Chapter Text
Caroline (Caroline), see, Caroline
All the guys would say she's mighty fine (mighty fine)
But mighty fine only got you somewhere half the time
And the other half either got you
Cussed out or coming up short
Yeah, now dig this, now even though (even though)
You'd need a golden calculator to divide (to divide)
The time it took to look inside and realize
That real guys go for real down-to-Mars girls, haha, yeah
Roses by Outkast
Lights flicker over the low drum of a radio. Weiss doesn’t remember a radio, doesn’t remember much. A thief, the one she’s been hunting, a loud sound that destroyed her coms device, then-
She jolts upright gasping for breath as the escape pod explodes into view. Her vision shifts, blurred by a deep ache behind her left eye. Steadying her breath, Weiss takes in the space around her, just outside the ship. She sees only nothingness, the deep silence of vacant space, and then, an annoyingly familiar mask. The red wolf looks into the ship with wide silver eyes, the translucent red light forming the wolf's head giving them a playful pink hue. She looks curious, with caution to her movements inside the slim-fit space suit.
The thief clicks a button on her wrist and suddenly the radio dims and static introduces Weiss to the wolf’s voice once more.
“Good morning! Well… kind of morning… I’m fixing the effect field and the haptic drive, they took a heavy beating in the explosion.”
The radio buzzes back in as she presses another button cutting off the connection inside the pod, and Wiess frowns deeper. She approaches the control board and locates the external com button. The screen below the ship's expansive glass windshield blinks to life requesting a confirmation number for her message.
“This is Officer Schnee with Atlas Glactic Civilian force. I am stuck in an unknown system with a level 1 captive looking for a retrieval ship after the destruction of Outpost 31-”
“Sorry officer, our external coms are busted.” Silver eyes look into the ship sadly, “I can’t even contact my sister yet, no way the bucket heads are gonna hear you.”
Blood boils white hot as blue eyes sear through space-grade glass and the silver and red material of the thief’s space suit. “Get back in here,” Weiss seethes, her shoulders hunched, and hands balled tightly into fists.
“Working on it.” The Red Wolf says dully, rolling her eyes as she shifts back out of view.
It’s another fifteen minutes before the small airlock clicks, pressurizes, and hisses open. The thief enters with a sigh and slumps her shoulders. Weiss has positioned herself just inside the door, her gun aimed at the brightly lit mask of The Red Wolf.
“Take the mask off and cuff yourself.” She dangles her cuffs off one hand, deadly serious.
Another sigh and the thief disengages her mask as Weiss lays eyes on her prey fully. Tanned skin, dark red hair, and piercing silver eyes. The woman turns toward the officer and knocks the cuffs out of her hand.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Her voice rises, anger lights dark and brooding in those silver eyes. “We’re stranded! So far away from inhabited systems, there isn’t even any light here! Our coms don’t work and we’re in an escape pod !!” Shoulders heaving, the thief growls her next reply through grit teeth. “ We. Are. Stuck. ”
“What?” Weiss shifts her pistol down and away from the other woman with a furrowed brow. “What do you mean stuck?”
“We’re in an escape pod! If we can’t communicate with anyone there’s no way the minuscule fuel stores administered via boosters is going to get us back to the atlas systems!”
“We’re not even in the atlas systems anymore?” Her gun forgotten, Weiss glowers up at the thief with a hand on her hip. “What kind of idiot warps themselves out into uninhabited space?”
“I didn’t intentionally put us here!” The taller woman’s hands punctuate each statement with a wild movement. “That whale was going to kill us, and I couldn’t risk a tail!”
“So you haphazardly shoot us in some random direction?” Weiss responds with her own exaggerated hand movement.
“Are you kidding me? I didn’t direct us into the void like some suicidal cop on a mission!” She presses hard pokes into the officer's chest as she leans in, “I was trying to send us to Mistral, but the explosion threw us off course.”
“So get us back on course!”
“It doesn’t work like that! This is an escape pod! We only have one charge on the warp drive and we used it .” The thief’s teeth are grit tight as she stands nearly a head above Weiss.
“Didn’t you say you fix things?” She’s used to this game, taller, physically stronger individuals looking down on her, but she’s never lost a stare-down, and she certainly won’t be changing that today. “So fix it! Make it have more than one warp.”
“ Make it have another warp , what are you a rockfoot or something?”
The derogatory term washes over the officer and anger once again takes over. “You stars for brains spacers act like us planet-bound citizens are less than just because our homes don’t get demolished by asteroids-”
The taller woman’s shoulders ease as silver eyes widen in genuine surprise. “Oh my god, you are a rockfoot.”
“Don’t call me that!” Ice-blue eyes blaze brighter and with more fury.
"Then don't act like one!"
"I'm not acting like anything!" She resists the urge to stomp like a child. The officer was still new, yes, but she knows how space works, and how politics work.
The two women are nose to nose, searing silver and icy blue locked in a metaphorical fistfight as Weiss reaches for her baton.
Before she can click open the latch keeping the weapon at her waist something hits the escape pod with a low thunk . The thief blinks, confusion replacing frustration as she turns toward the sound. Another soft thu-thunk skitters over the top of the near-stationary vehicle and Weiss furrows her brow.
"What in God's name is that sound?"
"I'm not sure." The thief says cautiously before moving to the control panel.
She activates the thrusters with a few button presses and a switch or two and turns the front of the escape pod in the direction of the noise. A few pieces of debris skitters over the top of the sleek pod, but there's no sign of what may have caused the debris to begin with.
Weiss approaches slowly, placing her hand on the back of the pilot's seat before easing down to squint into vacant space.
"Wolf?"
"My name is Ruby ," the thief grunts, shoulders stiffened as she watches the void in front of them.
Weiss rolls her eyes with a sigh before returning to her thought, " Ruby . What is your expert opinion of the cause of this debris?”
"Not many things I would consider good." The woman says slowly, her eyes never leaving the recesses of space.
Several minutes tick by. Long unbearable moments punctuated by more quiet thunk-thunks . Weiss watches every angle, her eyes flickering from one piece of debris to another, as the space trash slows to a stop.
"Is it over?"
Ruby is deathly still, her eyes focused intently on something Weiss can't quite see. The silver-haired woman is about to speak again, to let her annoyance wriggle its way into the cautious air of the escape pod but suddenly Ruby moves. She jolts, shifting the ship into gear and shooting forward.
Weiss nearly falls down by the momentum of it all, but crawls into the passenger seat with a growl, "What are you doing?"
"I think this is a trash shoot."
"A garbage shoot?"
" No , a trash shoot." Ruby ignores Weiss' exaggerated sigh before continuing. "A trash shoot is illegal in all main space districts, officer ." She intends to continue, to outline how, in the outer systems, garbage and old ships are tightly packed into large cubes of metal and shot into space for the leading organizations to practice aiming their new and improved weapons. However, she's not able to before an enormous cube of garbage flies toward them at unimaginable speeds.
The officer understands instantly as Ruby swerves around the object and kicks the escape pod into overdrive.
"Don't we have limited fuel?"
"Oh yeah."
"So why are you driving like a lunatic!?" She’s not breathing, plastered to the faux leather seat as Ruby speeds forward.
"Because trash shoots mean people, people means an outpost or a planet, and that means a way to fix the coms device and contact Yang."
"None of that matters if we run out of fuel first!"
"That's why we're hitching a ride."
"A ride on what?"
In that instant, Weiss sees a beam of light slice through space. Expertly, Ruby shifts up and over the beam, and Weiss doesn't have the ability to look behind them to see the large cube of garbage explode, the force of which propels them forward.
Ruby disengages the boosters, allowing the inertia of the blast to send them rocketing toward the source of the shot that decimated a metal cube 3 times the size of their tiny pod.
"You're insane?"
"No, I'm just very good at what I do." She grins, wild and toothy with so much joy and pride in the statement that Weiss nearly calms down.
Nearly.
Quickly the cause of the shrapnel and debris comes into view. A huge enterprise ship covered in rough patch jobs and mismatched paint. Across the side, a crude heart made of high-heeled shoes is painted in red. Ruby manages to zoom out of sight and beneath the hovering behemoth, dodging any weapons systems that may cause additional damage to their poor excuse for a space vessel.
As they exit the vicinity of the massive ship Weiss has to cover her mouth as the “port” comes into view. It’s a fractured thing, made of chunks of a shattered planet that orbit around a tightly contained black hole. Massive metal walls wrapped in tight back coils lead from each broken piece of planet to the next. Beside her, Ruby bites her lip, eyes flickering from each ramshackle neighborhood to the next, all the way up to a sleek black ship parked just outside the caged back hole.
“Where are we?” Weiss whispers softly, her hands shaking as she leans forward in her seat.
Ruby swallows thickly, her eyes never leaving the ship overlooking the whole disaster made into life. “Officer Schnee? Welcome to The Expanse. ”