Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Hello… Miss… Uh, Nora,” Companion Marco Guerra mumbled. “May I please speak to my father?” He reminded Prof. Nora Robinette-Guerra something of a child, the way he didn’t meet her eyes directly and kept awkwardly shifting his weight as he stood before her primary entryway, his shuttle docked along the edge of the Guerras’ landing platform behind him.

This was odd behavior for her stepson, as he had not been a child since he was twelve, already trained to maturity by the time Nora had met him for the first time, at her wedding. (She also noticed that while he hadn’t grown much since then, still a few inches shorter than herself, he’d gotten worrisomely thin.) She raised an eyebrow at him to communicate her uncertainty. “Are you feeling okay, Marco?” she asked. “You look ill.”

“I am fine, Ms. Nora,” Marco said. He continued to stand there stiffly, nervous fists tugging at the hem of his embroidered tunic. “Uh… May I come in?”

She considered for a moment, then stepped back. “Sure, honey,” she said, and she stepped aside so that he could enter the Guerras’ Ariel City apartment. As the married couple were comprised of a renowned mathematician and a talented programming engineer, they of course had several homes across the Verse. But this was the one that Marco had grown up in, and the one that Dr. Peter Guerra had, eventually, decided to spend the majority of his time. There was still an almost invisible dent in one wall where, according to Peter, the infamous Captain Jake Berenson had once slipped on the wood floor during a play fight and slammed into it.

When Marco passed by her to enter the home, she leaned in toward him curiously, causing him to jerk aside violently. “You don’t smell drunk,” she observed.

“I, uh…” Marco seemed to hesitate, wringing his hands, then suddenly met her eyes and confessed, “I’m nervous.”

“Nervous?” Nora repeated. She shut the door behind them and looked him over. “About what?” She’d heard stories, of course, but her husband encouraged her not to believe the things that were said about her stepson until he himself confirmed it. Surely, he hadn’t really rejoined the Independent Faction, or else he wouldn’t be standing here on a Core planet under strict control of the Universal Alliance.

Again, Marco hesitated, his gaze drifting away from her before suddenly snapping back to attention. He opened his mouth, seemed to struggle for a moment, then coughed out, “Because… Because I’ve only had this… host for a short period of time.”

Well, that certainly explained… everything. Eagerly, Nora pressed, “Last I heard, Marco was free and active on the border worlds.”

“With the new security precautions against Humanity, news travels a lot slower,” he explained. “I, uh… He left. Um, the IF. Well, not the IF. Captain Berenson.” The poor dear. If he was having trouble sorting his own identity from his host’s, this was likely his first host. Owning someone else’s mind can be very confusing at first. “As I’m sure you know, Berenson was reinstated to his position as an Independent Faction corporal when the resistance organization reconstituted following The Miranda Revelation. No longer infatuated enough to follow him into war, Marco decided to make his way home, albeit by an indirect route. He was infested at the, uh, Devil’s Garden Checkpoint.”

“That is recent,” said Nora. She frowned tightly, disapproving. “You should have waited longer before visiting. Gotten more used to your host. Peter will notice that Marco’s acting out of character.”

“I… apologize?” Marco guessed, apparently unfamiliar with human social norms.

Nora smiled kindly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll help get you through it. It won’t be for long anyway. He’s got an appointment tomorrow!”

Marco’s smile came across a bit forced. “Great!”

“Peter!” Nora called loudly up the nearby stairs. “Marco’s here!” She reached out to pull Marco along, but again, he instinctively twisted out of her reach. She raised an eyebrow at him. “What, you don’t like touching?”

“Uh…” Marco floundered.

“You do know your host is a prostitute?” she said.

“Uh…” Marco said again, his cheeks beginning to heat.

Luckily for him, Nora was still distracted by her husband. “What on earth is taking him?” she wondered aloud. She took a step up the stairs and called, more loudly, “Peter?!”

“Maybe we should check on him,” Marco suggested quickly.

Nora scowled and hummed thoughtfully, but she began advancing up the stairs anyway. “Peter?” she called again. “Peter, did you fall asleep watching the data stream, again?” Behind her, Marco slowly followed after her, hesitating and casting glances all around. “Peter?” She came to the top of the stairs and pushed open the door of Peter’s office, finding him sitting there at his computer, facing the door as though expecting her. If she’d been paying attention, she’d have noticed that the sourcebox for his computer was missing and that he looked very, very nervous.

“Peter, what are you doing?” she demanded. “What are you waiting up here for?”

“For you,” said Peter as Nora stepped through the door. And then she felt cold metal press to the side of her head, just above the ear, as Fox stepped out of the shadows beside the door. They were just as creepy in person as in the wanted posters, every inch of skin covered and a sleek brass helmet with two tips at the crown of the head like ears, another point out in front of the mouth like a snout, and flashing and darting lights dancing across the broad, glossy copper sides. Even more odd were the legs. Fox stood on two below-the-knee brass-colored prosthetics of a vaguely vulpine design, designed entirely as simple machinery, no electronic parts. This apparent lack was made up for by the fact that their entire outfit seemed to be interlaced with miscellaneous electronic devices of indiscernible purpose.

“I’m afraid we’ve been kidnapped,” said Peter from his chair.

“Professor Robinette-Guerra,” Fox said in their eerie digital voice, “if you don’t want brains on the wall, I suggest you obey my every word.” He called out more loudly, “Same goes for you, Companion.”

“You have no idea who you’re messing with!” Nora snarled angrily.

Fox’s laughter came through the helmet’s voice distorter as a weird snapping, sizzling noise. “Lady, I promise that I know exactly who I’m messing with.”

“Honey, I think maybe we should listen to the person with the gun,” Peter suggested meekly.

“Companion Guerra, you still here?” called Fox.

“Um, yes,” said Marco from two-thirds of the way up the stairs.

“How did you get here?” Fox called back.

“I, uh, I took a short-range, intraplanetary shuttle,” said Marco. “It… It won’t take you far.”

“Doesn’t need to.” Fox used the laser rifle they were holding to gesture to the doorway. “Dr. Guerra, Prof. Guerra, you’re gonna follow your son out to his vehicle, and you’re not gonna make a sound the whole while.”

Nora muttered something under her breath, and Fox shoved the rifle’s muzzle at her head again. “Not. One. Sound. Trust me, lady, I get plenty of pay with two of the three of you. Now march.”

Peter stood and carefully guided his fuming wife out of the office and back to the stairs, where Marco was waiting for them, still nervously pulling at his tunic. On the way out of the office, Fox slung the rifle back over their shoulder and grabbed up the sourcebox from where they’d left it on the floor. As Marco lead the couple toward the front door, Fox followed down after them, shoving the corner of the sourcebox into Peter’s back, nearly making him jump. When Peter turned, Fox held the sourcebox out. Frowning in confusion, Peter took it.

Marco opened the door, gave Fox a nervous look, then headed across the massive landing platform to where his shuttle was docked. The Guerra’s luxury apartment was seventy-three stories above ground, and the four of them were about half way across the platform when the police arrived. “The mumbling was you activating the security, wasn’t it?” Fox groused. Nora couldn’t see their eyes, but she suspected Fox was glaring at her.

“As much as I’d love to take credit,” said Nora, “it must have been my husband. He don’t become an engineer by being stupid.”

Fox glanced toward Peter. There was something personally irritated about their mannerisms, and Peter was understandably confused by this response.

“Non-resident identified as Fox, put your hands up!” said one of the police shuttles.

Fox shrugged and said, “We all gotta die someday.” They raised their hands not above them but in front of them, palms of their odd metal-laced gloves facing each other. At first, this action was merely strange, but then there was the tiny sound of a crackle and a shimmer in the air between the gloves.

“No, stop!” Peter shouted, reaching out to grab Fox, but it was too late. They slammed their palms together and everything stopped. Everything electronic within a short distance just turned off. Like a switch had been flipped. Everything, including Fox’s helmet, the devices decorating their jacket and gloves, and the police shuttles. As they were not yet docked to the platform, the police shuttles dropped like stones. There one moment and gone the next.

“Oh god!” Peter cried, clutching at his stomach.

Fox pulled a box out of his coat pocket, opened it, and removed from it a small radio. They shoved it up under the chin of their helmet, lifting the nose just enough to reveal dark olive skin, and said into it, “Shirei Shamayim, you’ll need to take the shuttle one manually.” Their voice was now horribly muffled by a helmet designed not to let sound out, but there was still something oddly familiar about it.

Peter spun toward them, disbelieving. “You… You－!”

“I?” asked Fox.

“You killed them!” Peter cried. “It’s one thing to threaten to… But to just…!”

“A mercy death,” Fox said coldly. “At least now they’re free.” They grabbed Nora and Peter and started pulling them toward Marco’s shuttle. Surprisingly, Marco merely followed along behind without argument or resistance.

“Pointless,” Nora spat. “Your little faction is so fucking pointless! You are never going to be free, and for this little insurrection, you will be ground under Earth’s heel.”

“Oh shut up,” Fox growled, reaching toward the keypad of the shuttle without even glancing toward Marco. Peter looked back and forth between them, uncertain. Fox unlocked the door and shoved them toward the door. “Get the fuck inside.”

But Peter was unmovable. “Why do you sound like my son?” he demanded. “Why do you know the passcode?” Fox stiffened, hesitating. The hesitation was a mistake. Nora lunged forward and yanked hard at where the strap attached to the rifle, making it break and drop with a clatter to the platform. As Fox instinctively moved away from her, she grabbed up the rifle and pointed it at them.

“You two are Andalites, aren’t you?” Nora demanded. “Using Marco to get close to Peter! I bet he’s the only human morph you have!”

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” Peter demanded, staring at her in disbelief.

“Not now, Dear,” said Nora.

Fox cocked their head in an amused fashion as Marco and Peter watched the two of them carefully. “Professor, I think there is a vital portion of this scenario which you have failed to account for,” they said calmly.

She snorted. “What might that be?”

“Laser rifles need electricity to function,” they said. Then, they punched her hard enough to knock her out. “Okay, kiddies, we’ve had our fun. Now everyone get on the gorram shuttle.” Fox grabbed both Peter and Marco and shoved them inside, where Peter was surprised to find that the shuttle had been pre-prepared for captives, most of its contents stripped out and a partitioning wall erected through the middle of its belly. Marco pulled his father toward the other side of the partition while Fox picked Nora up under the armpits and dragged her inside the shuttle, shutting the door behind them.

Peter sat where Marco put him and gaped in disbelief as his supposed son helped the supposed terrorist move his unconscious wife into a seat where she could be buckled in and then handcuffed with her arms behind her. “You… This was the plan?” he mumbled. “This was why you were coming?”

Fox snorted. “Hey, I tried to tell you the truth once before,” they said. They collapsed into the pilot’s chair wearily. Through the windshield, they could see the back end of a wren-class ship drifting carefully toward them in order to attach to the shuttle. “You didn’t handle it very well.”

There were loud clanks as the Wren locked onto the shuttle. “Get up,” said Marco, now a lot less nervous and hesitant than he had been earlier. He shooed Fox from the pilot’s chair.  “I need to monitor the metrics as we break atmosphere to make sure we will be able to jump back into Z-space without dying.”

“Z-space?” Peter repeated. “Z-space is just a theory!”

Fox ignored him, instead sitting next to Nora to strap in for the ride. “Good,” he said to Marco. As soon as he was secured, he finally removed his helmet and shook out his long, wavy black hair. The same hair as Marco’s. Which was fitting, because he had the same face and voice as Marco, too. “The sooner we’re out of the Core, the sooner we can never ever come back.”

Chapter Text

On the tiny bridge of the Wren-class transport ship Shirei Shamayim, Tobias Matsumoto sat with his ass in the pilot’s chair and his feet on the control board, staring out at the featureless, dimensionless white of Z-space that lie just past the forward window. It was such a featureless white, in fact, that he could actually see his reflection in the glass despite the fact that it was formulated to not do that. When he was a kid, it had bothered him the way that he was so thoroughly genetically mixed that he didn’t look like anyone, even the other mixed kids. Now, he couldn’t not see the way that marked him as his father’s child. Now that he knew his father’s face, he could finally see his mother’s contributions to his genes. His father had calculatedly sat just exactly at an indescribable “medium,” while his mother’s genes nudged him a bit paler, a bit taller, a bit more compact. He had her long, straight nose and his vivid green eyes. (Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, who had turned out to be Tobias’s alien uncle via his mysterious father, had recently told explained that if green eyes were an option in the species they were morphing, Andalites often preferred to keep them.) Of course, he'd always known the thick, dishwater-blond hair was her fault.

Z-space bothered him all the way down to his bones, and he already couldn’t wait to get back home to Aberdeen. Unfortunately for him, a ten-minute hop in and out of spacial dimensions was being purposefully prolonged to three days. He was starting to wonder if staring at Z-space might have ill effect on his brain, but he had nothing better to look at. He should have listened to Cassie and brought a book.

“Oh, we have made it to Z-space,” said Ax, behind him. “I’m glad.” Tobias turned to see Ax carefully maneuvering himself through the cramped doorway onto the bridge. Wrens weren’t built for more than a one-man crew, and Andalites apparently did not trust small space at all no matter what. Like Alan Fangor, the morph of “Alex Fangor” was a technological blend of multiple genetics. Unfortunately, the morph had been composed of an entirely different set of samples (average height and gawky like a yearling deer, golden brown hair in tight curls, skin of medium ochre, and those same emerald eyes), so Tobias still looked very little like his own family.

Tobias raised an eyebrow at his uncle.  “That was the plan, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Did you doubt this ship could make the trip twice?”

“Yes,” said Ax, eying their transport warily. “Yes, I did.”

Tobias grumbled and turned back to the whiteness past his windshield. “Thanks for waiting until now to tell me.”

“I have learned that humans often appreciate receiving bad news after the event in question has passed,” said Ax, and Tobias couldn’t help laughing.

A weary groan alerted them to Marco’s presence as he wandered up to the bridge, glanced around at the meager furnishing of one single chair that their pilot was already occupying, and decided to just sit on the floor. He was short and thin and lacking in claustrophobia, so it didn’t seem to bother him much. “Our passengers are finally secure,” he said, his voice full of exhaustion. “Thanks for all the help.”

“Awe, it’s no problem,” Tobias laughed. “Flying is what I do.”

Marco sank down until he was laying across the scant amount of floorspace on his back. “Y’know,” he said, “sometimes I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or if you’re just that ditzy. And that’s a compliment, because I’m supposed to be trained in that. Tobias Matsumoto, you may be the reason I go back to school.”

Tobias snorted. “Well, I can never tell if you’re flirting or making fun of me, so we’ll call it even,” he said. He glanced over his instruments and frowned. “And we have to be here for…?”

“Three days,” said Ax.

Tobias groaned, “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Did you not know?” said Marco. Lying on his back did not stop him from gesturing as he spoke. “Even if a Yeerk crawls out of Nora and dies right now, we don’t know that Peter’s really, truly independent unless three days passes or we see a Yeerk crawl out of him, too. Even then it could be a trick. Maybe two are sharing one head. Waiting for an opportunity to trick us. Or maybe she grabs one of us, jumps hosts, then lies about dying. We have got to wait it out for three days. No less.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tobias said, leaning back in his seat and putting his feet back up on the console. Despite his best efforts, he found his gaze drifting back to the whiteness and shivered. It felt like a monster he couldn’t do anything about, so he was pretending it wasn’t really there. But he couldn’t stop checking, making sure that the oppressive nothingness was still in sight. That it hadn’t moved. That it hadn’t come closer. “Z-space just creeps me out,” he admitted. “The sooner we’re in normal space, the better.”

“Well, if the ship falls apart on us, I don’t suppose it’s a terrible way to die,” Marco mumbled quietly. A glance back at him over Tobias’s shoulder revealed that he’d closed his eyes and was probably beginning to sleep there on the floor. The Wren didn’t have a crew cabin and Marco’s shuttle was holding angry captives, so the floor was probably the best option at the moment.

“It is, actually,” Ax informed him. “It is a terrifying and horrific way to die.”

Marco cracked one eye open to glance up at the alien. “Well, you’re just a bundle of joy today, aren’t you?” he asked, but Ax just shrugged and said nothing. As much as Ax might have warmed up to them since their arrest and capture on the Alliance cruiser, he still remained largely stoic toward anyone who wasn’t Tobias, and even that was off and on. His particular flavor of stoic ran the whole range between uncertain smiles to gruesome moroseness. Marco had stated that he considered it a compliment to his talent that he was able to wrench free more and more of those smiles. A statement that Ax had responded to with more stoicness.

Tobias glanced at the whiteness again, made an angry noise of frustration, and brought his feet down off the console to stand. “I can’t sit here any longer,” he grumbled. “I’m gonna take first watch.”

“Okay, I’ll take first nap,” Marco mumbled as Tobias stepped over him to head toward the shuttle.

Ax watched his nephew go, then moved to take his place in the pilot’s seat. “I suppose I will tend to this then,” he said almost to himself. “Just in case.”

“You could come keep me warm,” Marco offered flirtatiously, slurring slightly.

Ax glanced back at him, frowned, and returned his attention to the Wren’s flight console, tapping one of the display panels. “Do not distract yourself,” he said. “You do need to sleep. You’ve been awake for thirty-eight UA standard hours.” When Marco didn’t reply, Ax looked back again to see that Marco had, in fact, done exactly that.

The first twenty-four hours were relatively easy. Peter’s questions flustered Tobias, exhausted Marco, and annoyed Ax. Nora’s threats were unilaterally ignored. Marco had sectioned the shuttle to keep them apart, so they barely heard each other. While this succeeded in preventing them from working together against their captors, it also prevented Peter from believing Marco’s claim that Nora was host to an alien mind-controller.

As time wore on, Peter became more and more anxious, even fearful. He wanted to trust Marco, but he couldn’t when he didn’t understand what was happening or why. Whenever Marco or Tobias tried to explain, he was unconvincable. So they stopped trying. Marco had asked Ax not to morph in front of Peter because if Peter had a heart attack out of panic, they didn’t have the medical resources on Shirei Shamayim to deal with it. Ax, for the most part, did not entertain Peter’s questions.

Meanwhile, Nora got increasingly frantic, alternating between hysteria, futile attempts at violence, crying, and pleading. None of these things wore down any of her three guards. What they did do, however, was reach a volume that could be heard by Peter, only making him all the more fearful.

Nearing the last day, Ax asked Peter, “If you do not believe the story your son has told you, then why did you do the things that I know he has asked you to do on behalf of the Independent Faction?”

Peter shrugged and looked aside, embarrassed. “Because he asked me to?”

“I once asked my parents to help in a minor act of rebellion for the benefit of my sibling,” said Ax. He scowled down at Peter, disbelieving. “They did not oblige.”

“Well, I’m sorry that happened,” Peter said awkwardly. “But Marco…” He shook his head. “I’ve let him down before. I can’t bear the thought of doing it again.”

“Then, why won’t you believe him?” asked Ax.

“About the aliens?” Peter laughed bitterly. The laugh was very similar to that of his son. “I’m kind; I’m not stupid.”

“But you are stupid,” Ax said bluntly, surprising Peter. “The things he has said are true. You would do anything for your son except believe his truths.”

Peter scowled angrily. “He says that you’re an alien from another part of the galaxy. He says that you can transform. That you were the one pretending to be him, and it wasn’t a holographic mask,” he snapped. “If these things are true, then why not transform now? Why not just prove it?”

“Because I want you to believe Marco because he asked you to,” said Ax. He awkwardly mimicked a shrug. “Also because he is worried for your health.”

Several hours later, Nora’s Yeerk died, and Marco spent the next few hours comforting a woman he had resented and barely known, fighting to squash down the guilt rising in his throat knowing that he had caused this trauma, even if said trauma was simply the price of her freedom.

“I thought it was Marco’s shift after Tobias,” Peter said when Ax re-entered his portion of the shuttle with dried food and water.

“It would be, but he is still comforting Prof. Robinette-Guerra,” said Ax.

“Comforting her?” asked Peter, suddenly concerned. If Marco hadn’t been busy comforting her when she was loudly screaming and crying, what would make him start now?

“It is traumatic for the host when the Yeerk parasite starves to death,” Ax explained. “Even if the host is unwilling. They can feel the Yeerk dying. All of the Yeerk’s memories and its prior hosts’ memories will flood into her. In a way, this is worse for the unwilling hosts, because they are forced through a sympathetic experience with their captor.”

Peter just stared up at him.

Ax held out the tray. “You should eat,” he said.

Peter took the tray and stared at it, a hard lump forming in his throat.

At the end of the third “day,” Marco knocked and then entered Peter’s side of the shuttle without waiting for a reply. “Hey,” he said, voice sounding a little rough. He wasn’t looking directly at Peter. “So the three day period I told you about is up. Which means Tobias is about to take us out of Z-space and into normal space, and that’s going to feel strange and you might throw up. When we’re in normal space, I’ll uninstall the divider, so you and Nora can be together again. We’ll be rendezvousing with Jian Seng at Renao. It’s unquarantined and too close to Persephone, so no one is disembarking. From there, we’ll be going to Broadside in Aberdeen. You’ll be held for a second quarantine there, then go with the next batch of refugees to one of the safe zones in the Qing Long sector: New Canaan or Deadwood. And I know that you don’t believe me, and you think this is all insane, but just sit through it, and I promise－”

“I believe you,” said Peter.

Marco blinked at him, too emotionally exhausted to register his own surprise. “What?”

Peter nodded, wiped his nose, and repeated, “I believe you. Your friend was right.”

“My friend?” Marco repeated, confused.

Peter nodded again and said, “I should believe you because you asked me to. Because you need me to. I’ve been so focused on the absurdity of it. Of what it would mean to my life, to my world, that I haven’t seen how much I was hurting you. I haven’t seen the sense of how out of character it was for you to behave like this. I have ignored the cost to you, despite the fact that I promised I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

“Papá, I…” Marco didn’t know how to finish that statement, so he didn’t.

“I just… I have one question,” said Peter. He gave his son a pained look. “Please?”

Marco stared at his father, mystified. “Of course, Papá,” he said.

“The, uh…” Peter found it difficult to look his son in the eye just then, but he felt he owed it to him to try. “The… first time… that you mentioned aliens. To me. You, um, you said… You said that they had your mother.”

Marco’s jaw tightened briefly, and he swallowed. “I’d hoped you’d forgotten,” he admitted. “That was nearly a year ago.”

“It’s hard to forget the day your child loses his mind,” Peter said, and Marco laughed a bit sourly. “Why would you want me to forget?”

Marco’s jaw clenched again, and he blinked rapidly, trying to keep back tears. “Because I don’t know where she is,” he admitted, his voice tight. “I saw her twice. She was the host of Visser One, a high-ranking… brain slug. The first time I saw her, she thought I knew where Elfangor was, which I did, but I didn’t know I knew at the time. I didn’t believe she was her because no one had told me about the aliens yet. I thought she was a fake, a cruel and honestly stupid ploy by the Universal Alliance.”

“How did you find out?” asked Peter. “That she was real?”

“Ax told me,” said Marco. He determinedly left out the part where he'd attempted to hit Ax, and Jake and Cassie had been forced to wrestle him out of the ship's galley.

“And when you saw her next?”

Marco nodded and said, “On Universe Moon. We got there after the big fight. To help anyone still left on the ground. And then she shows up with this… Yeerk Mother ship. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, and I have seen a frankly unreasonable amount of scary shit in my short life. She’d come for an Alliance operative who’d been there. Who had traded sides after the truth was out. Turns out he was an Earthling. From an Earth that she － Visser One － now ruled. She called herself his god.

“And when he was unapologetic for his failure and betrayal, she had him thrown among a cluster of Taxxons,” Marco continued. “They’re… They’re these huge, carnivorous insects. Always hungry. They handed themselves over to the Yeerks in hope that the Yeerks would have more control over them than they had over themselves. She threw him to them, and they ate him alive. And then she left.”

Peter leaned forward and buried his head in his hands, letting the information sink in. Finally, when he couldn’t stand the silence anymore, he said, “And you haven’t seen her since?”

Marco shook his head. “I’m sorry, no,” he admitted. “I’ve looked everywhere. It’s why I’ve been so active in the Core when so few of the Independents will venture there, even with the few Z-space engines we've been able to steal off Yeerk wrecks. But there hasn’t been a word. We do know that a new visser has been assigned to the Verse and has been somewhat active, but we haven’t met him yet.”

Peter nodded, trying to sort all these details in his mind. Trying to keep himself from dismissing them outright as ludicrous. “Well, maybe once you’ve won this war－”

“Peter, we’re not gonna win this war,” Marco said, laughing like the very idea was ridiculous. “We’re vastly outnumbered, overpowered, and under-resourced, and no one on the outside gives a shit. We’ve heard nothing from the Andalites, no matter what Ax and Humanity feed them. All our allies are as powerless as we are if not more so.”

“You have an entire subsystem,” argued Peter. “You’re holding large portions of Aberdeen and other planets. You’ve begun occupation of Jiangyin.”

“And they have everything else!” Marco shouted. He wasn’t angry at his father, but Peter had hit on something that had been welling up for quite some time. Still, Peter was shocked, unaware of just how much of Marco’s carefully calculated Companion’s countenance had worn away over the past year. “They could wipe us out from the sky if they wanted. They’re letting us fight because they’re not scared! And the people we do have are leaving us one by one every fucking day because the Universal Alliance has food and medicine! How am I supposed to fight that, Papá? How am I supposed to fight food and medicine and technology with rabbits and weeds and hunting rifles?

“We’re not fighting to win, Peter. We’re fighting to die well.”

“This is your pilot speaking,” Tobias’s voice said over the intercom. “If you are not currently sitting down and strapped in, I advise you get that way. We’re hopping back into normal space in one minute.” The intercom clicked off and, grumbling, Marco sat next to his father on the couch and shoved his hands down into the cushions to find the belts.

Peter Guerra frowned at his son. “So then what was the program you had me build for?” he asked.

Marco ran a hand nervously through his hair. “For still being stupid enough to hope,” he said with a lopsided smile.

Chapter Text

Marco hadn’t realized that he’d fallen asleep leaning against Ax until Ax jostled him awake. “Hn?” Marco mumbled, wiping his eyes and looking around. The partition had been removed from his shuttle, opening up the space once more, so that Nora and Peter could sit together on the couch. Giving them space to talk with as much privacy as they were going to get for a while, Marco had relegated himself to the bed. He’d been surprised when Ax had sat across from him at the foot of the bed, but Ax didn’t have the same “Marco has had sex here” hang ups that everyone else did. (Marco was always careful not to point out that he’s had sex everywhere else, anyway.)

“I have to demorph,” Ax explained. He took the time to stand and stretch first, though. He had probably even more relieved than Peter and Nora when the partition had come down. Even shared between four people, Marco’s shuttle was a hell of a lot larger than the bridge and narrow hall that composed the interior of the Wren.

Marco groaned and stood also. “Urgh, I told Tobias that I was supposed to dock in the shuttle bay before he joined the ships,” he complained.

Ax blinked at him, confused. “I am sure that he will still do that, when we meet with Jian Seng,” he said.

“When…” Marco stared at his friend. “You’ve already demorphed and remorphed once. That means we’ve been here for－”

“Three and one half UA standard hours,” said Ax.

Peter leaned forward from the couch at the other end of the room to peer at them more directly. “Why does he keep saying it like that?” he asked his son as though Ax were not actually in the room.

“Andalites don’t like to be associated with other people’s cultures,” Nora answered automatically. Catching herself, she pressed a hand to her lips and darted a wary glance to Ax. “Not that－ I didn’t mean any offense.”

Ax just stared back at her until she shrank back behind Peter as much as she could sitting on the couch. Ax finally turned away when he realized that Marco had pulled his boots on and was hurrying out the door into the tiny hall. “Marco?” he called after him. When he didn’t receive an immediate reply, he hesitated only a moment before following into the cramped space and following Marco up to the bridge.

“Tobias, why have we been sitting on our hands for three and a half hours?” Marco growled.

“Why are you just now noticing?” Tobias countered, scowling over his shoulder.

“He fell asleep,” Ax explained as he joined them.

Tobias rolled his eyes at that and waved a hand to indicate his pointedly quiet instruments. “We’ve been sitting here for three and a half hours because absolutely no one has come by in three and a half hours,” he said. “I don’t like sitting around with our thumbs up our asses any more than you do, but there is no backup plan for Jian Seng being late. According to Humanity, there’s no indication that they’ve been apprehended, but she’s keeping a close… spine, I guess, on the Cortex alerts and police waves.”

Marco grumbled to himself and glared out the forward window like that might suddenly make Jian Seng appear and complete the rendezvous. “That man loves to give me ulcers,” he hissed. “Alright, Ax go demorph and don’t remorph until I tell you to. And make sure my parents are armed. Tobias, if there is even a hint of UA interceptors, jump to Z-space. I don’t care if you take a chunk out of this moon on the way.”

“Oh, tamper,” a distinctly feminine voice chirped from a speaker somewhere to the back and left of Marco’s head. A year ago, he’d have jolted in surprise, but they’d all long become accustomed to the voice of Humanity － the raiding alias of their genius bio-mechanical engineer, Melissa Chapman － appearing from nowhere without warning. “I’ve found them. They’re still in town. Naomi and Rachel are retrieving files from a court office.”

Marco and Tobias exchanged confused glances. “Right, that sounds… suspicious,” said Marco. “I’m gonna stick with my previous orders. Keep us posted on any developments, please.”

“Aye aye, Companion!” Humanity cackled, followed by the silence of her presumed (but not guaranteed) absence.

In all, it was another forty-seven (UA standard) minutes before Jian Seng actually left Persephone and signaled for rendezvous. Marco checked with Humanity first, as she was physically safe in the quarantine zone and unlikely to be compromised, but she still gave the (“Probably!”) all-clear.

Ax returned to his human form, and though Marco took weapons back from his parents (having the weapons really only made them more nervous, so it was best not to insist unless circumstances were dire), he still kept them for himself, Tobias, and Ax. Tobias lifted off again from their spot in Renao’s shadow, and as Jian Seng came into view, Marco returned to join Ax and his parents in his shuttle, taking the pilot’s seat. The shuttle door hissed as it went air-tight, and Marco flipped off the magnetization. “Shirei Shamayim, this is Shuttle One. I’m prepared for release.”

“Roger. Releasing now.” There was a few small clacks as the Wren’s access hall sealed off and receded from the shuttle’s door. This was followed by four loud clanks as the main clamps released. At last, the mag-locks shut down, and Shuttle One floated free.

Marco tapped the engines a couple times to jet a little further from the Wren before he actually turned them on. He changed wave frequency and broadcast, “Jian Seng, this is Shuttle One. I’m prepared to dock if you are.”

“Welcome back, Shuttle One,” came Cassie’s warm, welcoming voice. If anyone had a voice that could sound like home no matter where you were, it was Cassie, and Marco found himself relaxing by tiny increments. He turned on his engines and carefully flew up to the much larger Hanover-class salvager. The bay one door slid open, and Marco docked his shuttle with practiced ease. The clamps came down with their loud clanks. The mag-locks slid into place. The bay door shut again and sealed. The air in the bay briefly clouded as the pressurized air was replaced.

The intercom buzzed on again, and Cassie informed him, “Tobias and I think it could take as much as twenty minutes to replace the Z-space engine from Shirei Shamayim into Jian Seng. Do you wanna stay put until we make the jump, or do you wanna join us?”

Marco glanced back over his shoulder at Ax and his parents. “I think my guests could use some new faces,” he admitted. “And I could use the privacy for a bath. It’s been three days, Cassie.”

Cassie laughed at that. “Sure you don’t want to go back to the Core?” she teased him.

“Thinking about it,” he said. “See you in twenty minutes.” He flipped off the intercom, stood, and stretched out his back, trying to force himself to relax. Three days in Z-space and one dead Yeerk. This job was done. It would probably be a while before they figured out their next move. He could let go for a little bit.

It wasn’t like he had any clients to worry about anymore…

“Alright, Ax can you take my parents to Jian Seng, please?” he asked, turning back to the group in his shuttle. “Introduce them to everyone and get them some fresh food? See if Tobias and Cassie need any help with the Z-space engine?”

Ax nodded, unsealed the shuttle door, and gestured for Peter and Nora to follow him out. Marco waited a few minutes, then shut the door and locked it behind him. Bone-deep weariness washed over him, and he let himself slide down to the floor. He sat there longer than intended, only aware of how much time had passed when he felt the punch to the gut of the ship moving into Z-space. With a sigh, he moved over to the bed. Or, specifically, the set of cabinets underneath it. From there, he removed a bathing sponge, a container of purified water, a smaller container of skin oil, and a very small container of tiny black rubber plugs.

Marco set them all out in front of himself on the floor. He unlaced his combat boots and set them aside. These were followed by his t-shirt and jeans. If the High Priestess could see him now, his license would be revoked. Not that it wasn’t due to expire in a few more months anyway. But, for now, he was still a Companion, and he was going to be damned if he didn’t worship like one.

He ran his hand down his right calf until he found the hidden button just above the heel. On pressing this button, his prosthesis sprang open, shin and calf splitting apart to reveal the robotics inside. Carefully, he disconnected the command and feedback wires from the neural ports at the end of his stump, plugging each port with one of the tiny rubber plugs. He ignored the way his gut twisted and his head swam as he set his right leg aside and started in on the left one.

Once his prostheses were removed and set aside, he wet the sponge and began to wipe away days of grime, finally feeling more and more like his actual self. “I worship at the temple of my flesh,” he whispered to himself. “I am reverent, and I am revered. I am the priest, the graven image, and the divine being. My love is a light upon the world and a blessing to the company I choose…”

Marco wasn’t even halfway to the galley when the distant sounds of shouting met with his ears. He changed path slightly to the catwalks over the cargo hold, where the Wren had latched on. Down below, their captain, Corporal Jake Berenson, was sitting on the stairs, wearily cradling his temple, while Rachel Berenson and Tobias screamed at each other out on the mostly-empty floor of the hold. She was claiming that something wasn’t her fault, and while Marco wasn’t fluent in Japanese, he knew that Tobias was calling her some hideously ugly names.

Though fights weren’t remotely rare with that couple, they didn’t usually need Jake’s supervision, not to mention that “First time we’ve seen each other in days” reunitings were usually reserved for cavity-inducing cuddle sessions, not getting unbelievably vicious. The cherry on top of this huge “what the fuck” cake was that Tobias never ever called Rachel names. He called her dangerous and reckless and suicidal and macho and overly aggressive, but Marco was definitely hearing some words about her sexuality this time, despite their well-established open relationship.

Marco dug a mirror in his pocket, and carefully angled it to flash Jake in the face. Jake glanced up, squinting at him, and cocked his head in question.

What? Marco signed at him.

Jake just shook his head. Go, he signed back as surreptitiously as possible. Later.

Oh well. If the rest of the crew wasn’t gossiping about it yet, they surely would be soon. No reason to push it now just for curiosity’s sake. Jake was capable of preventing them from actually throwing punches.

The thought worried Marco, though. That was also a thing that never happened in their domestic spats. The only time Rachel had ever gotten physical with Tobias, she was high on Reaver gas, and she’d spent days afterward crying about it. But if Jake was supervising their arguments, that must suddenly be a concern…

No, Jake said to leave it, so he’d leave it. Marco pocketed the mirror and silently escaped the cargo bay, making his way to the galley, where he found his parents, Naomi Berenson, Badger, and a young man Marco didn’t recognize. If Tobias was busy screaming at Rachel, that meant Cassie Sosanya was probably monitoring the bridge and Ax was probably hiding in his quarters, as secluded from strange humans as possible. Which left Marco on his own with a fresh crop of people he didn’t know. Yay.

Peter glanced up at him as he entered and smiled. “Oh, you changed,” he said, noting that Marco was now in trousers, a dress shirt, and vest, dress shoes and jewelry impeccably shined. “I was starting to worry about you.”

Marco held back a reflexive grimace, keeping his countenance carefully neutral. “I wasn’t aware you noticed such things, Papá,” he said. “Thank you for your attentiveness.” He saw that the unknown man was staring. Blond like Rachel, Tobias, and Melissa, though his Asian-lineage features broke through more than the European-lineage ones did. Marco’s suspicions slid neatly together into a perfectly logical conclusion, but he feigned naivety and smiled. “Is our third guest one of yours, Badger?” he asked. “Won’t you introduce us?”

“Not mine,” Badger answered, his surly voice even more gravely than usual. Marco couldn’t see the evidence past the old man’s high-collared jacket, but every grifter on the border planets had heard about the way he’d been hung after finally cheating the wrong thief. It had taken a big donation to the IF to get him out of Persephone, and even then it was unlikely anyone would have bothered if Jian Seng hadn’t already had plans in the area. Badger wasn’t a particularly likeable man, and it surprised Marco not at all that none of his little helpers had had their passage purchased with his.

“David Jackson,” the blond introduced himself, still very obviously sizing up Marco. “Are you a companion?”

“Ex,” Marco lied fluently. “I’m afraid my involvement with the Independent Faction has nullified my license. Does that bother you?”

“Not at all,” David lied without Marco’s fluency. The poor dear.

Naomi gestured angrily to David. “This is why we were late,” she said. “The courts weren’t open for an annulment, so we had to snatch the documents and drag him along with us.”

“An… annulment?” Marco repeated.

“Rachel got really, really, really drunk,” Cassie said, adding a “really” with each step down from the bridge.

“Hey, Gorgeous,” Marco said with a smile. “If you’re here, who’s flying the ship? You know Tobias flips out about the Z-space thing.”

“Autopilot can handle it long enough for me to go pee,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You all keep saying ‘Z-space,’” David noted. “But I’ve got my pilot’s training, and that’s not a thing that is existent.”

“It’s new UA tech!” Cassie chirped brightly, and they both politely pretended to miss the way David’s eyebrows went up. She was a terrible liar, but Marco had spent a lot of time teaching her how to tell the truth correctly. “When I come back from the bathroom, I’ll show you!”

It was all Marco could do keep from snickering.

Chapter Text

Marco was awakened by the sound of alarms. “Sixty credits says we’re locked in here,” he mumbled into Jake’s shoulder.

“Sixty?” Jake balked. He tried to sit up, but Marco just pulled his arm tighter over Jake’s chest. Jake fell back into the bed with a small laugh.

“Gotta make my wage somewhere,” Marco mumbled. He snuggled in against Jake's arm pointedly and distantly wondered where the hell Cassie had gotten to during the night.

“Then, maybe you should stop giving it away for free,” Jake teased. “Seriously, let me up.”

“But we’re locked in,” Marco protested. “We’ve had our navigation damaged and irreparably locked on a specific set of coordinates, where we will be picked up by a carrion house, and be electrocuted to death before our ship is dismantled for parts. Obviously, we should be spending the few hours we have left making the best of it.”

Jake laughed and fought to disentangle himself from Marco’s arms. “I completely agree, which is why I’m going to go make use of it by breaking out and undoing the damage.” Finally escaping Marco’s clutches, Jake rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants from the floor, and started rummaging around for one of the magnetic repulsers Mal had advised them to keep on hand.

“Ugh, you’re such a righteous do-gooder,” Marco groaned. He sat up, and Jake paused only to throw another pair of pants at him. Magnetic repulser in hand, he climbed the short ladder to the hatch of his crew quarters. Marco glared at the garment in his hands. “These are your pants,” he said.

“Plan is for you to catch David and kick his ass,” Jake reminded him. He carefully aligned the repulser with the hatch’s lock, ducked his head down, and fired. The hatch exploded open. “I didn’t think you wanted to mess up those nice trousers.”

“But now I need a belt,” Marco complained, even though he was pulling on Jake’s pants.

“Check the end of the bed, where you’re always leaving them,” Jake said. And then he climbed out of the hatch and was gone.

Marco pressed the intercom button with one hand while he groped under the mattress for a belt with the other. “Anyone on bridge?” he asked.

“Just got up here,” Tobias answered back a bit breathlessly. “It’s a mess. You sure we can undo this?”

“Now is definitely the worst time to ask that question,” Marco said. Successful in his search, he pulled out a belt and threaded it as quickly as possible. He pressed the intercom again. “Are we back in normal space?”

“Yeah, looks like he’s not a complete idiot,” said Tobias. “There’s no way he could have escaped if he hadn’t gotten the ship out of Z-space first. We’re on the wrong end of the quadrant, though. It’d take two days to reach these coordinates. Assuming we didn't run out of fuel first.”

Marco snorted. He grabbed up the nearest of Jake’s shirts. Thank god the guy was a slob. Made emergency dressing surprisingly easy. It could be argued that if they’d wanted to be prepared, they wouldn’t have gotten naked in the first place, but that was a stupid argument that Marco looked down upon. “Okay, reach out to Humanity. Have her send the shuttle back to us. I’ll wait for him in shuttle bay two.”

“Shuttle bay one,” Tobias corrected.

Marco paused. “He took mine?” he demanded. “What a dick!”

“Yes, that’s definitely the worst thing he’s done today,” Tobias deadpanned. “To be honest, I think he doesn’t like you very much.”

“It’s the companion thing,” Marco informed him. “I've seen his record. He didn’t just flunk out; al-Kāhinat kicked him out personally and chased him to the edge of space.”

“Seriously?” Tobias gasped, his voice somewhere between shocked disbelief and laughter.

“Well, that’s what you get for hawking artifacts from the temple,” Marco said. “Alright, I have to finish getting ready. Please call Humanity ASAP. We don’t want to waste fuel cells actually chasing him.”

A few moments later, Marco was dressed in Jake’s old fatigues (too small for Jake, too big for Marco) and waiting outside the cargo bay doors to shuttle bay one, his arms folded across his chest as he leaned patiently back against the railing. When the door finally burst open, he grinned at a surprised David Jackson. “Miss us already?” Marco quipped.

David didn’t bother trying to lie. He just raised his pistol instead. It was a predictable move, and Marco predicted it. Marco grabbed David’s wrist before David had even really aimed; he pushed the wrist down and he punched directly into David’s elbow with his other hand. With a cry, David dropped the weapon but twisted out of Marco’s hold.

Quickly, Marco kicked the gun out of the way, then neatly deflected the oncoming knife with his arm guard. He made a quarter turn and slammed his foot down into David’s knee. With another cry of pain, David buckled to the floor, and Marco grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into the railing, knocking him out cold. He quickly pulled the laces out of David’s boots, turned him over, and tied his hands behind his back.

When he stood, he found Peter standing on the nearby catwalk, gawking in disbelief. “Couldn’t sleep?” Marco asked.

“The alarms do rather interfere with the process,” Peter said. He pointed to David. “Is that not Miss Berenson’s new husband?”

“Yes, it is,” Marco confirmed.

“Are you doing something illegal?”

“The answer to that is actually surprisingly philosophical in nature,” Marco informed him.

Peter considered that for a moment. He looked from Marco to David, then finally to Marco again. “Is it safe to go back to bed?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah, we’re good,” Marco assured him. “I’ll see what we can do about that alarm for you.”

“You did what?” Naomi shouted a few hours later as they were all gathered in the galley to finally clear things up. Well, “all” except Tobias who lucked out with the excuse of needing to land the ship on Aberdeen. Naomi, Nora, and Peter were sitting at the dining table with Cassie, Jake, and Rachel. Marco and Ax were flanking a bound David in the corner. Badger was rifling through the cabinets, presumably for snacks. (As though they were stupid enough to forget to lock all the valuables away before letting him on board.)

“Okay, before you get too carried away with the yelling, I would like to point out that it did work,” said Rachel.

“We could have all died!” Naomi protested.

Badger finally popped up from one of the lower cabinets. “Is that true?” he asked. “You all assured me you knew what you were doing.”

“David was the one who brought us out of Z-space,” said Peter. “Now, I’m not familiar with these Z-space engines, but I am familiar with Z-space theory. If he’d gone about it the wrong way, it is possible that we would have all been flattened out of existence.”

“Lucky for you, the dumb broad told me everything about running this ship within five minutes of meeting me,” David sneered.

“Lucky?” Cassie repeated. She turned around in her chair to face him while Jake rolled his eyes and Rachel openly snickered. “Do you still not understand that we spent months planning every move? We picked you specifically because you are not bright, which you are proving now. Someone who has been operating on a salvager for five years tells a stranger brought on board only because of drunken marriage absolutely all the information he needs to steal it and nothing else? Come on!”

“Yeah, dude, she’s not a very good liar,” Rachel told him. “It took two months to train her to just selectively tell the truth.”

David opened his mouth again, but Marco just shook his head. “You’re only going to dig a deeper hole at this point.” David shot him a glare but didn’t pursue the argument.

“I was more referring to the fact that the goal of the matter was to get this ship aimed at scrappers,” Naomi snarled.

“Oh, I had a couple dozen safety measures in place for that,” said Cassie. “I could have shut down the ship any number of ways. We’d have to float until we fixed the matter, but we wouldn’t have to worry about actually arriving at the carrion house. Plus, we stashed plenty of supplies in the caches for all sorts of contingencies!”

“We got the idea when… one of our comrades… who shall remain nameless, told us about getting caught up with a scrapper's lure,” Jake explained. “Usually, these things are urban legends and horror stories. There’s usually no one left to tell the details, and when they do survive, it tends to be by accident, not by wit, so they don’t have much detail on the matter. M－ my comrade, however…”

“Nice save,” Rachel teased.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Jake said, shooting her a look. He continued, “He was tricked into an accidental marriage by someone with incomplete companion training, who damaged their ship, locked it onto certain coordinates, and escaped in a shuttle. They barely got the ship back under control in time to escape and locate her. With this data, we know what the carrion houses are actually like, and we know it would be a huge advantage to our side to have one to use against the Yeerks. Taking what we knew, Marco was able to use the Guild’s database to track down someone of a similar background who might possibly be working with scrappers as a lure. We tracked him down, kept an eye out, and kept dropping hints that our ship had new technology. When Badger got his location, we chose that as the best time to pick up Naomi and the Guerras, giving Rachel the excuse to be on Persephone, and keeping Marco and Tobias out of the way while we hooked him, as Marco’s companion status and Tobias’s boyfriend status could possibly warn him off.” To this, David snorted dismissively but did not contribute more.

“Carrion houses use a very large immobilization net to both attack any living people within and to destroy the ship so that parts can be harvested from it,” Cassie explained. “Utilized correctly, we could use something like that to shut down Yeerk spacecraft even without having them outgunned.”

“What the fuck is a yirk?” David snarled.

“Ssh,” Rachel whispered. She reached backward to pat him patronizingly on the head. “Husbands are better seen and not heard.”

“You nearly gave me a heart attack, and had me search for documentation for six hours over a fake marriage?” Naomi demanded.

“Yeah, what the hell was that about?” Jake asked, turning to Rachel. “You scared the shit out of us when you didn’t show up on time.”

Rachel groaned and slid down in her chair. “Yeah, uh, the one bit of data we didn’t have was his alcohol tolerance,” she admitted. “It took a long time to drink him under the table, and I… I do not know if I remembered to make sure it wasn’t actually legally binding.”

“Oh my god,” Cassie said. She leaned forward until her forehead hit the table. “Oh my god.”

Naomi sat up a bit to look past Cassie to David. “Do you remember?” she asked. “I mean, now that I know that you only engaged in this ruse in an attempt to steal a ship, I assume you don’t want to be tied to her, either.”

David shrugged. “I haven’t got a fucking clue,” he admitted. “It’s never been an issue before.”

They were all surprised when Tobias ran in from the bridge. “Marco, Inara called for you,” he said.

Marco squinted in disbelief. “We’re going to meet Serenity in less than ten minutes.”

Tobias shrugged helplessly. “She says there’s a newswave you need to catch,” he said. “Cortex main.” Message delivered, he hurried back to the bridge.

Marco looked around, wondering where the best place to catch the news would be, when Nora pulled rolled panel out of her pocket and tossed it to him. “It still works out here,” she promised. “I was just on it earlier.”

“Thanks,” he said. He quickly rolled it out and tapped on the news icon.

A broad, plump woman with golden decoration painted across her light-brown skin and a huge mass of thick, black hair that cascaded in elegant curls down over her expensive robes sat facing the screen, speaking directly to the viewer. David’s head immediately turned up toward him. “Hey, I know that voice,” he said, confused.

“Al-Kāhinat,” Marco whispered. He hadn’t seen her in years, but he’d know her anywhere. It was impossible to forget the face of your High Priestess. “Everyone shut up.”

“-- neutral,” al-Kāhinat was saying. “But, knowing what we now know and having seen what we have, there is no way that, in this war, the Companions’ Guild can remain neutral. Never before have we stood, knowingly, with slavers. It is the antithesis of our nature. And the nature of these invaders is much worse than even that. And that is what they are. Extrasystemic invaders of another species. They have worked hard this past year to convince us all of the falsehood of these allegations, of the evidence right before our eyes. Even I have been fooled.

“But no longer. My eyes are open. My temple is prepared. All Guild houses and temples are now quarantine zones. They will be safe places for the unhosted. They will keep defense against all others. This is my only warning to the Yeerks: Rise against us, and you will fall.”

The transmission ended.

Marco dropped the panel.

He didn’t realize he was shaking until Ax grabbed him to help hold him on his feet. Cassie was shouting his name. His friends were already on their feet, and Cassie had come to his side. “Marco, what’s going on?” she pressed. “Are you okay? What does this mean?”

“Tiān is with us,” he said.

Chapter Text

“You really think the Queen of Prostitutes’ broadwave is gonna convince people we have tiānmìng?” Sfc. Malcolm Reynolds grumbled. Companion Inara Serra shot him a severely disapproving look, but Marco ignored Mal’s very obvious posturing.

Mal, Sgt. Zoë Washburne, Inara, Jake, Melissa Chapman, and Marco were gathered around Loren Matsumoto’s kitchen table. While Mal and Jake sprawled in their uniforms at the table, Inara sat primly dressed to the nines, and Marco hunched exhaustedly over the table in trousers, shirt sleeves, and combat boots. Zoë was leaning against a nearby counter, also in uniform. Melissa, always a bundle of energy when disconnected from the Cortex, kept moving from spot to spot, unable to settle. Mal only relaxed when she was out of sight, providing mild entertainment with his inability to cope with Melissa’s dislike of shirts. (“Fabric makes my ports itch,” she’d complained on multiple occasions.) Nearby, in Loren’s living room, which wasn’t actually a separate room at all, Rachel and Tobias were sorting through David’s belongings on the floor. Initially, it had been Serenity that was supposed to follow up on the scrapper coordinates, but seeing as Serenity and Jian Seng were the only crews that could report on the Companions’ Guild development, the job (and David) had been handed off to Capt. Olston.

Mal had always been cagey about the companion thing, only getting worse with his deep-set denial of his intentions toward Inara. What was bugging him this time, however, was tiānmìng. During the War for Independence, Mal had been absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause, and that no higher power could allow them to lose. The loss at Serenity Valley thus equally convinced him that there must not be a higher power, and if there was, it was probably a huge dick.

Since The Miranda Revelation, however, tiānmìng had become a constant thorn in their side. The Mandate of Heaven was the throne that the UA had sat upon since its conception on Earth That Was (or, as they were beginning to call it, Earth That Is) － the reason why only a few countries had held all the resources and the only hope of survival was because they were the only ones who could manage it properly and make sure it was evenly dispersed. (And yet, still, millions of people had been left behind, evidently for the Yeerks to save.) When the IF had failed to defeat the UA the first time, it became clear that higher powers were not on their side. To attempt a second go with the very same organization was unfathomable to most people in the Verse, even if they believed the revelation. They’d actually attempted to organize a different resistance force for that very reason, but the UA had been quick and exacting in labeling every resistance as Independent Faction, continuing to use tiānmìng to their advantage.

“I feel convinced,” Inara said. “I mean, from the day the Operative showed up, I knew there was… Not that it hadn’t been hinted with River, but… For al-Kāhinat herself to take such a stand is… I don’t have words.”

“Problem is, while it’s nice to y’all that god herself has spoken on the matter, she is only god to companions,” said Jake.

Marco groaned and rubbed his neck. “God is… a complicated word,” he said. “Why don’t we stick with ‘High Priestess’?”

“‘Seeress’ would be a more literal translation,” Inara offered.

“What does she see?” asked Mal.

Inara shrugged. “Truth,” she said.

He rolled his eyes. “Funny how that didn’t come up the first time we fought this goddamned war.”

“For all we know, it did,” said Marco. “There’s an argument to be made that the war couldn’t have been won without The Miranda Revelation. If we’d had a greater force, been more of a threat, they probably would’ve just dumped the Pax on our whole army, and we wouldn’t have been prepared for that then. Wouldn’t have weaned ourselves off Blue Sun. It could be said that perhaps tiānmìng wasn’t with us yet because we weren’t yet ready.”

“THERE IS NO TIĀNMÌNG!” Mal shouted, bursting to his feet and slamming his palms down on the rickety old table. “We wanna argue how we’re presentin’ this to superstitious Rimmers, fine! But I am not arguin’ the actuality of it with you, ‘cuz it doesn’t fucking exist! No heaven would have ever let this happen in the first place!”

“Reynolds.”

Mal jumped to the side and nearly tripped over his chair when Loren appeared suddenly next to him. She dropped a decapitated chicken on the table in front of him. “Pluck,” she ordered.

Mal gaped in disbelief. “Woman, what do you think I’m here for?” he demanded.

Loren arched an eyebrow over her opaque glasses. “You got another place free of ears to be havin' this polite an' quiet discussion?”

Mal glared at her but eventually realized that it was impossible to intimidate a blind woman by use of facial expressions. With many grumbled swear words, he sat down again and began pulling off feathers.

“Okaasan!” Tobias called. “Check something out for me?”

Loren raised that eyebrow again but made her way carefully around to where he sat on the floor with Rachel and the pile of personal effects and put out her hand. Tobias handed over a small blue cube. She frowned. She turned it over a few times, running her thumbs across the smooth surfaces. Finally, she lifted it to her face and sniffed it uncertainly. Then, she licked it. She scowled and tossed it back to him. “Yeah, it’s Andalite,” she decided.

“How the hell do you know that by taste?” Rachel demanded incredulously as Tobias wiped the cube off on his shirt and set it carefully aside from the other small piles.

“They use dif’rent alloys,” Loren said.

“Better question: How did Tobias realize that it might be Andalite in the first place, and he needed it taste tested?” Marco asked, the debate having been stalled to watch the odd scene.

Tobias rolled his eyes. “You don’t recognize the color?” he asked.

Marco rolled his eyes right back. “Same color as Ax,” he said. “It’s not like Andalites own blue.”

“They think they do,” Loren told him. “Andalites don’t vary in color much. I saw some dark blues, some indigos, some more tan than blue, but they seemed t’ have a standard. A… beauty ideal or som’in’. A specific Andalite Blue. An’ it appears on goddamn everythin’. Even after we settled here, if Alan found that color, he tended to keep it.”

“That explains Ax’s magpie tendencies,” Marco said, and Tobias snorted in amused agreement.

“Did David steal that from Ax?” Rachel asked.

“Never seen it before,” said Tobias. “I assumed some of Alan’s stuff must have gotten lost over the years.”

Loren shook her head. “Hardly had anything on us but the shredders and the Matrix when we got here,” she said.

“What Matrix?” asked Tobias.

“’s how we got home,” she said.

“Is it a ship?” Tobias pressed, leaning forward with interest. Mal was doing the same, having forgotten to keep plucking.

“No,” said Loren.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s. How. We. Got. Home.”

“Loren…”

“Tobias.”

Tobias threw up his hands in exasperation. “Fine!” he cried. “I’ll just ignore that my mother is hiding potentially useful alien technology somewhere.”

“’s not useful,” Loren grunted. “’s dangerous, an’ we were lucky to survive it.”

“Alright,” Jake interrupted. “Let’s just trust the woman with experience on the matter when she says certain tech might murder us. Especially when we have something else to look at. Rachel, go get Ax. Tell him David might’ve had some of his shit.” Loren nodded in agreement and left again, presumably to return to the chores of the small farm. Rachel left behind her. He turned back to those at the kitchen table. “Back to the subject at hand, instead of debating what it might or could mean, do either of you have any knowledge of what it definitely does mean?” Jake asked Marco and Inara.

Marco shook his head. “I need more intel before I can guess,” he said. “It’s entirely possible that this is a Yeerk ploy. Dangle a powerful Core elite in front of us as an ally and see who bites.”

Melissa shook her head. “I’ve been able to get past the first ring data blockades by repurposing military communications systems instead of using the Cortex satellites, but I still haven’t been able to get ahold of House Madrassa, much less al-Kāhinat herself,” she said. “Every time I so much as look sideways at their firewall, I get blasted back by extra guard programs. I’ve never seen security like this. That’s why I handed that little project over to Dr. Guerra so that I could meet with you two－” She indicated Inara and Marco. “－ and discuss a different avenue.”

Inara glanced to Marco, but he didn’t seem to know what she was talking about either. “I’m sorry I don’t understand what we can provide in that arena,” she said. “Neither of us are engineers or programmers or data raiders.”

Melissa shrugged. “Well, to put it as a more easily imaginable scene, you could say that on finding out about this announcement, the first thing I did was try to hop her fence to look into the windows. Unfortunately, the dogs keep chasing me off before I can even get to the fence,” she explained. “But it does make me wonder… Has anyone in this group actually tried knocking on the door yet?”

Mal shook his head. “Data blockades, just like you said,” he reminded her. “No one past relay ring 2 can communicate with the border or core. No one between relay rings 1 and 2 can reach rim or core. An’ no one within relay ring 1 can communicate with the border or rim. Furthermore, all known IF source numbers are blocked completely from Cortex access. We’ve been able to use stolen sourceboxes only for up to five days ’fore those numbers get blocked, too. Everyone who isn’t a cyborg nudist is, for all intents and purposes, cut off from the Cortex.”

“But did you check?” Melissa pressed. “If she thinks all Guild houses are promptly gonna switch over to defended safe houses, she must believe that she can still reach them. Not to mention that her broadwave got out to all systems in the first place.”

Marco finally sat up in his chair, scowling at some empty middle space as he thought about that. “The Companions’ Guild Network is run on private servers but relayed through the Cortex. But it’s been nearly a year since Miranda, which gives her plenty of time to set up private satellites,” he said. “Guild sat safe behind the UA last time, so everyone expected the same this time. No one would’ve looked twice at such activity.”

Inara already had out her panel. “It seems to be letting me log in, but it’s dragging.”

“That could back up the private satellite theory,” said Melissa.

“Or it just means that a million companions are also trying to log in at the same time,” said Marco.

“If she’s been sitting on this for a year, what made her act now?” Mal pressed.

Marco shrugged. “Maybe she’s just ready now.”

“Should we even be tryin’ to ally?” asked Jake. “The message seemed to me to say that she was only lookin’ to protect her own. A Core connection is a potential advantage if we could work out how to access it, but it’s a huge disadvantage as well. They could literally be infested at any moment and bring their whole network down with ’em.”

“Absolutely,” said Inara, looking up from her panel. “Your biggest disadvantage right now, besides the issue of tiānmìng, is the lack of resources. Everything is produced by, and therefore poisoned by, Blue Sun. Setting up independent production is incredibly expensive, which is why you’ve been feeding your army watered-down weeds and using as little medicine as possible. You haven’t got the finances to buy purification systems.”

“We’ve still got plenty of rich people on the Rim and Border to steal from,” Mal countered.

Marco laughed. “No, you don’t get it,” he said. “Have you ever seen what we make?”

Mal raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?” he said. “Rich. I get she’s the head whore, so she must cost the most, but－”

“The temple gets fifteen percent of all income in tribute,” said Marco. “A mandatory fifteen percent. From almost one million active companions across one hundred and fifty worlds. Not to mention the fees of access to the database. Or the booking fees. Or what’s made by reinvesting some of that money. Or the fact that Guild education is only free if you become a member afterward; last numbers I saw there were about two billion former students paying off their education, about half of them making additional donations on top of that. If you're a Rim Rat with dreams of becoming Core elite, you go through the Companions' Guild to do it because you are guaranteed to succeed as long as you put the effort in, and then you are more than happy to financially demonstrate your gratitude for the opportunity. We’re not talking about one rich woman, Mal. We’re talking about an organization with more accumulated wealth than all of Londinium.”

Zoë, at last, moved into a more active stance and involved herself in the conversation. She almost never spoke these days, so when she did deign to communicate anything at all, everyone around her knew to shut up and listen. “Sir, with that kind of wealth, the IF could not only feed, clothe, and arm all the enlisted, but it could actually pay for their services too, and the dent in her pocket would still be too light for her to notice,” she said. “I have to say, this is worth serious consideration, however you might feel about the organization as a whole.”

“I don’t feel any way about the organization,” Mal blatantly lied. He started pulling out feathers out of the dead chicken again, roughly enough that a lot of skin was going with them.

Before anyone could start an argument on that, something gave a mechanical chirp and Melissa pulled a mini-panel out of the back pocket of her jeans. “Oh, hey, it’s your dad,” she said, obviously meaning Peter. Mal’s family had disappeared with Shadow in the first war, Zoë’s were in the quarantine zone, and not only had they failed to retrieve Steve and Jean Berenson, but they’d “misplaced” Tom Berenson while trying. Melissa scowled at the screen. “He says he hasn’t made headway on the guard dog programs, but he has at least been able to grab at some code snippets, though he ruined six boxes trying.”

“How is that helpful?” asked Jake.

“Because he recognized the coding style.” Melissa held out the panel to Marco.

Marco blinked in surprise and took it from her, uncertain what she thought he could contribute to the conversation. But when he looked down… “This is the sabotaged Z-space communication program we gave him,” Marco said. “When I found out he was working for Yeerks, Ax rewrote the program so it would fail, making the Cortex crash, which made him look like an idiot and unappealing as a host.”

Mal stopped plucking again, for the first time forgetting to be bothered by Melissa's partial nudity. “Chapman, are you saying that Isthill set up the Guild guarding program?”

“I've done what?” Ax asked as Rachel finally escorted him into the house.

Tobias was on his feet, trying to look stern but mostly just looking like a confused puppy. “Ax, did you build any programs for the Companions’ Guild?” he asked.

Ax stared with a particular flavor of blankness that Marco had learned to interpret as confusion. “I have known no companions aside from Marco and Inara,” he reminded Tobias. “And it is not within my ability to build programs, only modify them. I was not trained in programming; I only learned some from… a friend.”

Melissa grabbed the mini-panel from Marco and leaned over the kitchen counter to hold it out to Ax. “Do you have any idea why your style of coding is popping up in the security programs that keep kicking me every time I try to access Guild servers?”

Ax stepped forward and took the panel. He scrolled through the code. Slowly his eyes widened. “You… you are correct,” he said quietly. “This is an Andalite program. It’s reworked to integrate with your Cortex operating system, but it is Andalite.”

Tobias held out the blue cube. “We found this in David’s things. Loren says it’s Andalite, but not Alan’s. Is it yours?”

Ax very nearly snatched the box out of Tobias’s hand. He gazed at it like it was the last spicecake in the pan. “No. No, this is…” He glanced up at Tobias only briefly, then cleared his throat awkwardly. “Uh, this is a data storage device. Defunct. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Mal repeated. Luckily, Ax seemed to miss the mocking tone.

“I don’t get it,” said Jake. “If there’s Andalite code defending Madrassa, and there’s Andalite tech popping up in pilfered goods, why haven’t we heard anything from them this past year? You and Humanity have been broadwavin’ intel into the ether thrice a week for ten months. But we didn’t even know they were here? Is that normal tactics for yours?”

Ax grimaced and finally remembered to hand the mini-panel back to Melissa. “No, it’s not tactics that there were no further communications with me,” he said. “It’s dishonor.”

Marco sighed heavily. “Because you’re a deserter,” he said.

Ax nodded.

“Which means if we want to try to reach out to them, make any kind of connection, we can’t do it through him,” Mal growled.

“It’s Madrassa’s program,” said Inara. She finally set down her own panel. “Perhaps al-Kāhinat can tell us how Andalite code was integrated.” She smiled at Marco. “I’ve set us an appointment to talk with her tomorrow night.”

“Us?” Marco asked, surprised.

Inara rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re still a companion, aren’t you?”

Marco shrugged. “Obviously.”