She took my hand and we started making our way down from our vantage point and towards the lower levels of the reclamation mine. It looked like we weren't going to be able to go in at the level we'd started at, but that was fine. We needed to get to the bottom of the reclamation mine, literally, and find my crew anyway.

"The one thing in ancient Seattle they've never been able to find is Frasier Crane's building," I said, not really thinking about it.

"Frasier Crane? Was this a great person in your history?" she asked. "A mighty conqueror of some sort?"

"No, just a television show, but they've never been able to figure out why his building has the view it does even though there doesn't seem to be any real building that ever had that view. Some speculate it was poorly made and blew up in the city's destruction."

Varis stared at me for a long moment. I turned and looked at her.

"What?"

"Is this the kind of thing your species worries themselves about? The location of a building a fictional character might or might not have lived in?"

"Well, yeah?" I said. "We do that kind of stuff all the time. Understanding your past helps you understand who you are and all that stuff. Plus there are a lot of anthropologists working on the 20th who are trying to figure out what tossed salad and scrambled eggs had to do with each other. Was it a popular dish in Seattle at the time? Nobody knows."

"You are truly from an odd species," William Stewart," she said, shaking her head and giving my hand a squeeze as we moved deeper into the debris field and towards the reclamation mine.

Whatever. Maybe she didn't understand humanity, but she understood me. And as dire as our current circumstances were? I'd take that.

"The slope here is surprisingly gentle compared to everything else," I said, looking back at the territory we'd just gone through.

It was like there was a massive cliff of debris and old buildings rising out of the darkness behind us. It even looked like some of the skeletal remains of those old buildings were reaching out into the darkness. Clawing out and trying to reach us. I let out an involuntary shiver as I looked at it, and then I chided myself for getting freaked out by architecture, of all things.

"Yeah. It looks like the people doing the reclaiming from the mine have started to move out into this area. You can tell by that grease that's all over everything," Varis said.

"The grease," I said, looking down and around. It didn't look like any of the layers of dust around here had been disturbed recently, but there was that layer of gunk and dust all over everything.

"That's a byproduct of people using those cutting torches to move through some of the metal segments. As stuff is pulled off, it releases fragments of atomized material from the alloy we synthesized from examining materials from the Ancients."

"So cutting through an Ancient alloy creates grease," I muttered.

I looked down at my pants. I wondered if there was some chemical residue from whatever was created when that alloy was cut. I wondered if my pants would be worth a small fortune if I managed to get back to human space with it so some egghead could try to determine its chemical composition.

Then I glanced over to Varis and decided it wasn't worth it. I was already living a life of lavish luxury here, at least when I wasn't getting shot at, and my life here had something I could never get back in human space. Something I wouldn't want to give up.

She looked at me and smiled.

"I feel the same way," she said, giving my hand another squeeze.

Okay. I guess she felt that surge of emotion through the mental link.

We made our way down the more gentle slope in a comfortable silence, though that silence was quickly filled by the steady industrial thrum of the reclamation mine and people doing their work down in there.

Though it was a thrum that was punctuated by the sound of gunfire. It was sporadic shooting, not at all like the high-powered weapons with a more rapid rate of fire I'd grown accustomed to when I'd been forced to go down into war zones on occasion.

I shivered.

"Is something wrong?" Varis asked.

"I'm used to being the guy who sits in a comfortable chair in air conditioning up in orbit while we send the crayon eaters down to a planet surface to do the fighting. Hearing that kind of fighting going on close by is still a little disconcerting."

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"Says the man who led an expedition into the middle of a nuclear firestorm so you could rescue some children, and then you defeated a prince consort in single combat with a plasma sword and chopped his head off."

I grinned. "Yeah, I guess when you put it that way, that was kind of badass."

"It was more than badass," she said.

I let out a surprised yelp, because she suddenly used her hand hold to whip me around. I found myself being dipped in her impossibly strong arms, and she pressed her lips against my own.

I wrapped my arms around her, and I went for it. It was a good enough kiss that I almost wondered if we were going to get it on right here, surrounded by the skeletons of an older livisk civilization. But then she pulled back and grinned at me.

"My hero."

I took a deep breath and puffed up my chest just a little.

"Anyway," I said, turning away from her and looking at the reclamation mine. But then I frowned, because I thought I saw movement over there.

"What is it?" she asked, immediately picking up on my curiosity through the link.

"Maybe I'm imagining things," I said.

"I doubt you're imagining things," she said. "Whatever you think you see out there is probably there. That's one of the first rules of ground combat."

"If you think you're seeing things, then you're probably seeing things?" I said, totally confused by this line of obvious reasoning.

"Exactly. You need to trust your instincts in a combat situation. They're with you for a reason, and you dismiss them at your peril."

"Right," I said, looking all around and then seeing a giant hunk of metal that would make for some nice cover.

"Over here," I said.

"Actually, why don't you go over there, and I'm going to step over here," she said.

"Okay, that's fine with me," I said, turning and staring at her.

The link told me she was up to something. I wasn't sure exactly what it was she was up to, but my general experience had been that if Varis was up to something and she didn't want to outright tell me what it was she was up to? It was typically going to be something that was annoying for yours truly.

But I moved over and got down behind what looked like the side of a building that had been embedded in this particular layer of ground.

I was well aware that there was another layer of blown up city underneath me. I wondered what it looked like all the way down there. Would it be dark and disgusting? Would there be grease all over everything because the people doing the reclamation work had gone through there with their laser cutters? Or would it simply be quiet like a tomb?

Thinking of something as being quiet like a tomb definitely wasn't the kind of thinking I needed right about now. I shivered as I thought about it, and then I pushed the thought away.

Instead, I ducked behind the hunk of building acting as my cover and stuck my head over. I looked down in the direction I'd been staring. I figured there had to be something down there. I'd seen somebody moving, and they were moving cautiously away from the reclamation mine. Like they were worried about somebody spotting them and taking a shot at them.

Or like they were looking for somebody. Maybe somebody who'd been tossed from the mine by an explosion and now they were looking for them.

Those assholes we'd run into before had done the same, after all. I wondered what was up with them, and exactly who they'd been waiting for, and why whoever they'd been waiting for had thought I wasn't important enough to come for double-time.

I was almost insulted that whoever it was hadn't come rushing over when they realized I'd been captured, but oh well. Their mistake was my gain.

I reached down and took my plasma pistol off my belt. As soon as I touched it the molecular bond faded away. It was a weapon that was coded to my biometrics so I didn't have to worry about somebody picking the thing up and firing on me, which was terribly useful.

It was a feature that was available to humanity, but it was the kind of thing you typically only saw in the actual Terran Navy. Especially with the Marines who had to go down to planets to pacify them in the name of peace, democracy, and our corporate overlords' profit margins.

They definitely didn't do that in the Combined Corporate Fleets. The party line was they didn't want a situation where somebody couldn't continue the fight because they weren't able to pick up their buddy's weapon, but everybody knew the actual reason was they were too cheap to put that kind of biometric locking onto all the weapons the CCF ordered at a discount from bargain basement suppliers and surplus dealers in the outlying regions.

Whatever, I pointed my blaster over the edge, but didn't actually activate the thing.

The last thing I needed was for a glowing tip or an ominous hum to give me away. Much safer to stay here and wait to see if anybody came along and provided a convenient target for me to fire on.

I also interrogated the link and wondered what Varis was doing. I could sense her somewhere behind me and slightly to my left. Maybe she'd found a better hiding place.

I wished I could talk to her, but she'd lost her comm as well. I'd glanced down to her belt first thing, and hadn't bothered to bring it up once I'd confirmed the thing was no longer there.

That would only bring up the embarrassment of me losing my comm as well, and I didn't want her to have another opportunity to tell me she'd told me so.

Instead I stared out to the spot where I'd seen that movement, wondering who could possibly be out there. Wondering who could...

"Okay, Terran," a gruff voice said. "We're going to make this nice and easy. I don't want to have to kill you, but I also don't have any problem with turning you into a corpse. That might not get me paid as much, but getting paid and staying alive is better than..."

I whirled around and pointed my weapon at the crowd, and then immediately let it go loose to dangle from my trigger finger before I dropped it because I was facing a crowd of armed livisk. It went clattering down to the ground.

I held my arms up as I stared at a group of livisk in unmarked uniforms, but they looked entirely too professional to be a bunch of brigands down here like those other assholes.

And all of them were pointing weapons at me. All of those weapons were humming ominously, and the tips on their plasma rifles were definitely glowing.

"Good idea, Terran," the woman who was leading them said. "Now hold still while we get you wrapped up nice for the prince consort."

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