for all the bad blood between us, Yondu, truly I am, but the shoe's in the other court, ball's on the other foot, know what I mean?"
"No." said Kraglin and Rocket under their breath simultaneously. Their respective captains chose to ignore them.
"Give. Me. That. Orb." growled Yondu.
"I. Don't. Fucking. Have. It." parroted Quill. "Ask Nova for it if you want it. Hell, if you're having trouble finding them, just look behind you." he said, gesturing dramatically behind him and nearly knocking Groot into the fridge.
Yondu followed the gesture with his sharp Centaurian eyes.
"Look behind me, eh?" he asked, lowering one hand out of Quill's field of vision and manipulating the controls on the com screen. Unaware, Quill blathered on.
"Yeah, behind, at the big fleet which, I'm gonna have to say, I had to work really hard to put together. I mean, I'm not just making a few calls and then claiming afterwards that I was slaving away, I'm talking about real gut-busting work, I even had to, like, move this really heavy door, and while I'm not expecting you to be happy for me I thought you of all people would appreciate the effort I went to, taking over a base, building a mighty fleet and being just a great hero and all. Now if I was in your shoes, I'd say, and I hope you don't mind this, I'd say 'Quill, my boy, I've misjudged you, it's time for me to be the bigger man and admit I was wrong and… and HOLY FUCK did you just fire on that Nova fleet?"
"Yep." said Yondu, watching the missile zoom off. "Reckon I just did. So according to their standard operating procedure, if they are on a combat mission they should retaliate just about now… three… two.." Quill stared at the red dots on the scanner, and went pale and sweaty. "One." said Yondu casually, watching the missile fly on for a good moment past that before hitting the abort button, sufficiently far away from Nova's shields for them to know it was just a friendly warning shot.
Quill breathed out slowly. "Yondu, what made you think they wouldn't vaporise your entire fleet for that little stunt?"
Yondu ginned, and sat back on his chair one leg draped casually, as he pointed with two fingers. "I dunno. Maybe the bit where it says that they won't help you until after you've got a democracy running on that pile of brains you're clearly not using, that you call a base."
"What, how-"
"How could I know that? It's written behind you on the fridge, right underneath 'Hope real hard that Yondu pisses off on his own accord 'cause we've got no way to stop him until Nova Prime pulls her finger out her butt and helps us' and 'Buy Eddie the Rac his membrane Thingie so he'll shut up' on that cute little list you got there." said Yondu, pointing.
As one, the crew turned to stare at the list. "Drax," Quill said in the low tones of someone who has just found half a maggot in his apple. "When I said 'feel free to add those things I said to the list', did you actually add them to the list?"
"Of course. Word for word."
"I was speaking sarcastical- I was speaking sarcastically!" he hissed, turning back to Yondu and gesticulating frantically. "When… when I implied that the Nova task force was waiting for us to establish some sort of democracy, they're here to protect us right now, of course. Ahahaha, Drax, what a joker, I….. where'd Yondu go?" he asked Kraglin.
"He's on the other line, calling that Nova fleet to check their orders."
"Shit." said, Quill, as Rocket scrambled to block Yondu's signal, probably too late.
"What's this about a membrane? You still not got a back-up osmotic membrane for that tub?" asked Kraglin, apparently unconcerned by the increasingly erratic signal and swearing raccoon.
"Hey, it's on my to do list, as apparently you can quite clearly see over my shoulder. 'Sides, it's not exactly looking like we'll live long enough to see the main one fail." said Quill, running his fingers through his hair in frustration. "So hey, Kraglin, how's tricks? You good?"
"Meh, can't complain, you?"
"About to get murdered by Yondu, same old, same old. Hey, who got my bunk when I went rogue, out of interest?
"Plicks."
"Huh. Wouldn't have figured. Who got his bed?"
"Hess."
"Uh. Who got Hess's bed?"
"Hess did. He's got so fat we had to push the two of them together."
"Oh thank gods for that, I thought that we'd have to listen to you list every crewmember on that ship." said Gamora, helping Rocket with the signal jammer. Quill ignored her.
"Really, Hess? Go figure. Hey, do you remember when he used to get so drunk he'd let himself into the wrong room and crash into the bunk on top of people when they were trying to sleep?"
Kraglin snorted laughter. "That was an act, he only did that to you, 'cause of that time you got so drunk you thought his locker was the head and woke him up at 0300 pissing into his shoes."
Quill slowed for a second, trying to remember. "Night of my seventeenth birthday party?"
"Fifteenth."
"Ahh, good times. Say, is your shield frequency still 18 cycles per second?"
"Go fish, Quill."
"Shoot, worth a try." said Quill, a second before Yondu leaned back into shot, and tapped on the pic' imager, grinning.
"Guess what? Those Nova drones ain't moving. I'm coming for you, boy!"
"Shit." said Quill, nervously, as Yondu leered and hung up. "Shit!"
"Shit." agreed Gamora, checking her swords.
"Shit." agreed Rocket, killing the Milano's power again, hopefully before they could get a lock on its location.
"I fail to see the relevance of faecal matter. I however require assistance on these barricades." said Drax, over the coms.
"I'll be right there, I just want to check that booby-trapped fuel dump in the main docks, and tell all the civilians to get their heads down." said Quill, grabbing a flechette rifle and checking his usual blasters: he'd not taken them off since the Ravengers were first detected.
"Cutting it a little fine, boss, those guys are on their final approach." said Rocket, gloomily watching the Ravengers fleet close in. "Say, Quill, any guys on that ship a bit, well yanno, bunch of guys cooped up on a ship for a long time, gets funny ideas, you hear stories about that sort of thing. Bad enough in prison, and there you can at least barter or threaten or bite knees off and shank em with their own fibulae or what have you. Just wanna know if I'm likely to spend my last moments in assless chaps with scurvy pirates breathing down my ear. If so I'm eating the ship's supply of chilies. That'll learn 'em."
"Okay, firstly, we're not going to lose this, I have a plan; secondly, goddamit Rocket, who do you think these guys are? They're not monsters, these are the guys that raised me, Yondu had a very strict rule on no sexual violence, that's why Wade Watts got kicked out, and thirdly, just….ewwww! How long do you think someone would have to be on a ship before they saw you in that light? Millennia? It's a pirate vessel, not a generational colony ship. Just… I have enough shit on my mind as it is. That's just plain unsettling. Rocket, lock down the Milano, you and the others head off to meet up with Drax. You're in command until I get back from the docks."
"Yondu gets here in less than an hour. What if you don't get back from the docks?" asked Rocket, unhooking his gun from the wall. After moments consideration, he took the Hadron Enforcer, and a box of sonic-activated triggers synced to whistling. He handed some to Gamora and Quill. Quill looked up.
"Detonators?" he asked. Rocket shook his head.
"Only if you tape a pyroelectric detonator to 'em. They give off small pulses of power. Wire them to anything from guns' firing circuits to light-switches, you make the right nose, they trigger it."
Quill looked at the one in his hand "It's a clapper? Like for a lamp?"
"If you want. Wire them to the door locks as you go. Yellow and brown wire, under the main touch panel. Press green button to record: you hit the same note again, they activate. Just hope you can hit the same note twice."
"And if I can't? Haven't been to a music lesson since second grade." Rocket shrugged.
"You got that Walkman. Use the rewind noise."
Quill nodded, and then helped himself to some detonators and plastic, just in case, and headed off. On the edge of the cockpit, Gamora called out and he paused.
"You never answered Rocket, Peter. What if you don't make it back from the docks?"
Peter Jason Quill looked down. "Yondu's beef is with me, and me alone. Between us we should just have the cash to clear things with Count Bligh for the rest of you. Strike a bargain with him. I get captured or killed, sell out to Yondu and save yourself. That's an order."
"No problem, boss." said Rocket, loading stun-rounds into his gun. Gamora took it less phlegmatically.
"Peter, surely you can't be serious!"
Peter Jason Starlord Quill paused on the brink, and looked back to her gravely.
"I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."
And with that, he was gone.
Peter hurried down to the docks, shooing people out of his way and into temporary shelters: as soon as they'd found out who was coming for them, he'd told the locals to get under cover, and to encourage this he'd taken the last of their rations and dumped them in any suitably solid looking windowless structure he could find, and declared them "emergency shelters". Most people were already in them, and the rest hurrying that way with mattresses and blankets and what have you. Unsurprisingly no-one had fancied the idea of trying to hold off long enough to organise an election and trade deal, so Quill was surprised to see a small but determined few digging in for a fight anyway, possibly just for the hell of it. Normally he'd be happy for the extra firepower backing him up, but this looked like a real good way to get a whole bunch of people killed over nothing and so he told those he saw to give it up and get to shelter. Weirdly, none did.
"Been bossed about too long, boy: Tivan, the Watts, you, now this guy..." said an old timer Aakon, spitting. "I'm staying right here."
"Then you'll die here." The old timer considered this, chewing slowly on something mercifuly unidentifiable, but by the sounds of it still capable of fighting back. Geez, the guy's got a face like a dried out lemon.
"Mayhaps." he said, hefting a tripod mounted necroblaster with arms like breadsticks. "Mayhaps not."
Quill left him: he had enough to deal with without this extra layer of insanity. He did notice the bar-keeper and the whores fortifying the bar as he ran past, but whether it was to make a stand or just to stop the Ravengers trashing it in their inevitable we-killed-Quill party, he couldn't say. He did notice the simple Belamy brother helping them, so he guessed they could cope better than most if it came to a fight and left them to it.
By the time he reached the docks, the last reaming souls out had ran and hid, the air left clammy, like before a storm, and his palms were sweating something fierce. He put on his Walkman to distract himself.
Awesome Mix Tape Vol 2: Renegade, Styx.
"-Oh, Mama, I can hear you a-cryin', you're so scared and all alone
Hangman is comin' down from the gallows and I don't have very long
The jig is up, the noose is out, They finally found me, The renegade who had it made, Retrieved for a bounty."
Hand shaking slightly, Quill switched the Walkman off again. Calmly as he could, looking out of the eyeless sockets of Knowhere at the approaching contacts, now dangerously close, he went and checked the trap. It was a good trap, simple and basic: a big lump of plastic wired under a tank of fuel, slap in the centre of the only approach that a ship as big as the Galley could take: the buildings cluttered around the docks and structures of brain and bone hanging like stalactites didn't give big ships a whole lot of options entering Knowhere: if Yondu brought her in this way, he'd have to pass right over it.
The triggers were good, set to go off, when the engines of the ship passed overhead.
"All good to go." he muttered.
It was about then, of course, that everything started to go wrong.
The jolt of weapons fire knocked him to the ground, and for a second he thought his trap had gone off prematurely before the rational part of his brain reminded him that that would have vaporised him, he got to his feet as a second, less severe jolt now shook Knowhere slightly. He looked up: a blue-white aurora had flared where the Galley's main weapons had hit the shielding in front of the station's eyes, and Quill watched it for a moment. Shit, surely not…
"Come on…. Come on…clear…" he muttered, looking up pensively at the shielding, the knot of anxiety in his gut tightening.
The aurora cleared. The ships were gone.
"Dammit! Rocket! Gamora! Drax! They went under us, just like with Ronan! Rocket, come in, do you read me?"
"Signal bad pretty- … situation fubar- …. Bushwacked us, Quill! Must have got a read on the Milano when we called them, they just hit the-…. Pressure suits, we weren't there to stop 'em. "
"Rocket, you're breaking up! What happened?"
"Quill, they just hit the Collector's private airlock! Forced the outer door. They're bypassing all the barricades we put between us and the docks!" said Gamora, loud and clear.
"Shit." Quill started running back to the Collector's HQ, when he heard a noise behind him, and slowly, he turned.
Two fighters, each identical to the Milano, were bearing down on him, one through each eye of Knowhere.
"Shit!" he yelled, turning to run. After a moment his brain kicked in and he jinked sideways as bullets begun tearing up the floor behind him. He dived into the meagre shelter of a refuelling rig. Yards from his bomb. One that will only detonate if the Galley is directly overhead…
Quill crawled over to the bomb, and begun to fiddle with it, cursing under his breath and wishing he was half as good as Rocket at this shit. The Obfonteri and the Number 108, Kraglin and Hess's ships, did a quick turn overhead, spraying shots around him, and he pushed a button, retaliated with a quick burst with the flechette rifle, barely scratching Kraglin's paintwork, before he flicked down his HUD and boosted over the 108 and rolled to relative safety on a metal gantry overlooking that re-fuelling bay.
"Quill, this is pointless. You're just gonna tire yourself out. Come along quietlike and maybe the boss'll go easy on you." boomed Kraglin's voice out the speakers, as the two ships hovered into view like momma and dada UFO's in battery's not included. Quill pointed the flechette rifle right at Kraglin behind his armoured cockpit as he hovered around close to the pipework walls of the refuelling bay, and Hess took up a position over the booby-trap to cover Quill's retreat with his cannons. "Hell, you know that toy can't even damage these ships!"
"Yeah, I guess, Krag. Sure makes a distinctive nose tho'." he said. He then jerked the gun sideways and fired into the pipe work.
The burst of oxidiser from the pipe knocked the Obfonteri sideways, which was a nice bonus, but the main event when the trigger recognised the sound of the gun from seconds earlier and set off the trap was more than gratifying enough, as a flash of heat that seared his nipples even through his clothes accompanied the dull whump of unfeasible amounts of firepower, and the fuel-air mix picked up the 108¸ bent its graceful manta-ray wings to confetti and slammed it into the brain above the docks like a sadist's razorblade hidden in Halloween candy into a kid's palate. Amazingly the cockpit survived, meaning that once they dug the ship out there Hess would prove to be fine, save from having very suddenly lost some weight and ruined some trousers, but his ship was toast. Kraglin, fighting down the scream of contact alarms, wrestled his ship back into level flight in a very twitchy seven seconds of hell, which felt a lot longer, and then opened up his cannons on the metal gantry.
But of course, Quill was long gone, Walkman-ing doors shut behind him as he went.
At that exact moment the rest of the team were retreating down a corridor towards the hold-out they'd built in the centre of the Collector's HQ, having hastily moved a few barricades and traded shots with the vanguard of Yondu's crew, when they heard the bang. There was an awkward pause as they all considered the possibility of what that could mean, before they all scrambled to call Quill at once. Rocket, by dint of wearing a C2 headset, got through first.
"Quill, you dead? Quill!"
"Not yet, furball! Kraglin came in the main docks, blew the bomb, but he's still coming. Reckon he'll offer close air support to anyone in the streets that ain't us. You?"
"Getting our asses handed to us here! They all got in the private airlock, and it's a short, straight walk from there to our control room, they hit that they can just use the station's sensors to find us!"
"Can you hold them off 'til I get there?"
"Too many of them!" yelled Gamora, leaning around a buttress in the corridor wall to drop one with a knife to the knee.
"Affirmative, these are cowards who will not engage me in a fair fight!" yelled Drax, ducking away from close range weapons fire.
"We're being swamped here, boss!" yelled Rocket, as Groot, frightened by the unfamiliar noises, hugged his legs fearfully. "You got a plan, or is this a heroic last stand?"
"Rocket, do not get in a last stand with these guys, run, hide, do whatever you have to, but do not get the team killed, you got that?"
"Boss, I got nothing!"
"Well think of something, I-" The line was drowned out by cannon fire at Quill's end. "You are the first officer, get my crew out of there alive! Use what you have, and do whatever you have to do. Got that, Ranger? Quill ou-"
There was an emp pulse from a plasma rifle round, and the line went dead.
"What now?" shouted Drax over the gunfire, as the Ravengers bunched up for a big push. Gamora drew her pistols, glanced to Rocket, and begun to tense to a leap that would take down most of them. And get her killed, Rocket thought. He looked down at the gun in his paws. Use your assets. Keep them alive. Assets: one gun, half a mag each of stun rounds and kinetic slugs, one verbal trigger left, your wits as a hardened bounty hunter. Groot hugged his legs, and a fierce angry pride burned through him. Keep them alive, my ass: I've been saving my own skin too long to need telling, and damned if I'm letting Groot get hurt'
"Rocket, I'm gonna try and hold them off, if I don't make it tell Quill, well…. He probably knows." yelled Gamora. "So if you've got a better plan, now would be a good time, shorty!"
Rocket looked at the gun in his hands. You ain't no nice guy, Rocket, he thought.
"I have a plan." he said.
He shot Gamora first; she was tensed to spring and with her reflexes he'd not get a chance for a second go. Two clean shots, centre mass. He'd switched his point of aim to Drax just as he bellowed and begun to move at him knifes raised, and he gave him the rest of the mag.
Just as well, guy that size, one stun round might not do it, he thought, as the electronic bola's light shot slammed into him and knocked the tattooed warrior back.
Groot gasped in shock, but Rocket shook him off, fumbling with the settings on his gun. "Shut it, Groot, I'm getting us out alive, like it or not!" he said, stepping over Gamora's unconscious body and sticking two fingers in his mouth and whistling loudly.
"Hey, idiots, I'm coming out and I'm not armed!" he yelled, before taking his gun in one paw, holding it by the barrel, and walking slowly out into the expectant pause, arms stretched out as far as they would go like a crucifix, every second expecting that shot to punch through his pigeon chest and end his miserable little life. When he was sure they could all see, he let go of the gun.
"What you want!" yelled one, peering out from behind the next buttress over.
"You Yondu?"
"No, I look like Yondu?"
"Meh, you bald bodies all look alike to me. You smell worse than Yondu 'tho. Go get him, I only talk to the organ grinder."
"You in no position to talk at all, rat, what you want to say?"
Rocket Raccoon grinned evilly, and very slowly, so they wouldn't shoot him, pulled out his bail bond recovery license.
"Well, unless he's canned it, then as a fellow bounty hunter, I'd like to claim a bounty Yondu Udonta posted." He grinned evilly, and hooked his claws though his belt.
"A bounty on one Peter Jason Quill."
To be continued
