Madlands

5. Sleazy City-Moon

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With the service lift's entry hatch slammed shut, Grey finally let out the breath she'd been holding and released her shoulders. She wondered how long she'd been hunching them up. Probably since the detailed planning for her visit to Reg'ah had begun.

Their arrival in the Auric Expanse had gone as smoothly as sailing into a turbulent nest of roving space rocks probably ever had; her flight path and Mando's piloting were an impressive combination. She'd gotten the feeling that he almost enjoyed it, but she was basing that on the slightest of tells—his gloved fingertips lightly grazing over the controls, a looseness of his gestures—signals that she would have considered but not relied on solely if she was working him up professionally.

Update-scans of the system underway, she'd next shown him a trick to conceal his ship in the Expanse—tucking in next to a particularly large, slow moving asteroid and looping the Crest into its electro-magnetic signature.

It was, to Mando's surprise, a combination of modulating the engines' idle rate, while also narrowing ship's communications to a bandwidth that dovetailed with the asteroid's natural radiation wave. It was the first time he'd seen a comms system play that kind of role in stealth tactics. While the ship was, of course, still visible to the eye, it had become unreadable to scanners.

A part of her had enjoyed impressing him.

After that though, the fun seemed to stop. As soon as she'd sent the coordinates for the rooftop landing site on the moon to the Crest's system, Mando's mood had changed.

He'd first insisted that he should come with her rather than staying with the ship. She'd countered with a protected ship and the fact that she belonged there while he did not (in case they did happen to cross paths with someone).

Having lost that one, he had then laid-down a series of rules for what she would and wouldn't do once off the ship, and most of them were obvious things that she would have done (and not done) any way, like staying on task and not straying off path.

He'd insisted that she carry a comlink connected directly to his in-armour communications.

And lastly, he'd wanted her to wear something different, an outer layer that was less "memorable" than her hooded, calf-length, light-grey wool cloak. This one felt invasive. But, she once again let the wave of indignation pass through her while not controlling her, and focused on what she really wanted, which was her archives.

So now here she was, buoyed by the reduced gravity of a fast-falling lift, wearing what she suspected was one of Mando's old, oversized hooded tunics, with an overkill comlink in her pocket.

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Up on the Crest, the setting supergiant cast its final rays straight across the cockpit.

Mando tried and failed to focus on the continuous radar sweeps he'd initiated of the moon's air- and orbital-space. The radar was thick with the blips of small, personal craft—the norm for dense city-worlds. Abandoning the radar, he watched the real thing out the front viewport, as banged-up ships lifted off from grubby landing bays and drifted upwards through the thin atmosphere like insects in the sideways sun.

This pit stop still seemed like a bad idea, or at least a risky waste of time. He got the feeling that Grey could talk most people into almost anything—the walls of logic that she built up trapping her opponent in a prison before they even realized what was happening.