Wayward Son: Part Five, Lay your weary head to rest.

Rocket's head hit the deck on the other side of the console with a metallic –clunk as the bionic at the top of his spine made contact with the metal flooring, and there was a sharp pain in his side, and the taste of blood in his mouth and a great existential weight pushing down on his lungs and he thought, rather calmly given the circumstances. Well this is it. Guess that arrow hit me. He felt like he ought to be more upset, but mostly he was just surprised. Thought this would hurt more.

He heard a familiar, creaking groan, like a ship in high seas, and it was only then that the panic started. Groot! I can't die I gotta help him! He begun to struggle and try and fight his way out of this darkness and weight, suspired that it felt more like a physical object than just slipping away. It was then that the crushing existential weight on him swore, and tried to roll over, and Rocket realised that the blood in his mouth wasn't his.

Quill groaned, and rolled off Rocket as Groot dug his roots into the control console and grappled with the Arrow, which was bucking and heaving wildly. Quill saw Plicks raise a head up cautiously out of the depression in the floor he and Yondu had landed in (Quill recognised it as the same one he and Gamora had hid in when the infinity stone went all Fourth of July on them), and Quill weakly raised his un-injured arm and stunned him. If being literally pinned to the wall had hurt, having the one pin holding him up wretched out was sheer agony: he'd turned an ankle when he landed, at best, maybe broken one, his chest hurt, and his shoulder was fountaining blood. Rocket's gun fired itself empty with a final click, but Quill felt a pair of tiny, nimble little paws scurry up and down his arm, side and leg, confirming what was injured and how bad, and then take the second blaster out of his useless hand. Slumped on the floor on his back with just his head raised up, Quill pointed his pistol in the only direction he could see, and felt a tiny warm furred back press up against him from behind holding his head up and helping him to see and avoid shooting his own foot off. There was a name for this shooting position, but Quill couldn't remember it, and you weren't supposed to do it with pistols, anyhow. As Groot wrestled the arrow, digging his roots into the console and floor and wrapping around it with vines, Rocket stuck the eye in his pocket and begun to blaze away with his pistol and Quill shouted. Or at least tried to: his lungs didn't seem to be working right.

"Yeah, your distraction was pretty good. Got a plan to go with that Ranger Rick?"

"Shut up and keep shooting! Depends if the patch has loaded of not."

"How will you know?" asked Quill from his supine shooting position (Supine, that's it. Supine) trading rounds with the Ravengers they're using real plasma rounds! No fair!

Quill felt Rocket swallow nervously, and then take a deep breath: this close to him, he could feel his heartbeat set somewhere between hummingbird and pneumatic drill.

"Only one way to find out. Computer, install new biometric standards for locks!" he yelled, before screaming and sprinting out from cover, pistol blazing trying to keep the Ravengers's heads down, he ran past Kraglin, desperately trying to bite the top off a wound-packing-foam syringe one-handed. As he ran past, he scooped up krag's gun, and, trying to minimize the kickback and deal with the heavy weapons, he sprinted over to the cover of a glass habitat. In cover for a second, he took a deep breath, trying to compose himself. He started and yelped when a huge hand slammed into the glass behind him, and nearly dropped a gun.

Drax glared angrily thought the glass at Rocket, and then looked past him to where his and Gamora's weapons were idly discarded in a corner. Rocket got the hint, and, ducking stray shots and swearing non-stop, he ran over on all fours, grabbed the long sword, pistol and heavy knives, and did that awkward little run, familiar to anyone with unsecured waste receptacles, of a racoon with far too much in their paws desperately trying to stay balanced with their tail as he ran back the way he'd come. It would have been cute, were it not for the gunshots, the fact he was still covered in Quill's blood, and the language which seemed to consist entirely of anatomically and, in some cases, temporally improbable suggestions. He slammed his back into the cover of the bullet-proof tank, took a deep breath, and then reached out a tiny paw to the fingerprint scanner at, for him, above head height, turning his head aside, clenching his teeth and flattening his ears. If he'd got this wrong and the Lock was still synced to Yondu's settings, it'd electrocute him and Quill and Groot would get mopped up before he woke. If he woke. If on the other hand he'd got it right…

The door pinged open, Rocket let out a momentary sight of relief and, feeling like the galaxy's biggest heel, held out the weapons sheepishly hoping that Gamora and Drax wouldn't be too mad with him-

A tattooed fist slammed into the tip of his snout with enough force to rock him back a half-pace, but the knives were then snatched from him and Drax sprinted off, roaring and taking the heat off Quill, so given he still had a limbs attached and that the man could have punched his head Inside out if he'd wanted to, Rocket guessed he'd been forgiven. Not that he'd admit that for a second, he thought behind watering eyes.

"Yeaouch! I bussst a gut to shave youse guys and thish is how you repay me?" said Rocket, massaging his nose as Gamora grabbed her sword and he passed her a pistol as she bucked up her sword-belt "I mean, I'm sorry, right? You all know I wasn't actually going to betray you, right?"

"Price wasn't right?" asked Gamora, and Rocket couldn't tell if that was a joke or if she was genuinely pissed at him.

"I mean, you knew it was a bluff, right?" Gamora glared.

"You are a foul, deceitful, spiteful selfish slovenly and hate filled person without a shred of honour!" she hissed. "A natural bastard. But you're our bastard, ours, and you're not getting rid of us that easily….crewmate"

"I missed you too." He said, grinning. "Least you took it better than Drax." He said, turning his back on her to take some pot-shots at the Ravengers, and then promptly jumping a foot in the air as she kicked him squarely up the ass.

"HEY! What was that for?"

"Shooting me in the breasts, you little pervert."

"That was a centre mass shot!" he yelled, scooting over the floor to cover again, and laying down a covering barrage of Plasma fire to let Gamora cross to where Quill was. "Trust me, I ain't that interested!" He yelled. As he passed Kraglin, Krag held up something and Rocket nearly shot him before he registered it as syringe and not a knife: another wound-packer. He snatched it as he went past, and lobbed it over to Gamora as she rushed to Quill. She saw and faster than an unmodified body could handle pulled out a syringe from her med-kit and threw it back, catching in the same hand she threw with. Rocket caught the morphine auto-injector and slammed it into Krag's thigh as he ran past, and then ran right to provide Gamora and Quill with covering fire. He wondered why Krag had done it, but then again, he must have known Quill for years and he guessed at this point it wouldn't make too much difference to the outcome of the fight.

Personally I'd have still gone for the knife and let Gamora use her own would-syringe, but then again I'm a natural Frickin' bastard he thought.

Even so, he switched to Tasers. He was their bastard, after all. Plus if I kill one of his old pirate buddies Quill will never let me here the end of it.

As Gamora rolled under the cover of the shredded console and popped up practically straddling Quill, he weekly held up a blaster in greeting and coughed. "I'm that interested. You know, just in case it ever comes up…" he said, in a way that would probably have been flirtatious if he could breathe without that bubbling noise coming from his chest. Gamora snorted.

"Firstly, the way this day is going, you do not get to make jokes. Secondly, the coughing up blood just doesn't do it for me, so shut up and let me work." She said, quickly and efficiently popping the cap on the wound-packing syringe, and jabbing it into the hole in his shoulder. There was the thunk and hiss of the CO2 going off and a brief, pained noise and Quill tried not to scream as thousands of tiny silver-nanoparticle coated wood-pulp aerogel balls poured into his wound and begun to swell, sealing it from the inside. He bit his lip, and made a dumb comment, because it was that or faint.

"Arrrgggh! … so what does do it for you? Is there a three in that list?" there was a series of plasma rounds impacting into the console, and Rocket skidded past and rolled into cover, shooting and panting.

"With her bod-mods? Forget it Quill. Even un-injured, she'd break you." He yelled, blasting at Yondu with the stunner every time he stuck his head above the parapet. It was looking bad, Ravengers closing on all sides.

Quill grimaced, and shook his head at that, trying the winning Starlord grin. "Well I dunno, I recon I'd give a pretty good account of myself, the old pelvic sorcery Achhhhh!" He begun to pant, sharply and seemed to have real problems breathing. Rocket glanced over.

"Pneumothorax?" he asked. Gamora looked at his distended Jugular veins, put an ear to his chest, both sides, tapping on it, and nodded.

"Yeah, Tension maybe. Okay Peter, I need you to be brave and trust me now." Said Gamora, in a kind, talking-to-child voice that told Quill instantly how much this was going to suck. "You have an air-bubble between your chest wall and lung, I need to pop it or it'll collapse your lung and we can't re-inflate it." She said, tactfully skipping over the nasty details, like how his lung was technically already collapsed and the act of breathing in should re-shape it once the bubble was gone. She gave him a shot of Nova smart morphine, and watched as the nanites mixed in with it migrated under his skin and formed the Xandarian symbol for Morphine on his forehead: they'd monitor his vitals and release more of the morphine bonded to them with nanoparticles if they felt he needed it, keeping a tally on his face of how much he'd had and when his last shot was. She then noticed a death-stick carton one of the Ravengers had left on the console top, and kicked the console, shaking it down and ripping off the cellophane whist dismantling a pen with her other hand. Quill screwed up his face and nodded, looking pained. "So when you say pop…"

"Don't speak Peter", she said, stroking his forehead gently. "This will only hurt for a second."

What will? He was about to ask, when Gamora ripped his shirt off and, before he could get his hopes up as to why, she jabbed him between two ribs with a dagger, just under the armpit of his wounded side, and twisted it suddenly to keep the wound open. There was a brief flair of pain, and then the soda-bottle hiss of escaping air, and the dreadful pressure on his side eased and he could breathe again, a little. She then jabbed what looked like about two thirds of a pen in the hole, and the hissing got louder and breathing easier. When the hissing stopped, she quickly withdrew the pen and jammed the flutter-valve she'd made from the cellophane on, sticking it to his side with the mix of sweat and blood filming his skin so air couldn't get back in the hole she'd made. Quill felt utter agony for a moment as the air-pressure from breathing in forcibly re-inflated his lung, got an almighty head-rush as his brain got the O2 he'd been starved of, and regained the power of speech.

"Jesuuuuuus!" he swore. "Gamora, I-"

"Shoot people now, thank her later." yelled Rocket. "We're getting flanked!"

Quill groaned, but weekly raised his one good arm, and begun to pot shots off at anything that moved. He didn't feel confident in his aim, but he was pretty sure Drax was behind him, judging by the sounds of carnage, and Gamora and Rocket both huddled up close to him, Gamora with her back against his, Rocket standing with a clawed foot on each of their shoulders so he could see over the console and so they could shoot in three directions at once ( he rested on Quill 's un-injured shoulder, which he was grateful for because the other one had what looked like polystyrene packaging foam pouring out of both sides of it from the syringe) and Groot continued to wrestle with Yondu's arrow, something that would have ripped its way through any hands laid on it that weren't made of wood. As the fire-fight heated up, Quill realised that they weren't going to hold out for long.

"Rocket, If you have a plan, now would be a really good time…"

Rocket took in a deep breath, ignoring the pain in his own chest where Quill had landed on him, and yelled.

"Hey, tattoos, get your ass over here!" I he glanced sideways at Groot, straining to stop the Arrow ripping though his vines. "You hold that just a second longer buddy, okay?"

"Quill, Quill Boy!" yelled a voice. "You give that up and let go of my gods-dammed arrow or I'll make you regret it!"

"Get him to say his name!" hissed Rocket, reaching into Quill's coat pockets, and pulling out a sonic trigger, and ripping out the recording unit from it. He then reached and grabbed something very personal from Quill.

"Hey!"

"Roll with it!" hissed Rocket "Go on!" he urged, rapidly re-wiring with his clever little paws.

"Wha?" Yelled Quill, week and confused, into the sudden lull in the shooting as the Ravengers stopped firing to let Yondu speak. "Who's that, Yondu, that you?"

"Who the ruttin' hell else is it gonna be? You Quit this boy or it'll just be worse for you!"

"Who's that?" muttered Quill weekly. "Hurts, hard to think. Whosthat…."

"it's me, Yondu, Yondu Udonta, you hit your head boy? Give it up, you can't win!" he yelled, as Drax, frustrated by his inability to do more that superficially wound anyone due to the Ravengers habit of hiding and shooting at him from a distance, dived over the console to join his crew. He glanced and Rocket angrily, and Quill, Gamora and Groot looked unto him, hopefully. He nodded to them all briefly and they turned back to Yondu.

"Hey Yondu, you want to drop this and just walk away bub, I got into your computer systems, that's how I freed Gamora and Drax, remember?"

Yondu laughed. "Yeah, reset that lock, but even with that eye, there's a secondary failsafe to access the Higher command functions. Weapons, navigation, all that. I ain't stupid."

"Stupid enough to know my rep think that I wouldn't know the in's and out of every major security system on the market. What were you using, Corvax Biometrics standard suite? What's the secondary security layer on that," He asked, twisting the last two wires together "Voice recognition?" He snarled. "Computer, initiate security program one, install new biometric standards and fly by wire systems, master override, activate protection initiative. "

"Clearance?" squawked the galley's computer via the collectors PA system. Rocket held up the Walkman, recording unit wired into it, and pushed a tiny clawed thumb down on "Play".

Click.

"Yondu Udonta."

There was a pregnant pause before. "Protocol cleared, new biometric standards installed for all systems, activating protection initiative Captain."

"What?!" Yelled Yondu. "Computer, belay that!"

"Voice does not match current biometric standards: speaker identified as hostile… activating protection initiative." There was an increasingly loud whirring noise, and as Yondu and the Ravengers, and let's face it, all but one of the guardians looked around stupidly, the Obfonteri, the Zatoan and four other Ravenger fighters of the same class as the Milano, appeared hovering at the windows, and slowly turned to face the Guardians in the centre of the room. As they turned, visible in some of them you could see crewmembers fighting with the controls, banging on the cockpit Armour-crys helplessly, or on some no crew at all as the new fly-by wire patch took over. There was an apocalyptic cur-chunk as six sets of cannons, disruptors, and, missile pods armed all at once, and Yondu's mouth went dry.

"See, This is why I get to make the plans." Said Rocket, gesturing to himself with both thumbs.

All six ships opened up at once, and Quill had to admit, the noise was incredible. The shots all passed within feet of their position behind the console, crossing over and making a perfect hexagon of tracer rounds around them, and then the ships as one turned away from them , enlarging the hexagon and ripping apart the collectors lair, shredding consoles habitats and cages and sending flying armour-crys and hot metal everywhere. The Ravengers begun to scatter and run even before the missile pods started firing, and Quill saw Yondu bellow his rage as Hess begun to drag him away. He wasn't sure, but he was pretty sure he saw someone drag out Karg as well, which he was grateful for, but mostly he was to tired and in pain to think, so he just slay there open-mouthed as the morphine really kicked in and watched the fireworks.

After a short eternity of noise, which in fact turned out to be under a minute of shooting, the guns fell silent. The building was wrecked but because the shooting had started near the guardians and then worked its way out, it looked like all the Ravengers had managed to flee successfully. The odd falling spark and clatter of glass was the only noise as Rocket looked around smugly. After a moment he noticed the others stating at him, open mouthed with shock.

"You're welcome." He said, sarcastically.

"An impressive display of destruction." Said Drax, nodding approvingly. "I may have spoken harshly to you, friend, I will not, at present, eat your heart."

"Yeah, well, don't get all mushy on me just yet, we've still got a station full of angry pirates to get rid of, and Quill's down for the count." Said Rocket, looking thought the wreckage looking for some of the stuff Kraglin had confiscated from him. It looked like his shock-prod and the hadron enforcer were back on the Obfonteri, but when Kraglin had been walking around with his gun, Rocket had seen him with and few spare magazines, and after some rummaging he found three. Briefly kissing the first mag, he slammed it into his gun and chambered a round, before catching the movement in the corner of his eye and spinning around, paw raised. "Stop!" he yelled, as Drax Gamora had Quill's arms around their shoulders and was about to help him up. Quill, yelled, in pain, and Gamora froze, staring at Rocket.

"He's got a leg fracture, distal tib-fib, just up from his ankle." Gamora gestured to Drax, who helped her lay Quill down again as Quill muttered. "Nah dude, its fine just sprained it a little bitjeeeeeessssuuus!" he swore, as Gamora checked his leg out. She swore, far more inventively.

"Peter, both the bones in your lower leg are broken, I can feel fluid rushing to the break and…. Peter, what the hell do you have in your pants?"

Quill grinned, and giggled weakly. "Wouldn't you like to know- arrrrgggghhh! Flechette rifle! Flechette rifle, I'll stop the jokes just make it stop!" he said, as his small movements made his leg shift slightly.

Drax dropped down with Gamora and, surprisingly gently, ran his huge hands along the side of Quill leg, before looking to Gamora.

"Unusual as it is, I believe that the rifle is spanning the break most conveniently." Gamora got the inference. "You think we should use it as a splint?" Without waiting for a reply, Drax begun to rip Quill discarded shirt up into rags to tie the splint with.

"Hey, idiots." Gamora looked up, and caught the thrown auto-tourniquets one-handed. Drax frowned.

"Will they not cut off the blood supply to his wounded limb and cause complications?" Rocket snorted, and skulked by the windows, watching the Ravengers get chased thought the streets by their own ships. "Those things are smart, self-adapting. They detect the subject's blood flow using ultrasound: unless you're actually bleeding, they'll just tighten up enough to get a real good, stable grip. When I was a merc' lot of guys wore those things at each joint all the time, so they were already in place in case they stepped on a mine, or got bushwhacked by a sniper."

"A cunning stratagem, why do you not emulate it?" asked Drax, as Gamora prepped the tourniquets. Rocket snorted. "Guy my height, I step on a mine, it's gonna take off everything below the waist. Didn't seem much point."

"Boys, we need something to go on the other side of the splint, otherwise the bone will just bow outwards away from the rife. Can you find me a stick or strip of metal? Something hard and about this long?" Said Gamora, holding her hands about twelve inches apart. She looked down at Quill as he was about to speak. "Don't." she warned. He looked vaguely disappointed, before laying back and enjoying just how wonderful the morphine was. As Rocket and Drax looked around, Rocket using his info glass to keep the ships chasing the Ravengers, Groot was stuck by an idea, and relinquished his Two-handed hold on the arrow, and begun to wave it one-handed at Gamora. She looked up, sympathetically. "That's about the right size, Groot, but I don't think we should use something Yondu can control as a weapon to splint his leg, especially given how close to his femoral artery it would be. Ideally we need a stick or something, about that size."

Groot appeared to consider this, looking around keenly, lost in thought as the arrow bucked and heaved, and when Rocket looked up to shout a warning "Groot, be careful with that-"

There was a sudden, loud snap as Groot's arm came off at the shoulder, and the arrow zoomed off, trying to get back within whistle-range of Yondu.

"-thing." Finished Rocket, lamely, as the arrow zonked though the wall about a foot above his head and made its break for freedom.

Groot stared at his severed arm with an expression of mute shock, made a sad, high pitched whine for a moment, before suddenly his eyes lit up with pure childlike joy, and he picked up the arm with his remaining hand, and handed it to Gamora with a Groot did good? face. Gamora stared horrified for a second, but then took the arm and said "thanks" as she begun to use the arm for the other side of her splint. Rocket watched, impassive, and then sighed. "You know Groot, there are times I really do worry about you."

"I am Groot!"

"Hey Rocket, don't worry about him." Said Quill. "He's armless!" before collapsing into giggling again and staring up at the ceiling. Rocket shook his head, sadly.

"First time on the Morphine, eh?" he asked.

Quill nodded, eagerly "God blesses the Nova corp! They have some goooooood shit!"

"Yeah, well, when you're coming down off that and trying to deal with the three-day constipation it'll give you, you just try to remember I'll have no sympathy at all." Muttered Rocket, glancing out the windows. "The coast looks clear; I think I've pushed most of the Ravengers back onto the main drag. We should have a clear run back to the Milano save for maybe a few stragglers. Can you get Quill onto one of those improvised stretchers they brought you two in on?" he asked. Gamora and Drax grabbed a stretcher, after a brief one-two-three got Quill onto it, and booted up the lifting repulsors.

Rocket nodded approvingly, and turned to face them as they propelled Quill over to the doors.

"Okay, our captain is simultaneously down and high as a frickin' satellite, we've got a station full of pirates that we've really pissed off out for our blood, Groot's lost and arm, I think I busted up a couple of ribs when Quill landed on me, and neither of you fully trust me." He said, checking his gun calmly. "That about sum it up?"

Drax and Gamora nodded. He nodded back. "Gamora, you're the fastest. You take Quill and Groot, Groot, get on that stretcher, thanks, and you get it back to the Milano as fast as you can and get him in the med-bay. Okay? How long do you think that will take, five, six minutes? "

She nodded. "Six, four to get there, two prep the suite: I need to shift some of my stuff, I've been using the med-suite as my bunk. But I should get him there fast enough."

"Oh good, I've always wanted to get into Gamora's bunk."

"You know Quill, you're even less funny on Morphine than I expected." Said Rocket, without missing a beat. "Me and Drax will follow, try and give you covering fire and take the heat off you. Any trouble and you get in cover and guard Quill, wait for me and Drax to get there and back you up, don't take any risks. I'm using the ships to hold the bulk of the Ravenger at a safe distance, so we can't count on them for support, but I'll move in the Obfonteri if it gets too hot. Got it? But we gotta move fast and can't get bogged down, Quill's in a bad shape and I don't have the ammo for a long firefight. "

Quill giggled. "It's half a mile to the Milano, we've got three mags of ammo, I'm half tanked on Morphine, I'm being held together by a packet of death sticks, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. " he waved a hand vaguely at nothing. "hit it."

They all regarded this for a second.

"What he said." Said Rocket, kicking the doors open. "Ladies first!" he yelled, dropping to one side of the door, and sending a quick burst down an alleyway opposite, sending two figures skulking there fleeing for their lives. Gamora sprinted out, pistol in one hand and pushing the stretcher before her, and Rocket and Drax followed.

They made it down the street and onto the main drag, before the first rounds of plasma-fire from Ravenger stragglers flared and burnt into the wall just above Gamora's head. Thinking quickly, the leapt on the hovering door they were using as a stretcher and, lying flat to minimise her target profile surfed it to some sort of maintenance-trench cut in the bone floor of Knowhere to the side of the road and killed the power, dropping it into the trench. There was a jolt as the stretcher hit the deck and Quill, who was drifting in and out of consciousness at this point, woke with a yelp as it jolted his leg. The glanced around dizzily, before focusing on Gamora, lying flat on top of him with an arm flung protectively over him.

"Oh. Still dreaming." He muttered. Groot waved at him, one handed. "Defiantly still dreaming." He said, and closed his eyes again as the volume of gunfire overhead increased dramatically.

Drax and Rocket, spotting the guys shooting at Gamora stopped, and Rocket levelled his gun, aiming carefully. There was a pop and one went down screaming and clutching at his foot, and as Rocket grinned and switched his aim to the other, Drax spotted the movement in the side alley, and unceremoniously dived on Rocket, bundling him into the identical maintenance trench on the other side of the road just before the spot they had been standing was lacerated by heavy plasma fire. Rocket spat and swore, trying to get his own whiskers out of his mouth as fully automatic fire passed overhead.

"Gaaaah! What the fuck, is this just every bald-body jump on the freak day? Did I miss that on the calendar or something?" he asked slumped on the bottom of the trench, trying to heft his gun into a position that didn't hurt his ribs. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could feel the chest-wound Yondu had given him on the ship re-open.

"We appear to be pinned down by no less than four heavily armed assailants." Said Drax, interestedly as he appeared over the top of the trench, moving from side to side and ducking occasionally to avoid the weapons fire.

"Really?" asked Rocket. That didn't sound good.

"Indeed. Their arms are huge! One has biceps bigger than you are, small mammal, nearly as large as mine. I suspect it is the exercise from carrying such large guns!" he said.

"They seem to have a precocious amount of firepower, you will have severe difficulty defeating them!" he said, smiling eagerly and saying a huge hand on Rocket's shoulder, as if announcing a particular rare treat.

"Oh. Goody."

"Yes, it is a fine day for combat." He said. Rocket took his info glass and, angling it like a mirror, peered very cautiously over the parapet.

"Fuck! They're in good cover behind that food stall, looking right at us! Come on big guy, we need to back up along this trench until we can find a safe place to exit and flank them."

"Is that not then a problem?" asked Drax.

"Is what a problem?" Drax took Rocket's glass in one hand, and turned it. Rocket saw the Ravengers dropping into the trench with them further along, and being to work their way down. He swore.

"Fuck! We're toast."

"I do not see how baked goods come into it. Can you not just kill the ones opposite us so we may cross over to their location and pin our pursuers in the same irksome location were are currently forced to abide?"

Rocket slammed down the glass and rounded on Drax angrily as he squatted in the trench trying to keep his head down. "Look, it ain't that easy pall, anything that pops up over that parapet is gonna draw a lot of heat real fast, capuche? This is when you need grenades, or a mortar, or even a frickin' trench rifle! And we don't have any of that dummy!"

"I am more than capable of speech, deceiver, what is this trench rife of which you speak?"

"It's like a periscope with a gun on it!" yelled Rocket. "Something small and hard to hit that you stick out over the top of the trench to do your shooting for you so you don't get hit!" he yelled.

Drax stared at him for a moment. Rocket frowned and stared back.

"What?" he asked.


Trelzar screamed and tried to martial the three numb-nut's he'd found himself saddled with into a proper firing position behind the pop-up noddle stall's generator engine block they were using for cover, directing Robbaz to drag Char into cover since he'd got shot in the foot. He noticed two guys drop into the trench that muscle-bound idiot and that dammed rodent, and nodded, approvingly. Wilder and Macero seemed to have that dammed woman pinned down, trading the occasional pistol shot with her, nothing more. Confident he had the situation under control, he called Yondu.

"Trelzar, what in the ruttin' hells happened to you? Where you at?"

"Couldn't see a damn thing without the bionic eye, took too long to get used to just the visible spectrum, couldn't keep up. I'm on… err… lower left Zygomatic street, near the corner of Right Temporal street. I've got about seven stragglers here, got Quill and his crew all bottled up, stuck in a ditch!"

"Trelzar, we're pinned down by our own damn ships, I got the boys on the Galley trying to manually re-set the computer core, but the Rodent's got all the pressure doors locked down, gonna take a while to cut through to the core. Now listen good, you keep them bottled up! Ya hear? We're gonna have to fix this problem with our ships so it'll take a while to find our way over to you, so don't do anything dumb, don't try anything smart, just keep them pinned down good till I can get over there. Got that?"

"Don't worry sir!" yelled Trelzar, truing away from the shooting and clutching a hand to his ear-piece so he could speak. "I've got this completely under control!"

Behind his back, three Ravengers were quite happily shooting up the side of the trench when suddenly a huge tattooed red-and-blue hand trust itself above the parapet, clutching a small furred creature by the front of its armoured orange body-glove. This took the three Pirates by surprise, and the creature didn't seen unsurprised itself as it emitted a terrifying, warbling scream that could have been a cry of rage, pain, bowel-loosening fear, or all three at once. It raised a gun bigger than it was faster than should have been possible, and working it side to side with short, sharp bursts, dropped all three picking out their vulnerable kneecaps visible under the wheeled generator the were kneeling behind. As they fell screaming and groaning, Trelzar just had time to turn to see what was happening as Drax ran past and flipped the fast-food stall over onto him before diving into the next trench.

"Gamora!" he yelled, looking down the trench to where the green-skinned assassin hunched, protecting Quill and trading shots with the two Ravengers pinning her down and the two who had reached Drax's previous position to find him gone. "Can you advance to the Milano and escape this tempestuous situation?"

"Pinned down Drax!" she yelled.

"Would a trench rifle be useful to extricate yourself?" he yelled over the sounds of shooting.

"Wouldn't say no!" she yelled. "Why, does Rocket have one or something?"

"In a manner of speaking!"

"Chuck it over!" she yelled.

"Drax, No, don't you dare don't you fucking dare Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaax!"

Rocket snow-ploughed into the dirt about a foot from Gamora, coughing weekly and spiting out the mix of powdered bone and decayed plastic packaging that passed for soil on Knowhere.

He groaned, and looked up.

"Yeah, I guess that's about as good as my day's gonna get." He muttered, before his rifle landed on him and smacked his face back down into the dirt.

"Tiny friend, you forgot your gun!"

Rocket stuck two thumbs up sarcastically, before pulling himself up. "Remind me again, why didn't I betray him to Yondu?"

"I am Groot!"

"I do not have a beautiful soul! Quit sayin' shit like that willya? You're the reason people think we're queers, you know. " he looked to Gamora, and sighed. "Okay, just, just give me a minute."

"You sure?" she said, grabbing him by the chest like Drax had. He winced. "No. And go for the scruff on the neck, please." He said, Pulled out the mag, noticing it was almost empty, and slotting it into his back-strap and taking out his last magazine. There was blue tape around it. "I'm down to Taser rounds, and not many. Need to save ammo, so do this fast, up, two shots down, turn me around, up at the next to. Okay?"

"You're a good friend, Rocket."

"Oh don't you start! And how is it people only ever say that when they're about to stick you into the firing line for them? Least usually it's metaphorical. Okay on three. One Shit, he's got a grenade Three! Three three three!" he screamed.

Gamora acted without hesitation and Rocket went up like a flag on a flagpole, catching the grenade and lobbing it back quickly into the maintenance trech opposite them so it would catch any shrapnel. The two Ravengers in there obligingly fled the trench, right into his Taser-rounds, and Gamora pulled him back down just as a shot from his left singed his tail fur. The two shooters kept that spot marked, waiting for the racoon to pop up again so they could nail him, but they were disappointed and surprised when, thanks to a quick underarm throw and a lot of swearing, he popped up back at Dax's position and dropped them both. Gamora instantly got the stretcher hovering again and begun running it down the street, closely followed by Drax pushing the back of the stretcher, Rocket riding on his shoulder. As they passed the fast food cart Trelzar groaned, struggling to draw a pistol from his belt as the stretcher went past and Rocket finished playing with the electronics of the eye and yelled, "Hey buddy, catch!" Trelzar got a hand out in time in a good catching position, but due to his depth perception being utterly fucked, the wrong position as Rocket belted him over the head with his own thrown eye.

As he swore and rolled on the ground in pain Rocket laughed and then turned to the others and said. "Well, I guess he didn't see that one coming."

When this didn't seem to elicit the response he was expecting, he tried again. "I mean, I guess he took his eye off the ball… what? Nothing? Oh come on Quill, I expected at least you'd laugh at that…." He looked down. Quill was staring at the ceiling and happily blowing bubbles with his own spit on the very edge of consiousness. "Right, med bay." He said. Groot looked up sympathetically and said "I am Groot!"

"I don't need your pity."


Yondu swore and tried to get his com's network sorted : with his first officer down and his engineer someplace else, he was having a very, very bad day.

"Say again Trelzar, come in!" he yield down the com, as he tried to rally his men under and overhanding mining gallery, where his own-dammed ships couldn't shoot at him. No one had died yet, and Yondu was pretty sure that the fucking rodent had programed them to avoid fatalities where possible, but he sure as hell wasn't about to test that theory, not until the ships ran out of ammo. Trelzar's call saying he'd got them pinned was the best news he'd had for hours, and then suddenly it had cut into static and incoherent sounds of shooting and screaming, which he didn't like.

"Come in Trelzar, dammit, what's your ruttin' status!"

"uhhhh…. Rat motherfucker beat me with my own eye!"

Yondu sighed, and hung up. That more or less summed up their whole day. He signaled Galen, who was the best medic they had left, to go slip round the ships using the alleyways and go pick up Trelzar and his boys, and grabbed Hess and begun to scream orders into his face to make himself heard as another ship strafed their position. "Get the rest of the boys together and rally here, we're spread over half this damn station, we go confronting these guy in ones and two and they'll go thought them like with Trelzar. Go!" he yelled, shoving him away without waiting for an answer as he spotted Plicks sprinting over the open street and then squeezing into cover with the rest, Yondu approached him.

"Plicks? Where you bin' boy? Whats happening out there?"

"Cap'in' we tried making it down to the docks, keeping to narrow alleyway to avoid getting spotted by the ships, just like you said but gods-dammit, the locals on this station are mad as a ruttin' grox, we made it two-thirds of the way there, found a whole bunch of miners looking for trouble, all armed, barely got out of there intact. Those savages says they was gonna lynch us!"

"What?" asked Yondu, appalled. "They working for Quill or something?" Plick shook his head.

"No sir cap, but Quill and his crew filled-in all the locals on how Count Bligh does business, the sort of things he's done other places he's took over, that goddam rat even distributed pictures. Then they told the locals how much miners make on nova worlds, mining lest valuable resources, and the natives did the rest themselves. They've formed a self-proclaimed 'Miners' Teamsters and Dockers Union'" he said, spiting, "And they say they ain't gonna work for anyone but themselves, and if we're working for Bligh they they'll fight us. Don't reckon' our ships shooting up the streets have much improved their opinion of us either."

"Dammit, how many they got and what they armed with?" asked Yondu, running a hand over his skull-ridge in frustration. Plicks shrugged.

"The group we ran into, about fifty: mining tools, fusion cutters, crowbars, knives, scatterguns, few old laser rifles. Short-range stuff, but they knows it, and they're lurking in the alleyways and the tenements where we'll have to fight them close-up and personal. Passed maybe five, six similar sized groups as we high-tailed it out of there. If every miner on this head has joined, were looking at what? Five to eight thousand? Plus dock-workers and so on. We want to get thought the alleyways, we gotta do it street-by-street, room-by-room, and badly outnumbered. "

Yondu punched a wall and clenched his teeth. "You mean to say Quill has gotten these guys so riled up we're outnumbered thirty to one by some labour-dispute hotheads?" Plicks nodded. Yondu punched the wall again. "Fine! We go up the main drag, avoid the backstreets, damn the ships. We move fast we should stay ahead of the ships, so long as we don't bog down. We gotta get control of those docks if we want to get out of here again cause' you can bet you bottom unit that Quill and his team will have that private airlock locked-down tighter than Kylarian pussy. Hey Kobe! Git over here!" Kobe got, as instructed. "You got your boys pretty far down the main drag, what's it like?!"

"Fucking shooting gallery cap'in: we can get down as far as Maxillary Street second junction, but then there's that gods-dammed bar on the main drag. The one with the lizard baiting signs up? Got that far, got bushwhacked by a bunch of Ruttin' whores."

Yondu frowned. "Who was it, the Miners union?"

"Not unless they've taken to wearing some pretty skimpy safety gear boss: I said whores, that weren't no insult. Bunch of working girls holed up in that bar, windows shuttered and sandbagged and covered with energy-distributing mesh. They got proper rifle slots cut in the walls and gaps in the sandbags, real hasty like, looks of it, but it works, and they got some godsdammed giant on the roof with a tripod mounted heavy necroblaster in a nice little sand-bagged nest, and you know who it is? Ruttin' Hue Watts! I'd recognise him anywhere! I stood out to parley with them, and they damn near took my head off. They say they won't strike a deal nor surrender to anyone working for Bligh, and seein' like a few of them got real acquainted with Wade Watts they subsequently ain't real kindly disposed to anyone in Ravenger garb. They're not great shots, but all armed with automatic zero-recoil laser riffles and big-ass scatterguns, they don't need to be. The barman in there seems a good shot, and got them organised. Ex merc maybe. I'd say get a sniper in to take out Hue Watts so we can get close enough to lob a grenade thought the rifle slots, but they've got some old-timers on one of the upper mining galleries with flechette rifles and mining-explosive pipe-bombs, and they're fucking fantastic shots, killed Osso, an' can see every move we make from above, call it into the guys below with the station intercom." Said Kobe, spiting. "Reckon' we should take the back-alleys, we can't force the main street, they'll bottle us up until our own ships arrive and fuck us in the ass." He noticed the look that Yondu and Plicks shared. "What? I missing something?"

Yondu's swearing went on long and so loud, that it took him quite a while to notice his coms-unit ringing. He checked the holo that came up, the galley. He took the call. "Allright boys, you better tell me that you've got to our computer core and can stop all this shit!"

"Oh hey Yondu, sorry about the caller ID, needed to patch through to you somehow." Said Rocket's voice. He sounded like he was running. "Looking at the distribution of your forces on the internal sensors, you feel like giving up yet?"

"Listen up Rodent." Snarled Yondu "You may have got the natives all stirred up, but these ain't' soldiers, you give them a day or too, there gonna get bored, or lazy, or stupid, and by then we'll have got the ships back under our control, and then I swear I'm gonna make you into a furry toilet-seat cover in the slimiest whorehouse in the quadrant!" he said, reacting out a fist and catching his Arrow mid-air as it zoomed back to him. "We wait this out and we win!"

Rocket paused for a second, panting. "Well yeah, sure, I know that. That's why I'm not gonna give you the chance to wait this out." He said. "When I have a plan, I have a plan. I don't like a whole bunch of loose ends." Yondu noticed Plicks tap him on the shoulder, swallow nervously, and point.

Outside of the giant eyes of Knowhere, the galley and her sister ship were turning, the distinctive glitter of their main batteries warming up visible.

Yondu laughed. "Rat, you fire that at our position within Knowhere, you'll breach the shielding that keeping all the air in and kill us all, your sweet little self included."

"… I'm sorry, who said anything about firing it at you?"

There was no noise thought the vacuum of space, only the glittering ball of scouring plasma that each of the ships fired, and the trail it left on your retinas as it streamed across the star-field and as Yondu watched he realised , oh surely not, it headed straight towards the-

There was no sound as the shots hit, but you could see them burst and spread around the invisible oval of the shielding like a thrown egg hitting a windshield, and with about as much effect. There was a perfect, pregnant pause, and then Yondu saw the pinpricks of light within that shielding move swiftly into attack vectors, and he got the ping ping ping of a call on his secondary com's line.

"Yondu Udonta, this is Centurion Kobayakawa Hideaki of the Nova Corp. Your ships have fired on Nova vessels, lower your shields immediately and prepare to be boarded. If you do not comply we will open fire."

"Goddamit, that wasn't us, they've hacked our computer systems!"

"Oh, I'm sorry." said Rocket. "You appear to be having a com's problem. He can't hear you. Would you like me to pass on message? Centurion Kobayakawa Hideaki, this is law-abiding citizen Rocket, first-officer or the Guardians of the Galaxy. I don't think Yondu will be replying to your hail, as he's not on the Galley at the moment. Make a life scan, filter for Centaurians. He's currently on Knowhere."

"… confirmed. Then, given that we have been fired upon by a vessel under the command on an individual located on Knowhere, I am hereby changing the role of our operation from an observation to a peace-keeping deployment. One of the factions in this disputed territory has fired on the Nova Corp: we will move in in accordance with our standard operating procedures. Both sides in this internal conflict will lay down their weapons and cease-firing immediately. If anyone resits we will show no mercy. As this is not a Nova World, and has no recognised Government, you are not under arrest, but we will keep an armed presence until a recognised government is formed and can take over security operations from us. We will set up a peace and reconciliation committee, and any individuals from this polity who wish to leave may do so, and will be escorted to the edge of Nova territory where their weapons will be returned to them. Individuals who feel they have been wronged can appeal to this comity for reparations. I am detecting a private airlock on the left-meridian line of the station, and a major docks facility. Clear both docks immediately and prepare to receive a boarding party in t-minus fifteen minutes. Centurion Kobayakawa out."

"Dammit Rocket!" yelled Yondu. "You know he's gonna check the computer logs and see you're the one that fired on him?"

"Really? Would these be the logs of the computer core your boys are desperately trying to reboot and restore to factory settings to get my patch out of? Let me help you out there: Computer, lower the shields on all ships, and power down automated ship-to-ship countermeasures, and begin a fifteen-min countdown, then safety land all vessels, and wipe all trace of the protection initiative and overwrite all computer activity for the last twenty-four hours."

There was a computerised bloop as the system acknowledged, and as Yondu contemplated punching the wall into dust, Rocket hung up with a final taunt. "oh, and baldly? Don't you ever call me rodent."

Yondu snarled, and in a fit of rage, sent his arrow thought the bone walls of Knowhere. He angrily rested his head on the wall, in frustration, and closed his yes. "This cannot be happening." He muttered.

He felt the wall shift, very slightly.

He paused, and then shoved it. The weakened bone caving in, revealing a maintenance duct, or air vent, or gods knows what inside the wall. It looked like it was heading in the rough direction of the warehouse where the Milano was stashed.

Yondu grinned.


"One, two, three!" Peter Jason Quill was jerked back into consciousness by feel of hands on his shoulders and legs, and the sudden flash of pain as his injured leg hit the med-suite padding.

"Wazzaf?" he exclaimed. His head was still swimming in a peasant poppy sea, but the morphine wasn't quite so strong, and he managed a relatively sensible. "Gamora? Drax? Rocket? Groot? I had the strangest dream… and you were there.. and you were there and…" he frowned. "No, wait, that's the Wizard of Oz. What happened? 'Cause I feel like someone dropped a farmhouse on me." He looked down. One of the robotic arms from the med-bag was wrist-deep in his leg, man-handling the bone back into the right place, as the other two arms wove a 3D printed cast around his foot. He went a little green and said. "Didn't need to see that. Not when I'm this high."

"Tell me about it." Muttered a voice. Rocket was about five feet from him, his gear from the Obforeti neatly stacked behind him, Velcro-ing splint-tape around his rips and wincing when Groot placed his remaining hand on his chest, grew his fingers into the furred flesh either side of vicious wound in his pectoral muscles that Quill could see metal and bone ribs though, and then Groot pulled it shut and snapped of his fingers in it, leaving neat wooden stitches behind.

"Thanks." Muttered Rocket, un-knotting the arms of his body-glove from around his waist and trying to avoid eye contact and avoid letting people see his scared and modified back as he pulled the top half of his jump-suit on. Quill put a sympathetic hand on his thin furry shoulder, and then winced at the pain it caused in his chest.

"Oh Jesus, Yondu got me good, didn't he?"

"You sustained a puncture wound under your left collarbone that pierced the wall of your chest, and exited via your scapular, disabling your left arm and collapsing your left lung." Said Drax, helpfully. "You then broke your right leg in two places when the arrow was pulled out and you fell nearly three times your high onto concrete."

"Concrete and me." said Rocket, prodding his side cautiously. "When Quill's patched up I want a go on that machine, check for cracked ribs. Gamora had to basically stop your lungs collapsing all the way back to the Milano." Quill looked at the figure seated closet to his bed. Gamora took his hand in hers, and stoked his morphine-tallied forehead gently. "You were very brave." She said. "Dumb, trying to take on the entire Ravenger crew single handed, but brave."

Quill coughed. It might have been a laugh. "Hey, I needed to save my crew. Didn't know what Rocket's plan was going to be. Needed to be close buy so I could leap in and help when they started pointing guns at him.

Rocket snorted. "My plan was to deal with it myself and then go find you when it was over. Didn't think you'd by apocalyptically stupid enough to come thought the window gun's blazing. Guess now I know."

"And knowing is half the battle." coughed Quill. "So, how did we beat Yondu?"

Rocket shrugged, wincing and rubbing his chest, and looked back to Gamora, who answered for him.

"Rocket managed to get the Nova Corp. involved."

"How?"

"He shot them. They're coming to dis-arm both sides and escort Yondu to the other side of Nova territory."

"He shot them?" muttered Quill, fuzzily. "Yeah, guess that would do it. But no, how did we beat Yondu? I mean, how did we make him think he'd beat us? You know if they escort him out of here, he'll be back and kill us first chance he gets. Or worse, he'll lose the respect of his men and they'll maroon him and put Hess or someone in charge, and they we'll have the Ravengers after us minus the brains and the class. Getting rid of him's not a resolution, not when it's personal like this. It might just be the morphine talking, but to win this we need to lose this, right? He has to think that he's won, or at least his crew does, or we'll have to do this every couple of months until we're all dead or they are. How did we beat him 'caus I know that you guys are smart enough to know that getting teacher to break up the fight won't end this, right?" he looked around at his crew. "Right guys? Guys?"

They all looked at each other blankly for a moment, and then the ships alarms started to go off. The crew all ran to the nearest panel to check what it was, but Quill groaned. "Yondu."

Quill looked down at his newly-cast foot, and swing it off the bed. Gamora Rocket and Drax craned around the panel didn't notice as Quill, very, very hazily, begun to pull himself upright.

"It's the perimeter sensors, life-signs closing fast from three sides, one of them Centaurian." Said Gamora, checking her sword out of force of habbit. Rocket gave vent to his feelings.

"Fuck me!"

"Will that help?"

"Drop dead Drax, or, If ya wanna do something useful go work out how they made it past the ships: I put the system re-set on a fifteen minute delay, they should be running scared for another-" Rocket's eye flicked sideways to the chronometer in the corner of the screen, oblivious as Quill, more morphine than man, buckled on both of his guns and started, holding on to the door frame for support, to buckle on his rocket-boosters. Groot spotted and tried to stop him, before realising he now had only one fingerless hand, and not much else.

"-another four minutes. How'd he get past?"

"I am Groot!"

"Could perhaps there have been a flaw in your programing?" asked Drax.

Rocket shrugged. "It was a rushed job, I'll admit I didn't have time to work on the minutiae of the coding, so yeah it's possible, but they ain't even coming up the streets at us, it's like they came out of the goddam walls!"

"I am Groot!" yelled Groot, wrapping his one arm around Quill's thigh as he begun to struggle up the stairs to the common area, dragging Groot along with him.

"Not now Groot! How'd they frickin' get past?"

"Does it matter?" asked Gamora, re-sheathing her sword. "They did somehow. Can we get airborne? Hold them off or just stay out of their way until Nova has dis-armed them all?" She asked, as, up the stairs in the main area Quill downloaded a file from the ships mainframe to a small holo-storage unit despite Groot's protestations.

"Yeah sure." Said Rocket sarcastically, ignoring the desperate litany's of "I am groooooot!"as Quill opened the draw he had kept his mother's final gift and some other personal things in, and scooped out what he needed. Quill looked around for something to put all this in, and spotted a containment sphere on Rocket's bunk. On spotting this Groot let go of his leg and, horrified gripped the sphere. Quill fought with him for a moment, and given Groot's aimlessness and Quill drugged state it went pretty weekly until Quill remembered he was twice Groot's current height and picked him up along with the sphere, and begun to slump down the other steps. Oblivious to the theft of his favourite toy, Rocket continued to sneer.

"We're inside, and it takes two people to even move the warehouse doors! Waddya want me to do? Hover on the spot and blow the frickin' doors off?" he yelled, glaring angrily at Gamora for a second before his brain caught up with his mouth.

"Oh. Yeah, sure, I'll get right on it." He said, running up the steps to the con and booting up the engines and arming the cannons "Give me thirty seconds and we're out of here!"

Gamora sighed with relief, and then both she and Drax turned back to the empty med-bay. She regarded it for a second. "...Shit. Rocket, we have a problem!" she said, charging up the stairs.

"What is it?" he yelled, diving into the pilot's seat, wincing as his ribs ground against each other. Before Gamora could answer, a second ship alarm went off. He looked up and forward. "Portside airlock?" his whiskers drooped and eyes widened. "Oh, no, you wouldn't? Would you?"

"I am Groot!" yelled Groot, running back up the steps from the airlock waving a piece of Quill's torn clothing like a flag.

"He stole my ball? When we have a dozen other containment spheres? Well that's just rude!" Yelled Rocket, charging down to the main aria and following Drax and Gamora down the steps to the airlock, stopping only to grab his gun and a spare sphere on the way


Quill managed to hobble a pretty good distance towards the doors of the warehouse, writing on a scrap of paper as he did, before Gamora caught up with him by the Watt's brothers fridge.

"Quill, what in the name of all the hells do you think you are doing? Get back to bed so we can-"

"Can end this? Not without me. We need to do this. Yondu has to walk away from this on his own terms or he'll be back."

"Quill, that's the drugs talking, the dosage you've had you shouldn't even be able to walk!"

"Guess whatever half of him ain't terran is pretty resistant to drugs." Said Rocket, panting and clutching at his ribs as he drew level. After a moment panting, he gestured one-pawed at Quill, leaning on his gun. "Okay Quill, give me my ball back."

"Rocket! We're here to get him back on the ship before Yondu gets here!"

"Sure, but first, I'd like my ball back Gamora, I mean, it's a simple request."

Quill and Gamora stared, as Drax and Groot joined them. "Wait, I'm on morphine, trying to risk my life to save us, and you're worrying about which particular containment sphere I use to do it?" asked Quill, shocked."You should be worrying about me getting killed, there's no way I'm up for this!"

"Exactly, so get back to bed, you're both wounded-"

"Stay out of this!" yelled Quill and Rocket at the same time. Gamora, inured to severe stupidity as she was, could only stare.

"Look Quill, it clearly doesn't matter to you which sphere you use, but it matters to me, because I get kinda territorial about my stuff, and I know I shouldn't and it's crazy but I get a little anxious and cranky so just take this sphere for whatever you're going to do and get back on the damn ship!" said Rocket, snatching the orb from Quill and replacing it with a seemingly identical, albeit slightly less battered one. As Quill fumbled with the Orb and Rocket hid his in his jumpsuit Gamora groaned and clutched her forehead.

"You know, just for a little while I'd like to be around people who aren't insane."

Drax nodded. "Myself also." He noticed the look the other four were giving him. "What?"

"Drax, grab them if you have to but get them back on the ship! We don't have time to mess around with orbs, for either hair-brained plans or stupid personal attachments."

"It ain't personal, trust me." Muttered Rocket. "This is the same orb we held the Infinity stone in for a bit before Nova took it. I get the feeling we'll need to keep it for research."

"How so?" Asked Drax, moving to grab Quill, you ducked away protesting that he had a plan, honest. Rocket hesitated.

"Not meaning to sound completely frickin' insane, but has anyone else been having weird dreams about the Stone?"

The Gamora and Drax, who had Quill in a headlock or by the lapels respectively, froze. Drax frowned. "Do, do you mean the stone interjecting itself in deeply personal dreams and somehow silently implying that it will fix ones problems present and past if touched again? ...What? You all keep giving me that look."

Gamora dropped Quill and stepped back a pace, shocked. "You… you guys too?" the other four nodded to her.

Quill ruffled a hand though his hair. "I… I think we might have a problem." He said.

A statement that became far more immediate a second later when there was a loud crack of cutting charges and the doors to the warehouse fell in inwards nearly flattening them. Being combat veterans with reflexes honed by hours of battle, the Guardians made it behind the Watt's brothers little kitchen range before the dust had settled.

All but Quill. Perhaps it was the fact his leg was in a cast. Perhaps it was the Morphine. Or, just perhaps, it was because this was something he felt he needed to do. As the dust cleared, a singe figure strode out, backed by his crew at a respectful distance. Quill nodded to him. He curled his lip, but nodded back.

"Quill."

"Yondu. My crew reckoned you'd pack up and leave when Nova got involved. I guess I know you a little better."

"Well, see now, some of my boys reckoned the same thing about you. I might not have been able to teach you smarts, and I sure as hell failed to teach you manners, but guts? You never was a coward. I'll give you that." Yondu spat, but without malice.

"So" He asked Quill casualy, as if nothing was happening. "How you want to do this? This is your house, least I could do is show you the respect you never showed me. You want to draw on three or something?" he asked, flicking his coat aside dramatically to free up the arrow, keeping one hand behind his back to hold the coat in place and standing hips cocked, like a gunfighter.

Quill shook his head, sadly. "No, no I Don't. Come on Yondu; you've seen the local miners here, since we introduced them to the idea of labour laws? You kill me, Nova or no Nova, you're crew don't walk out of here intact, I guarantee it. Now those miners, they'll need a broker for the stuff they sell, someone who knows the game, know how to grease the right palms and bust the right heads to get that stuff sold, legally or otherwise if this place is going to work. Why work for Bligh's table scraps when you could take a big ol' cut of this, and without any argument from me, Nova or the locals here? I'm sorry I wronged you. There, I've said it. I've apologised and I'll pay cold hard cash, so why do we have to fight?"

Yondu considered his for am moment, and then broke into a killing grin. "Same reason You're standing here like a damn fool and not hiding behind the refrigerator with the rest of your crew: pride."

Quill nodded. "Pride. Okay, fair enough. My house, you mind I pick the weapons make it fair?"

Yondu shrugged. "Be my guest."

Quill grinned. "I say no rules on the weapons, anything goes, and the two crews can join in, sound fair?"

Yondu looked from Quill, two his crew of four , two the two-hundred pirates backing him up, and back again.

"Your funeral."

"Quill." Said Gamora. "I really hope you know what you're doing."

"Don't worry, I've got… actually no. I don't even have part of a plan. But I've got something better. Can you guys coma out, please? Just line up with me, that would be swell."

The crew, alternately looking pleadingly at Quill or scowling at the Ravengers came out, one at a time, and lined up around Quill, Gamora first, then Drax, and finally Rocket and Groot on the ends of the line. After a second of looking nervously around, wondering when exactly they were going to get shot, Quill patted Drax on the shoulder reassuringly and said. "Don't worry big guy, I have a plan."

Drax paused, and then rested his hand of Quill shoulder in return. "I believe you do. And if not, then at least I will see my family again soon." As Quill smiled at Drax, he made a frantic gesture behind his back and Groot "I am Groot"-ed and grabbed Drax's leg.

"Really? Asked Rocket. "Aww shoot." He said, nervously eyeing up the Ravengers as he took Gamora's hand in his tiny clawed and calloused paw. As she looked down, he hissed at her and she got her eyes back to the Ravengers in front on her, getting his message. "Just roll with it." He muttered through clenched teeth . "I think the idiot's about to do with I think he's about to do."

"Sweet. Touching even. There a point to all, this?" asked Yondu. Quill grinned.

"Hey Yondu, before you kill us, can I just ask you one thing? Why did you ask if we had the orb? I mean, we so clearly wanted to get rid of it, and nova wanted it. Kinda a long-shot we'd still have it?"

Yondu shrugged. "You pulled a fast switch on me. Wouldn't put it past you to do the same on Nova prime. She's so honourable if you told her never to open it, she probably wouldn't. Price it would fetch, It was worth a shot you'd still have it."

"Yeah." said Quill, linking hands with Gamora and drawing out the containment sphere with his other hand. "It was, wasn't it?"

Yondu's eyes flickered between the orb, and all five of them linking hands, and a few drops of sweat beaded his blue forehead.

"Yeah." Said Quill. "You remember this? You saw what happened last time all five of us got together like this? You all saw what that was like." He added, as the Ravenger crew begun to edge back nervously. "It wasn't exactly pretty, was it? It hurt enough wielding this; I'd hate to think of what it feels like getting hit by it. And maybe-" he said, staring Yondu dead in the eye, as cool and anything. "Maybe I'm bluffing. Maybe Nova did get the orb and this is an empty sphere. Maybe I'm too dosed up on morphine to even know what I'm doing. But honestly, Yondu, do you want to take that risk? Bet your life on it? So I'm going to ask you one question: the way this day has been working out for you, exactly how lucky do you feel?"

As the Ravenger crew waited in agonised silence, there was a perfect moment of tense waiting, as Quill and Yondu stared each other down, looking for that one little tell. Yondu pursed his lips to whistle, and Quill thumbed the catch on the sphere in response, and the half the Ravenger crew took in an audible breath, and Yondu moved his eyes quickly from one guardian to the next, as they all stared him down with defiant, hard eyes, watching his lips for the first sign of a whistle, and he looked back to Quill a defeated man-

- and, seeing as they were all watching his lips and beginning to relax at his expression of defeat, he drew the blaster from behind his back, and tased Quill in the chest, conducting the charge to all of them by their linked hands and downing all five in a fraction of a second, sending Quill crashing into the fridge, which then fell on his good arm with a sickening crunch, sending the containment sphere rolling across the floor to bump against his boot.

"Oh god, he called the fucking bluff!" groaned Quill, as the medical nanites detected a new injury and flooded his system with morphine again. "I was way too high to try that!"

"Yep." said Yondu, stooping to pick up the sphere and turning it in his hand appreciatively "You gonna bluff me, try not to do it with nova morphine, keeps that tally of how much you've had on your forehead. See this is exactly the shit I'm talking about when I say you don't respect my intelligence boy." He said, gesturing for his crew with the orb to form a half-circle around the fallen Guardians, guns out. "Okay boys, fuck Bligh, let's finish this-

"Oh screw this!" said Quill, taking his wounded shoulder, and, bracing for the pain, reaching down and grabbing one took his rocket-boosters and slamming it onto the fridge, before ripping the door open and firing it up. Yondu had a momentary glimpse of the tiny Pompeii Rocket had created inside the fridge with the flame-thrower before it was fired at him at speed. As he leapt aside, the fridge bounced of the concrete floor of the warehouse and spun, covering the room in a stinking cloud of black ash that made it imposable for anyone to see for around a felt a stunner-round from Quills blaster hit the orb and Knock it high in the air, and he instinctively stepped on his own arrow and whistled himself ten feet in the air to catch it, landing with orb in hand, blaster and arrow aimed and Quill, who had one of his blasters aimed at Yondu's chest form under a yard away, as Drax pressed a knife to his throat, Plicks put a gun to Drax's head, Gamora a sword to Plick's and aimed her laser at Hess, who primed a grenade to throw at Rocket, who covered half the crew with his gun as they pointed their guns at him and Groot and-

"Cease this this instant and throw your weapons to the floor!" screamed a voice and ear-splitting volume ( Quill later found out he has a lagerphone-come-riot-ampvox built into the armour) as a tall, salt-and-pepper haired Xandarian stood in the doorway wearing a Nova-corps centurions uniform, a sword the even Gamora would have considered impressive, and a furious expression as a dozen fully-armoured Nova covered the room with fully automatic weapons from he cover of personal force fields. Behind him two Nova star-fighter hovered in the doorway and literally hundreds of Nova personnel double-timed it down the street outside, coming on from the ship moored to the collectors personal airlock.

Quill and Yondu shared a scowl for a moment, before both of them dropped their blasters and Yondu whistled his arrow back into its sheath and turned to go. As he did, Quill called out. "Hey no fair, that orb belongs to us!"

Yondu paused, and then looked from Quill back to the Nova officer. "Well, centurion, I believe you are here to stop both sides in this war fighting, and if anyone feels they've been wronged, there's gonna be a committee they can appeal to for compensation?" The officer glared, but then nodded. "Correct."

"Well ain't that nice." said Yondu, walking away, as Quill complained. "Oh come on, that belongs to me!" the centurion sighed.

"We have no jurisdiction to re-distribute property: everything is the de-facto property of whoever holds it the moment we arrive, until there is a civil government to establish de jure ownership. Unless it's a weapon, we can't touch it. I'm sorry."

"Centurion!" said a corpsman nervously. "That appears to be a containment sphere!" his eyes flashed to the guardians and the centurion got the message.

"Yondu Udonta, by the authority of the Nova corp., I cannot let you leave this place with an infinity stone, please open the sphere for us. Carefully."

Yondu turned, keeping half an eye on Quill, and, as his crew held their breath, popped open the sphere a tiny crack.

No purple light spilled out, and everyone begun to breathe again. Yondu turned his back for a moment, fishing thought the contents of the sphere, and then turned back, grinning.

"Well lookie here. No stone, but a copy of some archive from some Mr Star'lin, detailing leads on how to find site related to infinity stones, Thanos attacks in the qudrent, and the names and locations of suspected contacts of Thanos who are interested in stones. Must be worth a pretty penny on the black market, what say you Hess? Ten, twelve million at least?"

"At least!"

Centurion Kobayakawa Hideaki looked pale. "I cannot let you leave with that information, that is classified Nova Corp Property."

"Yeah well, I heard you didn't have the authority to re-distribute property, seein' as we're outside of the nova empire. And besides, firstly, if it's clasifed, how come Quill had it? you wouldn't be running some sorta off the books opps, would you? Honoroble guys like the Nova Corp? and secondly, this Star'lin is a reporter? Don't the Xandarian constitution have something about freedom of the press? Hell of a lawsuit if you try to take it. People might ask questions about how much Nova is involved in Infinity stones, and I'm sure that's something you want the media focusing on." he said, grinning as he put the orb in his pocket.

As he turned to leave, he pointed to Quill. "This don't pay your debts, boy, we ain't even yet!"

"Yeah." wheezed Quill "I know." He said, massaging his broke arm with the one with a ruined shoulder, and then deciding it hurt too much and laying back and letting the morphine take over as Yondu smiled, gestured to his crew, and walked away and out of his life again, for the time being.

Centurion Kobayakawa Hideaki looked horrified before turning to the Guardians apologetically.

"I'm sorry, it looks like Yondu has won this time."

"Yeah, yeah it does." Muttered Quill, smiling, before passing out.


An hour or so later, just as Rocket was having his ribs re-knit and Quill was waking up in a Nova med-bay rather better that the one on the Milano, Kraglin woke up in the med bay just off the bridge of the galley, and tried to focus on the figure in front of him.

"Captain?" he asked, confused. "Wha' happened?"

Yondu snorted. "Quill happened, what else?" he asked, swivelling his new captain's chair: he didn't think the collector would mind him taking the one from his trophy room, and it was pretty darn comfortable.

Kraglin considered this, and the sound or raucous partying from the deck below.

"Did, did we win?" he asked.

Yondu grinned. "Yeah, I guess you could say we did."

Kraglin frowned. "So, did we kill Quill. Or take him as bounty?"

"Nope." Said Yondu.

"His crew? The woman and the maniac and that cyborg an' his tree?"

"Nope." Said Yondu, cheerfully. "Got something that paid better." He said, tossing a containment sphere from hand to hand cheerfully.

Kraglin frowned. It was hard to think. "So… we won, without having to hurt Quill or his crew?"

"Wouldn't go quite that far, but they're all still breathing last I saw, yeah."

"Oh." Said Kraglin. He considered this for a moment. "Good." Yondu grinned, punched him affectionately in the arm making him wince, and walked off to join his crew for some much-needed celebration. The run of luck they'd been having since Quill left, he felt the boys needed a victory to celebrate.

"You rest up and get well Krag, I need you, gods knows Plicks and Hess and Trelzar ain't up to the job. You get well soon, you hear? That's an order." Said Yondu, walking out the door

"Aye aye captain." Muttered Kraglin drowsily, settling down in the med-suite. As he did, he noticed that Yondu had left the containment sphere on the table near his suite. Curious, he reached out and took it. A Holo-projector fell out, but Kraglin managed to catch the small hand-written note before it could slip thought his fingers, carefully, made cautious and slow by morphine, he unfolded it, and begun to read the familiar child-like scrawl.

Yondu,

Never men't to disrespect you just needed to do my own thing

thought you might understand that

Know this doesn't make it up, know we ain't even, and to be honest, I'm a little pissed you tried to kill me, but then again who hasn't? I'm willing to talk this out like adults if you are next time we meet.

Hope this makes it up to you a little

Q.

P.S. play them some good music once in a while.

Kraglin put the orb back on the table, and carefully screwed up the note and hid it. Wouldn't do for the crew to see that: captain had a reputation as a heartless bastard to maintain, after all.

He glanced out over the bridge for a moment, and then grinned when he spotted the two Lego's lined up with the other doo-dads by Yondu's console.

Wincing as he lay down, he made a mental note to buy Quill and his team a drink the next time he saw them. Right after he kicked the little rodent up the ass for shooting him in the shoulder, that was.

I guess sometimes even when it all goes wrong it just works out. He thought, as he drifted into a morphine stupor. At least no-one wants to murder anyone else over this anymore he thought, as the Ravengers flew of partying into the stars

Awsome Mix Vol 2: Lynard Skynard Freebird.


The Kree licked his lips nervously as he stood before the desk.

"You said what?!" asked Count Bligh, his lank hair falling in waves over his blue face and he leaned over and snarled in his face. The Kree filched back at his breath, redolent of beer and deathsticks, before repeating himself.

"Our spies on Nowhere and in the Nova Corp. confirmed that Yondu and the Guardians fought each-other to a standstill before Nova intervened and ended the fighting. The Ravengers have withdrawn, and returned the deposit we gave them. They will no longer peruse the contract now Nova is involved, and nor will anyone else for the price we are offering, not with a Nova fleet there. Knowhere…. Knowhere is lost to us."

Bligh snarled, and punched his desk, leaving a visible dent in the metal "Triple the bounties, quadruple on this so-called Starlord and offer immediate entry to the Blue Dragon syndicate as a full member to anyone who brings in Rocket, alive. Put a low-level bounty on Yondu and those Ravengers, trusted contacts only, don't let the Ravengers know they've been flagged, and make it clear we're not after a fight. We can't afford a turf-war with a pirate unit that size, not now. Centuries we've been trying to get Tivan off that head, and then five do-gooders go in and ruin it for us? No. I say no! Could be Yondu planed this all along, playing both sides with Quill as his ringer… we get the chance to take Yondu or an Ravenger officer by stealth, we do so, and we find out exactly what they know! Whatever it costs, we need Knowhere!"

The Kree, looked nervously to the Badoon, who said "Perhaps with a larger mercenary force…"

"And bring the Nova Corp. down on us?" snarled Bligh. "Get out of my site idiots before I have you flayed alive and fed to the rats like the last idiot who suggested that nonsense! Out!" he yelled, as the two nearly tripped over the Aaskvarian hide rug on their way out.

He slammed down onto his chair again, and hit the com's unit to his PA.

"Karren, hold my calls and get me a caffeine pod and some aspirin, stat." he listened to the sounds of screaming, coming through the walls from the black cells where he held the special bounties and people who upset him. "And tell the new interrogator that if he doesn't stop that racket right now he'll beg to swap places with his victim by the time I've finished with him." He said, hanging up.

He sat in his office in the silence and the heart of Fortress Viderdoom for a long time, and tried to re-assure himself that it was just money. Just billions and billions of units of brain and bone and spinal fluid he was losing. Just money, and he had plenty enough of that already.

But it wasn't, and he knew that, and that frightened him. He was a good bounty hunter, in his day, but in recent years as he'd got older he'd moved into accounting, and if he thought people were viscous in the bounty hunting game, that was nothing compared to what they would do to their accountants if they thought they were losing them money.

After minute or so, the line pinged.

"Karren! He snarled "I told you to hold my calls and-"

"It… it's line zero, sir. It's him."

Bling sat there open mouthed for a long time, before he realised that his PA was still trying to talk to him.

"-Sir? Sir are you there?"

"I'm here. Put him thought to the secure suite." He muttered, Mouth dry. I could really use that caffeine right now. He thought, as he dumbly walked over to a balk wall panel like all the others in his office, pressed his had to it, and walked thought when it slid back. He Doesn't know. He can't know yet, I only just found out… he thought, as the faradaic cage closed behind him, followed by the door of the anechoic chamber.

He paused before the holo-projector in the centre of the room, nervously for a moment, and then respectfully bowed his head as it flickered on, fighting the urge to throw himself prostate and beg for mercy: his boss hated shit like that.

"Mister Knife…." he whispered. "I… I can explain."

"You'd better."