Incursion Vector

005

[▲] Armstrong Police Department, Luna

There was one thing that Armstrong had which Irwin City did not: an express checkout line for arrested active military personnel. Apparently bar brawls were just that common on Luna. The men that arrested them didn't even read them the riot act like she had been expecting from a law officer; they were busy laughing at the two Vanguards Leo had thrashed single-handedly in between snipes at the other two who had been taken down by Calli, the "blind tuber girl" a quarter of their size who apparently looked "frail enough to snap when she sneezes."

Of course, none of them were remotely familiar with Calli's cold, merciless fighting tactics, either. Or the fact that the lot of them had been training in high gravity environments for nearly four years. The Vanguards they had fought were certainly burly enough but nothing beat the spring in your step that came with training in high gravity and fighting in low. All of Luna was like a giant silty trampoline to the marines of Methuselah Flight.

With Karda and Leo knowing no one in the Terran arm of the Milky Way and Calli's parents a two-hour trip away on Mars but none of them with enough cash for the cab fare, Nim had somehow ended up in charge of arranging their way out of the city once they went through the police booking, photographing, wrist-slapping and fining procedures. When she pointed out the fact that she didn't know anyone either they promptly pulled the XO card out of their pockets and she was stuck holding the phone in the waiting room. So she did the only thing she could think of.

She called Damien.

Actually getting hold of Damien took longer than getting through the police station. For some reason he had forwarded all his personal calls to his house instead of his computer. By the time she actually tracked him down her call had been routed through three siblings, five cousins (two of them sounding about ten years old), an aunt, an uncle, and someone named Kuia. If she didn't know that the police only permitted in-system coms on their waiting room line she would have sworn she had been bounced around half the explored galaxy. When he picked up the com ten minutes and eleven awkward conversations later, she discovered he was right outside the police station already.

Nim rounded everyone up, flipped the stranded PVs a double bird, then hauled her flight out of the police station before the officers were any the wiser to her having violated the "do not provoke the Planetary Vanguard for the remainder of your leave" clause of their release forms. They found the tattooed man loitering in front of the station near the flagpole dressed for the beach-linen shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. He waved at them with a laugh as he saw them all file out of the station in various states of bruised and beaten.

"Damien!" she sighed. "How'd you get here this quick, anyway?"

He winced slightly at the question and pointed to the dark blue vehicle parked against the curb. It looked sort of like the cars she had seen used in historical safari tours, complete with the engine snorkel in case it ended up in some sort of water hazard. "I came here to bail him out. You guys were just kind of a bonus."

Squinting to try and see through the tinted glass Nim realized that none other than Keiji was sitting in his front seat. He had a bigger black eye than even Karda and was intently staring at his kneecaps with his hands folded in his lap like a scolded child. Suddenly she felt the overwhelming desire to walk back into the station and stick it out with the general population of Armstrong's jail for the duration of her leave.

"You're kidding me!" Karda laughed and jogged over to the vehicle, rapping his knuckles on the window like a kid tapping on the side of a fishbowl. "Hey cap! You find yourself some peevees to play with too? Man, you should've seen the roid raging fools that tried to take us out! They had to have been injecting since they were ten."