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Four Seven Niner had worked with a lot of mouthy assholes in her day. She once spent 35 hours stuck running dark with only Wyoming for company and never wanted to talk about that particular experience again.
That was nothing compared to the orange fucker riding shotgun for the last hour and a half.
“Hey, hon, try not to get shot out of the air by a bunch of amateurs, all right?”
You are a professional, she reminded herself, so she said “Bite me, fuckwad, they kicked your ass plenty,” and didn't actually shoot him.
“Such language,” he drawled, stretching out like a fucking cat in the gunner's seat.
Niner gritted her teeth and fired the retrorockets harder than strictly necessary, making Felix fly forward and have to catch himself on the console. It was petty, and it felt really great. “We're here.”
He strolled leisurely over to the main console, not like they're in dangerous airspace or anything, and tuned the com frequency.
“Good morning, Chorus!” Felix crowed into microphone. “I'm sure you all missed m--” He braced his feet hard when Niner dodged a surface-to-air missile. The quick glimpse Niner got before it detonated showed a hunk of metal that looked like it had been cobbled together from junkyard scraps.
“That was rude,” Felix complained, before clearing his throat. “Let's try that again. My employer, in a frankly naïve gesture of generosity, is offering your entire, sweetly allied military transport off-planet. Doyle, you've got 24 hours. I'll be back for an answer.”
There was a brief reply from planetside, a guy's voice screeching “What the hell, an answer from who?! You fuckshitting piece of co—” before Felix cut the feed.
Niner clicked her tongue and said, “That's a shame. I was just getting interested.”
“I would advise against that. They're all remarkably tedious.” He threw himself back down into the gunner's seat, and Niner cut access to his controls before he could fidget the ship out of the sky.
Dodging another homemade missile, Niner took off toward the Control's base and tried to figure out why the voice on the other end of the line had been so familiar.
~~~~~~
Niner had known that something as, well, ethically tenuous as Project Freelancer couldn't last as a long-time gig. She didn't really have a problem with that, and made sure she could reasonably claim ignorance and following orders when the arrest warrants started rolling in. The problem was that she actually liked most of the idiots she saved on a regular basis. The inexorable, unrelenting increase in tension was hard to ignore, and Niner was not excited to find out what form the oncoming explosion would take.
Even she hadn't expected literal explosions.
She was busy shouting at the brain-dead grunts in the loading bay when the security breach alarms started to shriek. When she heard the distinctive, echoing crashes of heavily-armored assholes fighting, she decided that it was absolutely not her problem. She was about to yell at her wildly staring lackeys to get back to work when the entire ship listed sharply starboard.
“Who the fuck is flying this thing?” Niner demanded of the room in general, before emphatically concluding “. . . Motherfucker.” She took off for the flight deck at a sprint.
The next hour was a chaos of warning lights and ear-splitting metallic screeches, which all went silent when the flight crew managed to crash the ship deep in the snow rather than let it split itself in half in the middle of outer space.
Everyone left was exhausted when they all crowded in to the lecture hall to debrief. Niner was brought up short when she walked into the room, thwarted in her habit of gravitating toward absurd teal armor by the fact that Carolina wasn't in the room. She pushed someone out of the way and settled down on the edge of a desk.
The Director was as curt and vague as ever, but there was a fury there that had Niner staring around. There was a lot of steel and chrome crowding the seats and crouching in the aisles but a disarming lack of ridiculous colors and riotous cursing, and no explanation for why Project Freelancer seemed to be missing its namesakes.
*
The bi-weekly poker game was unbelievably quieter without South and York, but the gossip had gotten way more valuable.
“Did he seriously think we wouldn't notice all of them gone on some top-secret mission?” one of the marine grunts scoffed.
A woman from engineering laughed harshly. “Secret mission my ass. I was in the engine room – Agents Texas and York brought the ship down, and then everyone got the hell out.”
The soldier deliberately rolled his eyes, making sure it showed in the motion of his helmet. “Bullshit.”
“Unless I dreamed that Agent Texas kicked my ass and then a tank's ass, it's not,” said a heavy infantry specialist, pushing the last of her pile of credits in to the pot.
“You'd totally dream that, you kinky fuck.”
She slapped the soldier hard in the back of his helmet.
“No way Carolina bolted,” Niner added derisively, throwing her hand down to a chorus of groans.
Engineer just shrugged. “She sure as shit isn't around here anymore.”
*
Turns out that when almost all your elite agents were MIA or AWOL, there weren't a whole lot of risky missions that required an exceptional pilot. The break was great, at first, but after a few days of overseeing much-needed maintenance and supervising a re-organiztion of the landing bay and having the morons who were supposed to follow her orders lock her out of the landing bay, Niner was bored. Not so bored that getting called down for a meeting with the Counsellor sounded like fun, but it sounded better than nothing.
Trust him to make her immediately regret thinking charitable thoughts.
“Excuse me, I'm being – what now?”
“Reassigned to Recovery Command.” The Counsellor seemed distracted, which would have been understandable right now, if he wasn't also clearly losing his mind too.
“Not questioning orders, sir. But it seems like I should maybe just mention that I'm a pilot.”
“We are aware that this assignment is outside your usual realm of expertise. However, we believe that your skills will be crucial to the new Recovery unit.”
Niner didn't know what the Counsellor meant by that, and the single page brief describing the goals of the Recovery unit didn't actually give her any useful information. She stayed ticked off and confused until she sat at her new station and heard Wash from her headset.
“Command, this is Recovery One reporting in.”
She leaned back in the chair and rolled her eyes at the idea that she was apparently the go-to Freelancer wrangler.
“It's good to hear your voice, Wash.” Last she heard, he'd been stuck in the infirmary, unfit for active duty after the major AI screw-up. There was a long pause, making Niner check the radio connection.
“Thanks. It's good to be back.” His voice was strained, and Niner pulled up his file to make sure he hadn't just escaped from the med bay with a com unit. “Do I have an assignment?”
It sounded like Wash, but it sure didn't talk like Wash. Niner shook her head and pulled the Recovery One mission file.
“Looks like you're headed to Sidewinder. Yeesh, better pack a coat. See what you can pick up there, and report back in.”
“Recovery One out.”
“Alrighty then,” Niner said after a pause to the dead line.
A pilot's job was to get people on her ship to their assignment and out with a minimum of bloodshed and limb loss, and Niner was a damn good pilot. Now she was grounded at a command station, stuck reading orders to a Wash she clearly didn't know any more. But really, the job wasn't so different, and she was still going to be damn good at it. Years of pretty impeccable instinct told her that this one was going to be a bitch.
Other people in the command center were talking to code names Recovery Two through Nine. She really hoped one was Carolina.
*
Months later, UNSC soldiers kicked down the door to the PFL Recovery Command. Niner swiveled around in her chair, held out her wrists, and said “Took you assholes long enough, now get me the hell out of here.”
The soldier holding a pair of cuffs froze, and Niner sighed and took them out of his hand.
It had been unforgivably stupid to let herself get attached to the assholes who made her race an alien artifact down the side of a building, who took the kinds of risks that left her scrubbing bloodstains out of the ship's hold, who'd been so close that they took the whole place down with them when they fell apart. She didn't blame Wash for what he did. Hell, if she'd known he was going to detonate an EMP in the middle of Command, she would have held open the door. But he hadn't trusted her enough to say anything, and she couldn't blame him for that either.
She slid her own wrists into the cuffs, and walked up to the guy waiting just outside the door and who was probably in charge.
“Come on, let's get it moving. Bet you five bucks your boss wants to talk to me.”
It would have been senseless to lock up all of the highly-trained PFL assets when most of them had just been following orders, articularly when Control had a pretty substial need for competent people who didn't ask tricky questions. Barely a day later, she was in a regulation interview room, hooked up to biomonitoring equipment and answering increasingly inane questions that seemed like a weird hybrid of job interview and security check.
“Have you ever knowingly misused UNSC military equipment?”
Boy, did that make Niner a little nostalgic. “If by 'misused' you mean 'taken full if unconventional advantage of its possibilities,' then yes. Absolutely.”
The guy in low-grade armor didn't sound very grateful that Niner was making his job way more interesting. She was trying to figure out a way to work in the story about how she stopped South from throwing Wyoming out of an airlock over a pun when the next question caught her off her guard.
“Do you hold allegiance or loyalty to any part of Project Freelancer?”
She wasn't some naïve rookie. She knew the rest of the Freelancers were probably gone. Dead, she corrected herself. They were probably dead. With the exception of Wash, who she'd helped royally fuck up and who'd gotten thrown into a maximum security prison. Maybe it would have felt more like she was betraying something if she hadn't seen the program deliberately tear Carolina down, if the Director hadn't made her give Wash the orders to kill South, if the people she'd worked so damn hard to keep alive were still around.
“No, I don't. Not anymore.”
And now Felix was in the gunner's seat instead of Carolina.
~~~~~~
When they docked at Control, Felix strolled off the ship without a word. Niner was both intensely grateful and entirely pissed off.
For all her zero bullshit tolerance, Niner was always a professional. She knew her job wasn't to make friends, or play nice. She reminded herself it was better that she couldn't fucking stand the mercs who came and went from her ship and didn't bother to learn her call sign.
She pushed her way out of the loading bay, snapping reminders about her ship at the maintenance crew.
“Heading to dinner?” 613, one of the more reasonably competent pilots, jogged to catch up with her.
“Gonna grab a shower first.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Too much time in a ship with Felix will do that.”
Niner was surprised into a laugh, and 613 waved back over her shoulder as Niner turned to head back to her quarters.
The people here weren't bad, a mix of UNSC troops, hired mercs, and some holdovers from PFL. Several particular shitheads, not naming any names, were pretty unbearable, but most weren't better or worse than anyone she'd worked with before. The missions she flew weren't any more or less sketchy than they'd been at PFL, and judging that had always been above her pay grade anyway.
But hell if she didn't hate this job.
She blasted the shower as hot as it would go for the regulation 2 minutes, scrubbing the sticky feeling left by the underarmor off of her skin.
The mess was packed when she got there, and she slid into an empty seat at a table full of other pilots.
“How was the mission today?”
“Incredibly tedious, and indescribably annoying. Do you think we can get a muzzle for Felix?”
“Not a soul in the place would stop you,” someone laughed.
Some guy halfway down the table who Niner had never talked to stretched hugely and said “Man, I wish they'd give me tedious missions.”
“Missions don't feel tedious if you don't know what you're doing,” she said, and 613 elbowed her in the side.
That was the problem though, she thought, poking at the lab-cultured meat on her plate. Of course mercs made for tedious missions, because you couldn't get paid if you were dead.
She wished she had to make an impossible rendezvous because someone let themselves get pinned down to complete a stupid goal, that she had to catch someone leaping off a cliff. She wanted someone to put her (incredible) skills to use, and she was definitely not going to consider what any of that said about her psyche.
But none of these assholes had the guts to stick out their own necks for the sake of a mission, for the sake of a team. They'd never trust anyone enough, so she was stuck running routine shit she could have done in her sleep.
She waved off an offer for a poker game when she pushed back from the table, saying “I got another run tomorrow. If anyone finds that muzzle, let me know.”
*
“This is Agent Carolina of Project Freelancer, speaking on behalf of the United Army of Chorus.”
Niner had never been so grateful for the opaque faceplates. She almost didn't believe it, but that was was Carolina's voice, that was Carolina's tone, the one that demanded both respect and for Niner to throw an inappropriate comment back over her shoulder to make her laugh.
“This isn't the time to mess around, sweetheart. I need an answer.”
“And I need you to patch me through to the Chairman. We have something to discuss.”
“I don't think so.” Felix leaned in toward the mic, like he can try and intimidate Carolina from halfway to space. Like he could ever intimidate Carolina in the first place.
Niner leaned in and said evenly, in the carefully not-furious tone she'd perfected during her time at Recovery Command, “Patching you through now, Agent Carolina.”
“Excuse me?” Felix's tone was pushing dangerous, but just right now, Niner didn't give a shit.
“My ship, my call.” The 'motherfucker', she thought, was strongly implied.
Felix stared at her, but Niner was banking him not wanting to deal with the fallout of murdering the Chairman's best pilot in mid-air. The connection clicked to life, and Niner tilted her head at Felix.
“Chairman Hargrove, Agent Carolina asked to speak with you specifically,” Felix grinds out.
“One day soon, Felix, you're going to remind me precisely why I'm paying you. Agent Carolina, what part of my proposal was unclear?”
“The part where you didn't mention all of the civilians left on Chorus.”
“I shouldn't have thought that was under military purview.”
Felix hadn't taken his eyes off Niner the entire exchange, and she was trying to think a few steps ahead, but she could still hear Carolina's voice.
“Given that we represent the only viable government here, it really is.”
The Chairman lets out a staticky sigh, and it almost sounds repentant. “Agent Carolina, I appreciate your valor, but this is not a negotiation. We will have control of this planet, and it is entirely up to you whether the people under your care and command are safe.”
There was a click, and then silence, and then Felix's soft laugh.
It was almost easy, when he was bitching about everything from the last poker game to the lighting quality, to forget that he wasn't just an asshole, but a murderous, sadistic asshole.
“Y'know, I have no idea what you thought would happen. Chorus, your time is up.
Here's the coordinates,” Felix turned to Niner, and pushed a local latitude and longitude to her HUD before heading to settle himself back the gunner's chair. “Arm missiles.”
Niner eyed the light indicating that the com line was still open, and decided to do what Carolina always made her do best. She improvised.
“I ever tell you about the time I was on mission at 37-Eros?”
“That would be a no.” Felix sounds instensely skeptical, and that's just rude, even if Niner did mak a point to ignore the fucker whenever possible. “Isn't that the overblown asteroid mining colony?”
She kept herself busy on the console while she talked, entering coordinates, flipping innocuous switches, and trying to subtly loosen the panel by her knees. “Currently it's a blown-up bitty bits of rock and platinum fragments, but that's the one.”
Now Felix sounded interested. “Yeah? I heard they had a top-of-the-line defense system.”
“They sure did.”
“So how'd it blown up into bitty bits?”
“A little bit like this.” Niner gave up on subtle and kicked open the obstinate panel, yanked a handful of sparking wires, and took off running for the back of the ship.
“You crazy bitch!” The shot Felix fired ricocheted around the hold, making them both duck.
“Crazy bitch with a parachute!” Niner called back over her shoulder, and threw herself out of the opening bay doors.
The Pelican took off into the sky, and Niner focused on controlling the direction of her drop. She opened a com line, an old frequency the Freelancers had used, and heard Carolina's amused voice come through in seconds. “37-Eros. Inspired choice.”
“Not elegant, but you never give me any time to plan these things out.”
“I hate to interrupt,” another woman's voice cut in, way less amused and way more demanding, “but is my base about to get blown up or not?”
“That's a no,” Niner said. She pulled her chute, and looked above her for the small shape of the Pelican heading away from the planet. “And who are you?”
“General Kimball, leader of –“ there was a delicate cough, and Niner could hear the eye roll when Kimball corrected, “one of the leaders of the United Army of Chorus. And just who are you?”
“You can call me Four-Seven-Niner.”
“She was the best pilot in Project Freelancer,” Carolina added, and Niner told herself that preening was unbecoming.
“Damn straight, I am, none of this past tense bullshit.” Unbecoming, but so satisfying.
“And would you mind telling me exactly what just happened here?”
“37-Eros was heavily mined and even more heavily guarded asteroid.” Niner had thought she'd left all that behind, but she'd be damned if that wasn't a AI. “Loads of platinum and shit, and a surface-to-air missile defense system that should have stopped anything capable of blowing the place to fucking smithereens.” All right, this guy might not be so bad.
“Not when that 'anything' is read as a friendly ship, armed with live missiles and set on a collision course,” Carolina answered.
“Is that nostalgia I hear? I'm sure we can find you more stuff to blow up, Carolina. I disabled the missile launch systems and nav controls, so there's no way that asshole is turning the ship around,” Niner added for Kimball's benefit. “But I wouldn't count on Control being stupid enough to actually let it get anywhere close, and either way, they won't be gone for long.”
“I'm not sure if you're calling Felix an asshole to get on my good side, or if that's just an objective statement.” Kimball mused. “Either way, thank you. ”
“Carolina, your new boss is way better than your old boss.”
Carolina laughed, just a sharp exhale, and Niner thought she might be doing okay.
The view from the sky is beautiful. Long-dormant tectonic activity left the continents of Chorus striped with rolling, tree-covered mountains cut by plains and valleys filled with some kind of native flowering grass.
“So am I hiking my heroic ass to your city?”
“We've got a lock on your coordinates. It'll take us the better part of the day to reach your location --”
Carolina cut in. “I'll see you in a few hours, Niner.”
“-- or more like a few hours, with Carolina driving.”
Niner hit the dirt in the middle of a field of wildflowers. “I just hope you're better working the extracting side of an extraction.”
“Hey! I always made it to extraction.” There was a clank of metal that was definitely Carolina crossing her arms.
“Jumping off of something very tall and saying 'Niner, catch!' does not count!”
Kimball laughed hard, and managed to say “You know what? I am looking forward to having you around, Niner.”