There was no yelling or screaming or bellowing from me and Varis this time around. There was no need for any of that.

No, I was in the zone. It seemed ridiculous to talk about the battle link like I was in a sports game, but that's exactly what was going on here.

My plasma sword hummed in my right hand and my pistol hummed in my left. I felt very much like a pirate sailing the seven seas back in the day. It briefly gave me a notion of just staying down here in the Undercity and hitting the empress where it hurt by coming up through the plate up above whenever I damn well pleased.

"What are you thinking about?" Varis asked, as she raised her pistol and fired at a livisk who was coming at us. It looked like one of the bounty hunters.

"I was thinking about how much fun it would be to be a pirate."

"Is there something about piracy that made it more appealing on your world?" she asked.

"Okay, so the reality of living as a pirate probably isn't as cool as how it's depicted in the movies, but how they used to live on ancient Earth seems like it would've been pretty cool. Not having to answer to anybody. Doing your own thing."

I stabbed a livisk who came at me and then the other livisk started to give me and Varis a wide berth. Which was a problem. It was a lot easier when they were coming at us and we were killing them.

I felt a warning from Varis and I brought my sword around. She ducked under it easily enough, practically doubling herself over backwards as the sword moved over her and sliced through an imperial coming at her.

The imperials had much better equipment, though it was still unmarked because they probably wanted a little bit of plausible deniability for Her Majesty.

"Thank you," Varis said, popping up and leaning in to hit me with a kiss on the cheek.

She also brought her own blaster up and fired several times. I could sense the satisfaction as the shots landed, and I also heard the cries of pain from the livisk who'd made the mistake of coming at her while they thought she was distracted.

I raised my own pistol and fired at the max setting. It blasted into a livisk who was coming at us, only it was one of the reclamation mine livisk who was carrying one of those primitive tubes.

So basically they ceased to exist. They didn't quite disintegrate. A plasma weapon couldn't disintegrate somebody like a phaser in Star Trek, but if you hit somebody with enough energy that their body totally exploded and all their insides burned away? That was pretty much the same thing as disintegrating somebody, give or take a couple of steps in the process.

A large group of livisk looked like they were gathering to launch an attack at us despite that recent disintegration. Most of them imperials with a smattering of bounty hunters in with them. Most of the reclamation miners looked like they'd broken and were trying to escape.

I looked over at them. Varis did the same. There was no need for verbal communication.

Only before we could attack them, a shadow with a fluttering cape behind it came flying out of the twilight. A massive sword swung in a wide arc all around the figure, and a moment later everybody who'd been standing there was bisected and screaming in pain or just gurgling.

That quieted down pretty damn quick, though. Livisk were pretty hardy when it came to combat, but even they couldn't handle having their torsos bisected.

Jeraj raised his bleeding sword up to his face in a salute. I did the same with my plasma sword, but I made sure to keep it far enough from my face that I didn't singe myself.

"That looks like a plasma sword that's been bestowed by the Engineers Guild," he said, looking down at the hilt.

"It was," I said. "I have a good buddy, Harath, who gave it to me."

"I'm more interested in how you managed to convince somebody from the Engineers Guild to give one of their plasma swords to somebody outside of the guild, and to a human no less."

"What can I say?" I said with a shrug and a smile. "It seems like I grow on people the more time I spend with them."

"Yes, I heard about your antics when you took on Solom."

"Solom?" I asked.

"The asshole who you killed in single combat when he tried to invade your territory after the empress dropped an nuke on you."

"Oh, that asshole," I said. "I never got his name, but I do have his head on display in a trophy room."

"You already have a trophy room?" Jeraj said.

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"Well, I don't know if I'd call it a trophy room. I pretty much have Solom's head in there. "Anyway. Thank you for putting a name to the head. I'll have someone make a plaque."

"Glad to help," he said, sketching a quick bow.

I looked beyond Jeraj. I particularly looked at everybody who had been fighting just a moment ago, but it looked like the fighting had mostly come to an end.

There were a few injured people lying on the ground. I saw a few livisk who looked like they came from the reclamation mine, and there were some of my crew as well.

I stared at all of the destruction, and all I could do was shake my head.

"Such a fucking waste," I muttered.

"What's that?" Varis asked.

"I wouldn't call this a waste," Jeraj said, whipping his sword around and putting it on his side. The blade folded down on itself automatically as he did that until there was nothing but the hilt. Which had me wondering why they didn't have a plasma generator in the hilt for the swords they gave the prince consorts.

Maybe the empress thought it looked more impressive to have a dark blade rather than the glowing plasma. Whatever.

"All this death and destruction," I said, "It seems so pointless."

"The empress wants you dead," Jeraj said with a shrug.

"You have to fight off assholes sometimes," Varis said with a shrug of her own."

"Yeah, that's something I'm starting to realize," I said.

I thought about how things worked in human space. How it had been the same multinational and then multi-star conglomerates running everything for as far back as I could remember. There were some people who pushed back against them, sure, but mostly it was just business as usual because nobody ever got fucked with to the point there was a mass revolution.

Then I thought about how things were on Livisqa. How there were civil wars that resulted in actual nuclear warfare and the destruction of entire cities from time to time. Arvie had also told me about at least one occasion where a planet's crust had been cracked by somebody improvising a mining device and turning it into something that could be used to destroy an entire planet.

It hadn't been a particularly large rocky planet to hear Arvie tell it, but it was still a planet that had been destroyed. Like, not in the sense of the Death Star firing a laser and blowing something up in a cheesy explosion with that horizontal ring effect that was still used in movies to this day, but rather the planet had been cracked open like an egg and the liquid hot magma yolk leaking out had completely ruined its ability to support a biosphere.

I shook my head. So much death and destruction out there in the galaxy. I looked at the aftermath of all that fighting, and I felt bad.

"What's wrong?" Varis asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.

"It's just that I've been getting awfully bloodthirsty as we make our way through the Undercity," I said with a shrug.

"You feel bad about that?" she asked.

"I don't know that I'd say I feel bad about being bloodthirsty. It's like you said, we're in a war, and sometimes when you're in a war there are people who need to be taken out. I guess I don't feel bad about the whole bloodthirsty routine when I put it like that, but I feel like I could be doing better."

"Doing better how, Bill?" she asked, her voice soft. She didn't use my full name. I figured that meant I wasn't in trouble for thinking thoughts that were less than honorable.

Most livisk would be dancing a jig because they got the opportunity to defeat their enemies in honorable combat, after all. But I wasn't livisk. That's one of the things Varis loved about me.

I took in all the wounded and then I shook my head.

"Olsen," I said. "Rachel."

Both of them jogged over and stood next to me. I noticed other people from the crew turning to stare at me as well. I didn't flinch under those looks, but I could tell that some of them didn't like that I was giving orders again.

No doubt they were thinking about how a lot of this was my fault. Or maybe they'd heard I was shacking up with an alien hottie in a luxury tower while they were stuck down here. Or maybe it was just that they saw me showing up here today with said alien hottie and didn't appreciate it.

"I want the two of you to have everybody start looking through the wounded. See if there's anybody we can save down here."

"That's going to be difficult considering the level of medical technology down here, Captain," Olsen said. "I wasn't lying when I said they were trying to work us to death and they don't have any medbays down here."

"Yes, I get it and I understand," I said with a shrug, "But that doesn't change the fact that we need to do something for these people. We need to do better. We need to be better."

Olsen stared at me for a long moment. I wondered if it was going to be a moment where he decided it wasn't worth following my orders. Not if I was giving him orders to try and save people instead of killing them.

Especially people he'd just been fighting.

But then he merely nodded, glancing over to Rachel.

"You sure you don't want to give that order yourself, Bill?" Rachel asked.

"Yes, I'm sure," I said. "It looks like Olsen has everybody pretty well in hand, after all. And I honestly don't know how they'd take an order from me right now."

"He does," she said, grinning, as Olsen walked off and started barking orders at people. Then the grin slipped. "Most of the crew would still follow you, but there are some…"

She trailed off. I wondered if she was thinking about he husband. I wondered where he was, because I sure hadn't seen him since all this craziness started.

There weren't a lot of uninjured livisk left. I figured we'd have to rely on the human crew to take care of business. Though I noticed some of the crew were only looking at other humans despite the fact that there were injured livisk out there.

"No," I said, my voice carrying out clear over everything. "We take care of everybody, livisk and human alike. We're better than that."

"They are enemies," Varis pointed out.

"They were trying to kill you just a moment ago," Jeraj said. "Nobody on this planet would think any less of you if you simply killed them. It's the honorable thing to do."

"Maybe it's the honorable thing to do as far as the livisk are concerned, but it's not the right thing to do as far as my conscience is concerned."

Both livisk stared at me for a long moment. There were times when I was reminded of exactly how alien their culture was. The fact that I'd been able to chop Yana's arm off and she was chatting with me like we were... well, maybe not like we were old friends, but at least like we were acquaintances. That was enough to tell me just how odd things could get with the livisk.

"This is what you were talking about before, isn't it. Doing civilization better?" Varis asked, locking eyes with me. I held her gaze. I knew she could feel the determination through the link, the steel in my mind in that moment.

"It is," I said.

She nodded.

"Very well. Bill," she said, reaching out and interlacing her fingers with mine. "We have to kill sometimes for what we want to do, but that doesn't mean we can't do better when the fighting is over."

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