Disagreement is inevitable, and I imagine there will be many others before this is anywhere near done.
But what would life be if everyone agreed on how things should go?
The feeling of mixed triumph and surprise did not long last for Jarrion as some seconds after the Assertive had stopped the Collector vessel in its tracks he had someone tap him on the shoulder. They had to tap pretty hard, what with him wearing armour and all.
"Hmm, yes?" He asked, turning.
Jarrion was then somewhat alarmed at finding himself dangling. Shepard, it turned out, was a lot stronger than she looked. Strong enough to grab a man in full carapace and hoist him into the air, it transpired.
"You maniac, a third of the colony was on that fucking ship!" She snapped, glaring up at him.
Shepard then felt something nudge against the side of her head. This she discovered was a gun barrel - Thale had appeared almost as if from thin air to put his hellgun up to her temple. Everyone else was also pointing their guns at everybody else, too. Things had gone very quiet indeed.
"Thale, please, we're simply having a conversation," Jarrion said with a lot more confidence than he felt, reaching out to awkwardly pat the man on the only body part he could reach, which was Thale's forearm.
A particularly tense pause and then Thale gave a brief nod, stepped back and lowered his hellgun. A few equally tense seconds after this everyone else also relaxed - for a given value of relaxed - and Shepard put Jarrion back on his feet.
Once settled he dusted himself down, straightened out the jacket spread across his shoulders, and cleared his throat.
"As I understand it," he said. "Our mission here was to stop this alien attack. To all appearances it seems that we've done this."
He gave a gesture meant to encompass the profusion of dead Collectors they were currently standing in the middle of. With exquisite timing a dead Husk chose this moment to slither from the rooftop it had died on and land with a thump on the ground. Shepard ignored this, though she internally admitted it was pretty funny. She had a point to make.
"Yes, and then you blew their ship up! A ship that was full of people!" She said, pointing upward. Jarrion didn't look because he didn't need to. He was also starting to feel a bit underappreciated.
"A mercy, then! You've seen what these xenos do! They're hardly friendly and accommodating! I doubt the colonists had much to look forward to! And the ship is still there, in case you hadn't noticed! Look!"
Jarrion's turn to point. The Collector ship was indeed still above them, having apparently managed to reach orbit before being destroyed. Lucky it was a clear day, really, otherwise spotting them would have been quite difficult. As it stood, you could just about spot them. If you really looked.
Shepard just glared, something lost on Jarrion as she was wearing a helmet, much as he was.
"Yeah, as an exploded wreck. That's not a whole lot of use to the people inside it, is it?"
"A lance is a very precise weapon alongside being a very powerful one, I assure you. While that ship is surely crippled, internally it may well be more intact that you suspect. And - given that they went to all the trouble in the first place - one would imagine they would have stored their cargo quite safely and securely."
This was Jarrion talking out his arse as quickly as the words came to him, but the way he said it made him sound very convincing indeed. There was a reason he was the Lord Captain, after all.
This reason was that he was the son of a Rogue Trader.
But he was also very good at sounding convincing, even when saying the most outlandish bullshit. The key was that he never once doubted anything he said, no matter how untrue it might or might not be. All relative, wasn't it?
"You don't know that, you're just guessing," Shepard said, Jarrion's mojo not really hitting her square on but still carrying enough confidence to at least confuse her.
"You're just guessing that I'm guessing," Jarrion said.
This took Shepard a solid second to actually wrap her head around, because she couldn't fully believe someone could have said something like that to her. Once she had, she couldn't come up with a response because it annoyed her so much so she just went:
"Argh!"
And turned away, not really wanting to look at Jarrion right then if she could help it.
"Well, would you have let them go?" Jarrion asked, doing his best not to sound irritated. He even turned to Loghain and the others to see if they knew what he might have done wrong but they were as in the dark as he was and could only shrug.
Shepard was going to respond, too, but then she thought about it. What had her plan been, exactly? The idea had been to repel the attack on the colony, yes? And they'd done that. So that was good. That part was beyond dispute.
But, thinking about it, she couldn't help but suddenly feel that the whole operation had been rushed into. It had had to have been, of course, time had been of the essence, when else might there have been such an opportunity available? But thinking about it now that everything had settled, what might the actual plan have looked like?
The greater, overarching plan was clear - find way through relay, go through relay, see what they've got going on over there, make it explode, stop attacks, have drinks. Simple in theory, trickier in execution. That was fine, she could understand that. That was a clear goal.
In the very, very immediate short term - as in, standing on a planet that had only recently been under attack - what was it she'd been meaning to do? Single-handedly kill every Collector the ship might have felt like sending at them? Blowing the ship up herself? Driving it off somehow, like she'd done? Boarding it in a daring raid to rip out something important they could analyse for useful information?
If she'd had the option of blowing the ship up herself, would she have? Without those lasers how might she have managed that, exactly? Thrown the Normandy at it and hoped for the best? Assuming she even wanted to make it blow up? It had been packed with stolen humans, after all, and she was currently angry at Jarrion for blowing the thing up.
On top of which there was no guarantee that the GARDIAN battery couldn't have accidentally hit something vital and blown the thing up while it was still on the surface, or else done enough damage to cripple the thing and have it die on its own later. Who knew? Maybe the Collector ship was made of papier mache and relied entirely on the element of surprise?
It was unlikely, sure, but they had absolutely no information to go on at this point. And as a rule if you were shooting something you should always at least entertain the possibility that it was going to get destroyed.
And assuming that the Collectors had just been driven off without being destroyed wouldn't that mean they'd still have taken all those colonists? And wouldn't that be bad, too? Who knew what might have happened to them, then. They'd be in the wind and gone all the same. As good as dead, surely. No guarantee they wouldn't be.
At least this way where they'd ended up was obvious. In a ship that had been shot through by some weirdo space-ray and was now hanging in orbit, dead, probably on fire inside with all vital systems fried. Great.
The whole thing made her head spin. This was one of those situations where there wasn't actually an obvious best option, at least none that Shepard had had available. This irritated her. No matter which way things might have gone there would have been someone, somewhere ready to jump down her throat. She could hear them now.
As it happened, she supposed things could have gone worse. Could have gone a lot better, probably, but such was life.
"Fine," she said, at length, grunting. "What's done is done anyway. Now we just have a big, dead spaceship hanging overhead. Hope it doesn't crash. EDI, is that thing going to crash?"
"Presently, the Collector ship is in a moderately stable orbit, though at its current rate of decay it can be expected to drop out and fall to the surface sometime in the next ten years," EDI said in both Shepard and Jarrion's ears.
"See? Plenty of time," Jarrion said, beaming. He then frowned. "Wait, hang on, how can I hear-"
"They're gone! They - wait, they're still there? What are they doing?" Shouted a colonist, running out from left field and interrupting things.
The colonist, having shown up to the scene late, had not seen that the Collector ship had been prevented from escaping or how Jarrion's ship had stopped the Collector ship from escaping. He just saw that the Collector ship wasn't going anywhere, and that there was another, even larger vessel in orbit. He had mixed feelings about this.
"What the hell is that other thing? That another ship?" He asked, shielding his eyes with a hand and squinting upward.
Jarrion had no idea who this local was but felt that polite introductions would go a long way, especially given his immediate plans concerning the planet. Always a fine plan to get started on the right and proper foot - a friendly foot!
He stepped towards the man, holding out a hand.
"Hello. You're quite safe now, I'm happy to say. The attack has been repulsed with prejudice and the aliens prevented from making off," Jarrion said.
The colonist just blinked at him. And not a friendly blink, either. This was the blink of someone seeing something they had absolutely no enthusiasm or time for.
"Who the hell are you? What's that accent? What's with the jacket?" He asked, pointing at Jarrion's jacket. Jarrion looked down at it and failed to see why it should be remarkable.
"Merely a concerned passerby who saw fit to render assistance. Now that that's done, I'd actually rather like to enquire about possibly setting up shop - as it were - on a nicely secluded spot on this lovely planet of yours. Not nearby, I assure you, somewhere you wouldn't even notice us. Or we could lease some land from you, if that would work?"
Not much sense in dancing around the issue, Jarrion felt. Good to get down to brass tacks.
The colonist was entirely nonplussed and roundly confused.
"Lease?"
"Or rent, depending on what terms are agreeable. I'm flexible," Jarrion said.
"Why the hell would we let you do that?"
Not exactly an overwhelmingly positive reaction but it was early days.
"Oh, it can be a mutually beneficial arrangement, I assure you. I'd be more than willing to render whatever assistance your fine colony might require in its recovery and beyond. Help in reconstruction, raw materials, anything you might need from elsewhere, weaponry…"
The last word did make the man's ears prick up, but didn't improve his mood overmuch.
"You can keep your help but we'll see about the other stuff. I don't run this place. Not sure who's left who would still be in charge…" The colonist said, again casting his eyes upwards to where he'd seen the alien ship go and stop.
"Well, as and when, anyone who is in a position to speak for the colony would be more than welcome to come aboard my ship and speak with my Seneschal. Or else I could have him come down here, whichever is more convenient to you," Jarrion said.
"Your ship?"
"Yes, the Assertive. That one there. Near to the alien vessel that it stopped from escaping," Jarrion said, pointing upward. The colonist turned again to look and when he looked back to Jarrion he appeared confused.
"That thing's yours?" He asked.
"Yes."
"Are you joking?"
"No?"
By this point Shepard - who was not involved in the conversation - had removed her helmet to get some fresh air. The colonist glanced at this, then did a double-take and took a proper look.
"Wait, I recognise you…"
"Commander Shepard, Alliance military, saviour of the Citadel. You're in the presence of a legend. And a ghost."
This last was said by a guy who just emerged from behind some crates. This made Jarrion jump. What was it with people just appearing randomly all of a sudden now that the shooting had stopped?
"Had he been waiting this whole time?" He said to himself.
The colonist was not impressed by this, either.
"Oh God, it's you. Sure, half the colony gets taken but you're still here. Great. Who even talks like that? I need a lie down, done with this for the day," he said, dismissing all present with the wave of a hand and then sloping off to parts unknown.
Everyone watched him go, then it was back to the matter at hand.
"Hello there Kaiden, fancy seeing you here. How's it going? Been a while," said Shepard.
"That's all you have to say? After two years? After coming back from the dead? Just acting like it didn't happen?" Kaiden asked, obviously angry.
"Well I could dwell on how I died in space in agony but I like to think it's better to try and move past that," Shepard said, sourly. Jarrion stood to one side, trying not to draw any attention to himself. It worked well.
"I would have followed you anywhere, Commander! Thinking you were gone...it was like losing a limb. Why didn't you try to contact me? Why didn't you let me know you were alive?"
Shepard was pretty clearly taken aback by this strong line of questioning. Not every day you get compared to the loss of a limb. She cleared her throat quietly.
"...little busy being dead at the time, Kaiden. Getting blasted into space will do that. And then it was kind of a rush. The Cerberus station that put me back together again got attacked. It was a whole thing."
Kaiden's look got somehow even more severe and he took a step backwards, staring at Shepard as though she'd grown a second head.
"You're with Cerberus now? Garrus too? I'd heard rumours but I didn't believe them. I didn't want to. And you're saying it's true? Alliance intel was that Cerberus might have been behind these attacks on the colonies."
"What? Actually, okay, I can see why you might believe that. But it's not like that, as you've probably seen. Cerberus and us are actually on the same page on this one. Strange times we live in, right?"
"Do you really believe that? Or is that what Cerberus want you to think?"
"Uh, Kaiden, you can see all the dead Collectors, right?"
Kaiden elected to ignore this.
"I wanted to believe the rumours that you were alive, but I never expected anything like this. You've turned your back on everything we stood for!"
"Hey, whoa, back the bus the fuck up - excuse me? I get brought back to life by the evil bastards we don't like, sure, but then they also decided that humans getting abducted is bad and bankroll me trying to stop that. And that, me stopping colonies getting attacked, is turning my back on what exactly? Oh and by the way the Collectors and Reapers are looking to be linked, so there's that too. Something to consider."
"I want to believe you, Shepard, but I don't trust Cerberus. They could be using the threat of a Reaper to manipulate you. What if they're behind it?"
"Behind what?! We are literally standing in the middle of an attacked colony! Attacked by Collectors! Cerberus could be singing fucking showtunes and leading me around by the nose but we are literally standing surrounded by the dead aliens who attacked this colony! I get paranoia - I'm all for paranoia! - but thinking that Cerberus have attack aliens on standby is a step too far! I am not sure what part of this is confusing you!"
"Maybe they're working with the Collectors," Kaiden said. Shepard spluttered.
"Working with - are you listening to yourself? Are you aware of what the term 'myopic' means? Maybe a little overfocused on Cerberus here? To the exclusion of all else? To the exclusion of the bleeding obvious?"
"Maybe. Or maybe because they brought you back you think you owe them something."
"Bullshit, I don't owe them jack. They're just the ones footing the bill on this right now. Don't see anyone else doing anything about it. And once it's done that's them thrown under the bus, I don't even care."
Shepard turned to look at the woman in the impractical bodyglove, who Jarrion dimly recalled might have been called Miranda.
"Sorry, but it's true. I really don't care," Shepard said. Miranda just shrugged, as someone who'd long-since accepted something might shrug and Shepard turned back again.
"See? They're good for now but I am well aware that they're up to no good. As and when that manifests I'll be ready to shoot it in the face because that's kind of my thing. Until then, Collectors are an issue. So here we are."
Kaiden did not look convinced. He shook his head.
"You've changed. I still know where my loyalties lie-"
He didn't get a chance to finish.
"You fucking what! Don't you walk away from me! You're not getting the last word on this one!"
Things got progressively more heated from there.
"I don't think this conversation concerns us…" Jarrion muttered, slinking away to rejoin his entourage, who had settled in amongst themselves a certain distance away from Shepard and her lot, sitting down on crates, checking equipment and having wounds seen to. Jarrion took a seat just along a waist-high barrier from Loghain, who was sitting somewhat listlessly with her hands in her lap.
"Can I take this helmet off now?" She asked. She sounded tired and Jarrion nodded without really looking at her or paying much attention. When he did give her a sideways look once she had the helmet off he jolted in surprise - she appeared to be bleeding from the eyes somehow. And ears. And mouth. And nose.
"Eyes of Leonis! Loghain! What happened?"
"I may have overexerted myself," she sniffed, tilting her head back.
"Obviously so! How! What in the Emperor's name did you do?"
"It was rather dull keeping those, ah, little buzzy things at bay so I thought I'd see what else I could do. Sew confusion and doubt, cultivate a climate of hesitation and sluggishness - fairly standard trick, really. Was curious how it might work out these aliens. Well enough, from the looks of things, but something of a strain. Their minds are, ah, not wholly their own. Do you know, I believe they were being actively commanded by an outside force? During this engagement?"
"Ah, this 'outside force' you mentioned previously that made them a catspaw?" Jarrion asked. From his jacket he produced a handkerchief which he proffered to Loghain and which she took and pressed to her nose. Then her ears. Then just anywhere else that still seemed to be bleeding.
"Possibly. Or else simply a remote commander who was not personally present. Possibly one on that ship above us. Possibly one further afield still, relayed remotely. That's a thought, isn't it?" She asked.
Jarrion was not especially concerned.
"Well, in future perhaps limit yourself to only what's required, eh? Just to be on the safe side," he said.
"I had no idea you cared, Jarrion," she said with a smile and he bristled.
"That's Lord Captain to you, if you don't mind. And I don't, not really. It's just that if an Inquisitor happened to die while on my ship or nearby then I've no doubt another one would come sniffing around not long after, and they'd probably take their job more seriously than you do."
"It's okay to say you care, I know you do," Loghain said, holding the blood-soaked handkerchief back to him, smirking and giving his leg a pat.
Jarrion turned away with a grunt, and deigned not to answer.
Meanwhile, off to the side, the armsmen were doing their own thing.
They'd come through the various firefights - one long, running one, really - more-or-less intact, much to their delight, though that was not to say they had come through completely unscathed. There was a fair amount of bleeding and groaning going on among those less fortunate, which was to say nothing of the most unfortunate, who were worryingly quiet.
The sergeant looked down at the battered, buckled and bent plates of his armour and let out a low whistle. They didn't look great, but they'd held at least. Probably a pretty strident sign that he'd been standing out in the open too much, if nothing else.
"I'm glad we were wearing carapace. Don't think flak would have held up too well, eh?" He asked.
"You're telling me…" said the nearest armsman, staring in consternation at the bleeding hole in his leg where a round had found a gap between the plates. The sergeant followed the line of the man's eye to see the wound and frowned.
"You should probably get that looked at," he said, warningly, but the armsman just pointed off and shrugged.
"Medic's checking Rolf right now," he said. This did not need much further explanation. They'd all seen what had happened to him. Heard it, too. None of them could have guessed what a screamer Rolf would turn out to be.
Then again, having your hands melted could bring that out of most people.
"Ah. The hands?" The sergeant said. The arsman nodded.
"The hands."
"Damn poor luck, that," sniffed the sergeant, looking about. "How's Jajko?"
Jajko being the deeply ill-fortuned man who'd caught the beam weapon and had had his guts fall out as a result. Quick action and judicious application of powerful drugs had forestalled instant death and kept him mostly upright, but the sergeant did not have particularly high hopes at this point.
"He's over there," the armsman said, pointing again. Jajko was off to one side, laid flat and unmoving.
"He looks dead," the sergeant said.
"He probably is."
Stims and battlefield medicae could only do so much, after all.
"Damn poor luck…" the sergeant said, shaking his head and looking down. Something caught his eye.
A round had, inexplicably and in defiance of the odds involved, managed to lodge itself in a narrow gap between two carapace plates. The sergeant had to give it a firm tug or two but then it came loose and he held it up between forefinger and thumb, squinting at it.
"These look like teeth," he said, holding it out. The armsman looked over. The sergeant wasn't wrong.
"Urgh. Xenos."
Meanwhile meanwhile, back with Jarrion, the Rogue Trader was again on the vox to the Assertive.
"Lord Captain? What's happening down there?" Torian asked, crackling.
"Just wrapping some things up, Torian. There'll be some negotiations soon that will require your attention, but for right now I'd like you to organise some boarding parties."
"Lord Captain?"
"For the alien vessel. I want it given a thorough going over. If there's anything valuable on that wreck I want to know about it and then I want to have it," he said. Then, as afterthought: "And any human survivors from among those abducted, of course."
They'd be valuable in their own way, were any found, though Jarrion wasn't holding his breath. Just good to be seen to care.
If Torian had reservations about being asked to send men and material over to an alien ship he managed to keep most of them out of his voice.
"Lord Captain," he said.
"And standby for further instructions."
"Lord Captain," he said. A versatile pair of words and no mistake.
Jarrion hung the handset up and the armsman with the vox went jogging off again. Quite why he didn't just leave the thing Jarrion wasn't sure. There was probably a good reason.
"Looting alien ships? Tsch," Loghain said, shaking her head.
"Please. I'm just being prudent."
"Oh is that what they call it now?"
Jarrion had lengthy, well-thought out reasons for wanting to see if there was anything of value on that ship - beyond the obvious - but did not have the energy to even start explaining them to Loghain, especially given as he imagined she would just smirk and grin her way through anything he might have to say.
Instead, he took his own helmet off at last and sighed, rubbing his eyes.
"I don't have to justify myself to you, Loghain," he said, setting his helmet beside him and smoothing back his hair.
"I'm an Inquisitor," Loghain said, as though this blew Jarrion's sentence out of the water. Jarrion was unmoved. They'd danced this dance before.
"Yes. And somewhat out of your jurisdiction. While I, a Rogue Trader, am operating as I am allowed to operate where I am allowed to do just so. Fancy that."
"I wonder how that argument might hold up back home…" Loghain said, tapping a finger against her chin. Jarrion remained unmoved.
"Poorly, one assumes. But we are not back home, are we?"
"Not yet."
"Well there's that to look forward to, then."
At this point Shepard came wandering over looking grumpy. The man she'd been talking to was nowhere to be seen, and neither was the colonist.
"That was aggravating," she said, coming to a halt just in front of Jarrion and Loghain.
"Friend of yours?" Jarrion asked.
"Yes. Just not really the right circumstances for a reunion."
"Ah. That's unfortunate. Not beyond repair, I hope?"
"Remains to be seen," Shepard said, then looking at the armsmen. "Your guys get through alright?"
"For the most part. They gave a fair account of themselves, given the unknown nature of the foe. Rogue Trader must be prepared for the unexpected, of course, so this sort of thing isn't wholly unusual. Odd weaponry, though. And defences!"
An odd thing to mention, Shepard felt, but then it clicked.
"Ah. Barriers?"
"Yes. Quite unused to having such equipment be so widespread. You did mention it, of course, but quite another thing to see it in practise."
"You have something, if I saw right."
Shepard had been a bit taken aback by the big glowing bubble of crackling energy that had appeared around Jarrion once or twice, but she'd got over it easily enough. These things happened. Jarrion just nodded.
"I do indeed. But that's me. My men not so much. But this is just waffling, I'm sorry, quite tired. You seem to have come through alright," he said, not noticing anything in the way of significant damage.
"That's barriers for you. They're pretty good. Can shrug off a rocket. On a good day."
"That is rather impressive!"
"It is, yeah," Shepard said.
Barriers - or at least every barrier she'd ever had the opportunity to use - did all seem to have just enough power on hand to fortuitously block almost all of the impact from particularly lethal weapons, such as roving rockets.
Of course, you'd be left gasping and usually with just enough of a sliver of vitality remaining to scramble into cover and wait for the recharge, but still. It held, that was the point. And kept you alive long enough to get back into things with a fighting chance.
Kind of lucky how that worked, actually. Every single time. Must have been a design feature or something. Very handy.
"I had indeed quite forgotten about them, I must admit," Jarrion said, cutting Shepard's concentration back to the moment. "Was quite confused those times I landed what appeared to be perfectly fine shots that instead detonated just shy of the mark. Makes more sense now."
"You should probably look to maybe getting some of your own. If you're sticking around."
"Maybe, maybe. Who knows! But anyway. I imagine this is where we part ways, yes?"
Shepard looked around again at the many, many dead Collectors strewn about the place.
"Looks that way," she said.
Jarrion, with a grunt, stood up from the barrier he'd been sat on and extended a hand to Shepard who, in contrast to the colonist, did actually shake it.
"One can only imagine - given the odd way the universe tends to run - that we'll end up running into each other again at some point," Jarrion said. Shepard had to laugh at that.
"I can see that happening, yes."
"Good to have friends in strange places. As and when we figure out how to return I shall send you a message, just so you know."
"Thanks. I think?"
Shepard wasn't really sure what the etiquette was in a situation like this. It wasn't something she'd come up against before. Or hoped to come up against again, really.
The handshake broke, the two of them stepped back.
"I think it only right and proper I mark the occasion of our parting with a small gift," Jarrion said.
"You really don't have to," Shepard said, caught off-guard, but Jarrion shook his head and wagged his finger.
"I insist! Just a token of my esteem. I'm hardly going to hand over my ship but something small, simply name it. Never let it be said that House Croesus is anything but generous to its friends!"
Always good to be remembered fondly. Paid off in the long run.
Shepard about what it would be too cheeky to ask for, and settled on something she might actually be interested in:
"Couldn't have a lasergun, could I?" She asked.
Jarrion had not seen that one coming. It just seemed rather underwhelming.
"A lasgun? Uh, um, I don't see why not, uh…"
Jarrion, doing some quick thinking, looked around for the least-valuable las weapon within reach. His eyes alighted on Loghain.
"Loghain," he hissed. "Could you please pass me that weapon I lent you?"
"Oh no, my precious laspistol," Loghain said, flipping open the holster and handing it over.
"House Croseus property, I think you'll find. Here you go, Commander," Jarrion said, taking it and duly passing it to Shepard, who found it slightly heavier than she'd expected. But, being a ridiculous cyborg, this did not show.
"Much obliged," she said.
"Are you sure that'll suffice? It's only a Civitas pattern laspistol, hardly a worthy gift."
"I'm a cheap date."
Jarrion was unsure how to take this, so paused, then smiled, assuming - correctly - that it was a joke.
"...noted, Commander. Take it with my compliments," he said.
Without anywhere to actually put the thing Shepard was just left holding it in one hand.
"Will do," she said, then raising a free hand to her ear. "EDI? Can you get the shuttle round here, please? We have some debriefing to do and I need a cup of tea."
Jarrion did not hear the response to this but, fairly shortly afterwards, their shuttle came roaring in and landed and Shepard and all her crew obligingly clambered aboard, Shepard sparing Jarrion one last wave before the door closed and off they went. Jarrion stood in the wash of their departure, doing his best to look commanding as his jacket flapped about his shoulders.
Loghain came up beside him, head tilted up toward the sky for no discernible reason.
"Not only did you stick me, an Inquisitor, with only a laspistol for a combat mission but it was also a civilian grade laspistol?" She asked. Jarrion slumped and glared at her. It wasn't easy being annoyed with someone with that much dried blood on their face, but he managed it.
"Oh give over, you didn't even fire the damn thing," he growled.
"It's the principle of the thing!"