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Chapter four

Pretty Slick

Krits's eyes narrowed, and his tail twitched anxiously as he sniffed the air again. "They definitely came this way," he hissed. They had followed the scruffy-looking, brown-haired Martian and his blonde Aeripan friend all the way to this isolated area of the docks. Now that they had finally gotten their prey away from prying eyes, they had lost them.

"Where the hell did they go then?" Rick, the Verisian's Martian companion, asked impatiently as he looked down the empty tunnel they had just entered. "Man, we shoulda just vaped those fools back in the pavilion!"

"And incur the wrath of an Aeripan clan?" the Faenir said wryly, "That would be extremely foolish."

"Man, Yorg, I don't give a fuck about no Aeripans! I'll vape all those fools! Me and my boxer," he said defiantly, patting the carbine slung at his side.

"That would be unlikely," Zeetz buzzed. Unable to vocalize Martian, the Pyraxian's words were translated by a fist-sized interpreter bot he wore on his bandoleers. "My hive had the misfortune of running afoul of an Aeripan clan. I was one of the few of my brood to survive, and we were forced to pay them many reparations to gain peace."

"Yeah? Well I still don't give a fuck!" the foul-mouthed Martian reiterated. "That sucker vaped Billy, and now he's gonna get his!"

Yorg rolled his eyes, "Will you please shut the hell up! With all your carrying-on, they've probably heard us coming!"

Rick scowled and turned to look down the other direction of the tunnel.

"I don't like this," Yorg said thoughtfully. "Krits, which way did they go?"

After sniffing the floor for a few more seconds, Krits looked up at the Human and shrugged. "I can't tell, their scent simply disappears at this spot."

"I_definitely_ don't like this," the Faenir said emphatically. He scratched his beard in thought for a few moments, looking down the tunnel one way then the other. "Alright," he finally said, "Krits, you, Rick, and Zeetz go right, Mongo and I will go left. If you find anything call us first! These guys seem pretty slick."

The two groups split up and started to head down the tunnel in their respective directions. After a few steps, Yorg turned and added, "And Rick... For the love of Fraeya, keep your mouth shut."

The Martian scowled back at him, but did as he was ordered.

Kiole lay on his back, his nose less than an inch from a massive power conduit that carried energy to the gigantic shields holding the atmosphere in the docks back from the hard vacuum on the surface of the moon. On his left side, a small service tunnel ran next to the conduit; barely large enough for a human to maneuver through. On the other hand, the Klaknari, who built this mining colony originally, were generally only about four and a half feet tall, so it would have been spacious by their standards. He squeezed his arm up across his chest to tap the comm-link attached to his coat's lapel.

{"Gael Ewhele,"} he whispered in Aeripan, {"any sign of them yet?"}

{"Yes, my blood-brother,"} his response came back over the link, likewise in a whisper, {"The Verisian leads the Martian and the Pyraxian towards ourselves, while the Klekaeron took the Mohtehran with him toward Gael Aech's position."}

{"OK, get ready..."}

Krits walked slowly, cautiously down the corridor. His tail twitched anxiously as he sniffed the air with each step.

"Why_are you moving _so slow!" his Martian companion asked, not making any attempt to hide his irritation.

Krits turned, bared his fangs, and hissed at the Martian. "I am trying to follow a scent. It would be considerably easier for me to concentrate on it if you kept your mouth shut, as Yorg suggested."

"Man, fuck Yorg! I'm tired of him always tellin' me what to do!"

"Perhaps if you did as he said more often, we wouldn't be continually finding ourselves in predicaments such as these," Zeetz's interpreter bot buzzed.

"Man, fuck you too, Zeetz!" he snapped. Turning back around towards his feline comrade, he asked more calmly, "Hey, what the fuck are you tryin' to smell, Krits?"

"I believe it is the Aeripan's trail... It's very faint... It smells like the Aeripan, but it also does not..." Suddenly the air recyclers at the end of the hall cycled on. Krits's tail shot strait and the fur puffed out, making it look five times its normal thickness as the breeze carried a fresh scent to his nose. "This way," he growled and took off down the corridor.

Rick followed close on his heels, and Zeetz flew above the both of them, his wings buzzing as they beat at near sonic speed. Krits led them right, then left, then right again, down a flight of stairs, and then another right through a series of increasingly smaller tunnels and passages until finally they found themselves in a service corridor for some extremely large power conduits. Zeetz had been forced to land, and Rick's head almost scraped the ceiling.

"Where the fuck are we, Krits?!! You got us all turned around, man!" Rick yelled.

Krits spun around and hissed at Rick, "Quiet, idiot! They're very close!"

"Krits, man, don't make me..." Rick started to say but was cut off.

"You should be listening to the cat," a heavily accented voice said. The words came from a Human who looked like a cross between the Aeripan they had seen before, and the Martian they were following. His facial features resembled that of the Aeripan, and he had the same golden blonde hair. However, instead of it being styled in the traditional Aeripan mohawk, it was cropped short like the Martian's and hadn't seen a comb in several days. He wore a duster like the Martian, and in one hand he held a small laser pistol on them, while he took a drag off of a cigarette with the other. Next to the man was a large, vicious-looking bipedal reptile, with large powerful jaws, and a long, whip-like tail that it was swishing back and forth.

"A jantan raptor, no wonder I lost your scent," Krits hissed.

"That's right." The voice came not from the man in front of them, but from behind them. The three cautiously looked over their shoulders to see the Martian scooting out from underneath of the power conduit, he had a_very_ large and dangerous looking projectile pistol pointed in their general direction.

Zeetz's wings twitched nervously, "A bug buster," his interpreter bot buzzed.

"Two for two, you boys are on the ball tonight," Kiole jibed, "One shot will penetrate your chitin and bleed you dry, while my friend lets his pet loose on your buddies." As if to emphasize the point, the raptor croaked showing a mouth full of crooked, sharp teeth.

Yorg walked cautiously down the corridor, his carbine at the ready. Mongo trailed a few steps behind him, walking on all fours, as Mohtehrans often did. They stopped at a pair of open blast-doors that led into a hangar. Yorg motioned to Mongo to go to one side of the doorway while he crept to the other. The Faenir peered inside, careful not to expose himself too much.

Inside, the hangar was filled with the hulks and pieces of derelict starships. It was impossible to see all the way to the other side of the hangar with all of the junk in the way. Yorg frowned, "Too many places to hide, I don't like this," he whispered.

Mongo nodded in agreement.

Yorg took a deep breath and readied himself. He spun around the corner of the doorway, with his carbine at the ready, sweeping it in an arc in front of him. Yorg breathed a sigh of relief once he saw it was clear, and motioned for Mongo to follow him in. They moved slowly, deeper into the hangar, carefully looking over each piece of wreckage to make sure no one was hiding there.

When they were about ten yards inside the doors, just far enough so that they couldn't make it back out in time, the blast-doors sealed shut.

"I_really_ don't like this," Yorg reiterated.

Mongo nodded emphatically.

"Well, you just think you've got all the angles covered, huh mutha-fucka?" Rick asked incredulously. "Well I bet I can fricassee your buddy's iguana while Krits rips him to shreds with his claws, and you... Well I got some special kinda pain in mind for you, for what you did to Billy!"

"Look, bub," Kiole said casually, still covering the group with the large caliber projectile pistol, "I'm gonna make it simple for you, like I tried to do for your friend. You can drop your weapons and we'll let you walk away, everyone goes home alive. The other option is for us to shoot it out, in which case you, my Pyraxian friend," he added shifting his focus to the insectoid, "will take the first bullet from this gun, and you, Mr. Verisian," again he darted his eyes to the person he addressed, "will likely be mauled to death by my friend's pet. As for you bub," he finished, returning to Rick, "you may survive the first shot from my friend's pistol, and you may get off a few rounds from that cannon of yours, but you'll likely rupture this power conduit, in which case, we'll all be toast anyways."

"He's got a point Rick," Zeetz buzzed, "I don't particularly feel like dying."

"You expect me to just let them go, after what he did to Billy, man?"

"Look, I gave your friend every opportunity to walk away. But he was drunk and he let his ego get the best of him, don't let the same thing happen to you."

"You're on your own, Rick," Krits decided, "I didn't know the kid well enough to die for him." He raised his hands and backed up against the wall as best he could.

"I'm out too," Zeetz buzzed, and slowly reached up to tap the quick-release on his bandoleers, dropping them to the ground, along with his weapons.

"You mutha-fuckers..." Rick began to go into another tirade but was cut short as he was simultaneously struck from the front by a beam from Gael Ewhele's laser pistol, and from behind by a bullet from Kiole's 'bug buster'. He dropped unceremoniously to the ground, without having fired a shot from his much vaunted carbine.

Mongo grunted and strained to pry apart the blast-doors, but to no avail. Finally, he gave up and huffed, "No good."

"Hmmm...." Yorg mumbled as he scratched his beard, "He's probably in the control booth for the hangar."

"You are guessing good," a heavily accented Aeripan voice said from an comm-panel just above the door controls. As he spoke, the massive outer doors of the hangar began to lift open, and the hum of the force field holding in the hangar's atmosphere became audible. "So I am thinking," the Aeripan continued, "maybe I should just being releasing the force field, and blasting you out to the surface. My bro, he is saying though, that we should be being nice guys, and giving you chances. So, if you are liking to live you can be throwing your weapons through the field to the surface, and I will be lowering the doors again. By the time you are figuring out the doors, we will be gone. You have five minutes to be deciding."

Yorg looked up at Mongo. The giant ape simply shrugged and the two began walking to the outer doors. Yorg sighed as he took off his axe and pitched it gently through the force field, followed by his carbine, a blaster pistol, and a combat knife. "Have to rent a suit and come back for them I guess," he said to Mongo.

Mongo nodded as the outer doors began to lower back down.

Gael Aech met Kiole and Gael Ewhele as he came down the stairs from the hangar's control booth into an access corridor that ran between the hangars. {"I have trapped the Faenir and the Mohtehran in this hangar. Did you eliminate their comrades, my brothers?"}

{"The cat and the bug gave up without a fight, but we had to waste the Martian,"} Kiole answered. {"I don't think they'll be giving us any chase, the Martian seemed to be the one with the chip on his shoulder. I think he might have been the brother of the kid I vaped, they looked a lot alike."} Kiole chuckled, adding, {"Now that I think about it, they had the same foul mouth too. At any rate, I didn't think he'd be needing this, so I decided to grab it,"} Kiole said holding up Rick's carbine by the strap.

{"Very good, but let us be off, just in case they are still upset, my brothers. Come, the Sunhorse is only a few hangars down from here."}