KISMET ─ vento aureo.

▹ TWENTY-SIX ;

"You still care about us, Captain. You're still as reckless and as daring as ever." She smiled but it didn't reach her eyes. "I think we'll all be better off once this job is done."

Trish hadn't answered the question. You opened your mouth, but was cut off by your holopad going off. You took it from the nearby table, scanning the message.

"Summons from Fugo the bridge," you told Trish. She nodded, and less than five minutes later, you had joined your crew on the bridge. Mista and Narancia were clustered around Fugo by his console, Coco sitting on one of the screens. JoJo stood off to the side, looking a little overwhelmed but interested nonetheless.

"Cap, you're up already? Are you sure you shouldn't be resting more?" Narancia looked up at you, wide-eyed. You were glad to see that neither of his eyes looked worse. Actually, he looked hell of a lot better than everyone else did.

"I'll be fine. This is a lot more important than rest."

You found a spot between Mista and Narancia behind Fugo. Put simply, your engineer looked like flack. He probably hadn't slept at all since you'd gotten back on the ship. He tapped one last line of code across his screen before it dissipated, leaving behind a crisp new screen with only a few lines of information.

"We did it!" Mista shouted, high-fiving Narancia. "We cracked the drive!"

"You didn't do anything," Fugo grumbled. He rubbed his eyes. "All you did was get in my way and drop Coco Jumbo. Five times."

"Eh, call it moral support. What have you got for us?"

Fugo looked ready to collapse. "The drive was a set of complicated commands to input into Coco Jumbo. It effectively put it into a lockdown state and paused all of its other processes. From there, I had to work with the bare bones of its computer to produce this set of coordinates and this message."

He projected his screen into the air. A line of numbers, and beneath that, simply:

Congratulations. I eagerly await your arrival. JPP.

"The code is constantly shifting," Fugo said. "That set of coordinates was recently updated. As of now, it's Polnareff's most current location."

"And where is that?" Trish asked.

[ I CAN HELP WITH THAT. ] Coco overlaid Polnareff's image with a holograph of its own, focusing on a planet a few star systems away from where you were presently.

[ PLANET 857, JUST A FEW CLICKS AWAY FROM BEND GATE III. VIRTUALLY UNINHABITABLE. VERY HOSTILE. HOME TO A FEW RESEARCH BASES AND NOW POLNAREFF. ]

Mista frowned at the hologram. "Never heard of it."

[PROBABLY NOT. IT'S A VERY DESOLATE PLANET, ONLY OF INTEREST BECAUSE OF ITS EXPANSIVE OCEAN AND UNDERWATER SYSTEMS. AND IT'S EXTREMELY FAR AWAY, BESIDES. IT'LL TAKE AT LEAST THREE DAYS TO GET THERE. ]

The crew began chattering among themselves. You stayed quiet, a bad feeling settling in your stomach.

"Does this planet have a name, Coco?"

[ YOU CAN CALL IT MINOS IF PLANET SO857 IS TOO MUCH OF A MOUTHFUL. ]

You didn't outwardly react to this information. But inside, you felt something tear.

Minos. Of all the planets, why did it have to be that one?

You didn't let yourself think about it. You couldn't. If you thought about it, someone would notice it playing across your face and start asking questions.

All you had to do was find Polnareff and get the Stand Arrow. That was all you had to do.

A ping went off at the comms station. Trish went to answer it, her forehead wrinkling.