Cuius Testiculos Habes, Habeas Cardia Et Cerebellum

Captain Tray Porthos was pissed. 

Imrhien had a pretty general idea as to the why part. She’d done something risky and the man always seemed to get his knickers in a twist whenever she stuck her neck out. Or when another man bought her a drink, asked her to dance, or looked at her in a less than wholesome way, for that matter. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t have been quite that mad if Mikie had been the one on the table taking her clothes off. 

Anyhow, Mikie couldn’t have done it because Squirrel, a big time job broker and potentially the man who had set them up to take the fall for quite a few murders, had already made a pass at her and she’d sneered at him. The only other member of their crew who qualified in the way of having the proper plumbing was Kiara, and she had been making up for lost time, off servicing a client after her lengthy sojourn on the Eluvian World Ship. The Galisga would have been much better suited for the job, anyhow, given that this was right up her alley, but timing is a fragile thing. So that left Imrhien, who had fallen back on dancing for cash plenty when times got tight, to seduce the bastard. It wasn’t like they could exactly corner him and beat the information out of him – not with his thug squad perched around the bar to ensure nobody gave him any trouble. It had to be subtle. Well, sort of subtle. Okay, so, not subtle, just not obviously menacing.

Somehow, Tray seemed to think playing the jealous lover would help her, stomping around behind the bar like an enraged bull, reaching for his swords every time another piece of her clothing came off. At least squirrel seemed to enjoy igniting the man’s ire, every now and then tossing out an inflammatory and insulting comment for the captain’s edification. She didn’t like that Tray was now linked to her in Squirrel’s mind – she had intended to solo this endeavor so that if things went south, she was the only one getting shot at.

It wasn’t like Tray had a thing for her. He’d scorned every advance she’d made and had been pretty clear that his only interest in her was as a pilot. His obvious possessiveness over her was irritating as hell, given that he didn’t even have a right to be possessive. That, and Imrhien just didn’t like being treated like property.

Despite Tray’s internal struggle across the room as to whether or not he should bring swords to a gun fight to defend some honor that he apparently imagined she still had, things were going well. Nothing loosens lips like bare flesh and the suggestion of sex – except maybe alcohol or whatever truth-inducing drugs were on the market these days – and Squirrel was bragging about some huge job that was going to make everyone involved disgustingly rich. Intuition suggested that this was the very job she was interested in learning more about, so she pressed. Squirrel pushed back.

She ended up all but naked in his lap. Actually touching him hadn’t exactly been part of her plan, but at least being that close to him gave her a second option if the first didn’t pan out. She continued needling him, and he continued to evade her. Once the suggestion of going back to his place came up, though, she was fairly certain that pillow talk wasn’t going to get her what she wanted. That, and she was also fairly certain that Tray was having an apoplectic fit and wasn’t going to stand back watching a whole lot more, even with Mikie’s glares and hissed advice. He certainly wasn’t going to let them leave without getting himself killed. Not that she had any intention of leaving with Squirrel.

Generally when someone is touching your intimate bits intimately, it’s extremely hard to focus on other things… like what their other hand is doing… like having your own sidearm drawn against you. At least not until it’s pressed against your throat and the distracting sensation has ceased. It probably wasn’t her smoothest move ever, but it worked, and that’s what counted. Though, it didn’t have much effect on Squirrel – the bastard apparently still thought he was getting a piece of tail out of this encounter, attempting to intimidate her into giving him his gun back, then returning to his apartment with him. Sometimes, holding a gun to a man’s head just isn’t enough to be taken seriously. Or perhaps bare breasts take something away from one’s credulity.

In order to gain his full attention, as well as cooperation, she utilized that other hand – the one that had so thoroughly been distracting him the moment before – to grip a few essential and rather sensitive bits of him and squeezed, twisting his flesh. The change was immediate, Squirrel’s eyes watering as he suddenly found himself begging her to relinquish his nuts, his voice having jumped to about the same octave as his namesake.

Irritatingly, he still didn’t come clean with the intel she was after, and in an interesting twist, revealed that he knew exactly who she was and what kind of trouble she was in. Aside from that fascinating development, she was fairly certain the bulk of it was lies. He had implicated Xue as the power behind all of this, but it smelled wrong. Especially when, despite doing a fairly good job of hiding behind an infuriating façade of condescending calm, the man’s eyes were full of fear. And it wasn’t fear of her.

She couldn’t kill him. At some point, they were going to need more information from him, and killing him right there would be self-defeating. That, and she had every intention of everyone walking out of the bar with no shots fired, and there was zero chance of that happening if she killed him.

He wasn’t graceful about being released, either, leaving the gun she’d pulled on him on the table as a gift for her. Imrhien decided she was going to mail it back to him along with a can of crushed nuts. But the important thing was that he left and took his thugs with him. The crew of Tsunami now had to face the bleak prospect of contacting Xue, as well as figuring out what exactly they were going to do about Jo Massenberg’s body.

And Imrhien had to either avoid or assuage Tray, because boy, was he pissed.

Options and Pitfalls

So, Jo Massenberg was alive. That was an interesting turn of events.

While Imrhien hadn't kept up with her old crew while she'd wandered the 'verse running various jobs for Xue over the last few years, she had thought about them from time to time. She had gotten Jo out of several tight spots, including jail cells, and knew she possibly had even more of a propensity for finding trouble than Imrhien, herself. It was still a shock, though, when the incident at Xin Caodi took place. Leader of the J'Est Neb? Jo had done very well for herself, it seemed. At least until the Malal II had been blown to tiny bits by the Orion Confederation. Imrhien had mourned Jo's death quietly; besides not really being able to do anything to help the situation, she didn't want to give anyone of consequence any reason to associate her name with the pirate organization.

But now, as chance, or fate, or whatever unseen and potentially nefarious hand in this would have it, Jo's very much still alive body had come into her possession - well, the crew's, anyway. It seemed she would have the opportunity to get Jo out of another tight spot... if the authorities didn't catch up with them first. She wasn't entirely sure about Tray and where he stood on the whole matter of legality. She knew he was at least somewhat aware of her own sordid past - possibly not of her entire list of legal transgressions, which rivaled in length the list of ingredients involved in a good Thai curry - and he certainly wasn't above smuggling certain cargo of an illegitimate nature, so he at least had some sense of there being a moral grey area and didn't necessarily frown on lawlessness. The question was how far over the line separating legal from illegal was he willing to step, especially over a pirate that he didn't know and certainly had no allegiance to?

There were a surprising number of options available to them with regard to what they could do with Jo's body. They could go to their own government, the Alliance, tell their story and hand Jo's body over to them in an attempt to clear their names of whatever charges that might be hanging over their heads through cooperation. They could also take her to the Laandsrat council on Araxis, the Orion Confederation, the Eluvians, or Starfleet, with the same intent. They could reasonably dump her on Xue, who had, after all, given them the job in the first place, and let him figure out how to untangle the mess they were in. Or, they could use her as a bargaining chip with the J'Est Neb in order to get information and secure protection if they needed it.

The trouble was, they had no guarantees about any of the aforementioned groups or individuals keeping their word, with the only likely exception being the pirates. Imrhien knew that in any dealings with law enforcement or government agencies, there wouldn't just be bargaining from a weakened position because of legality - there was literally nothing stopping whatever officials they dealt with from going back on the agreement and tossing them in jail until they rotted. So far, the evidence was against them, and in her own experience with them, the Alliance, at least, had never really bothered itself with the actual truth. As far as she was concerned, individuals could be trusted, but governments could not.

While there were people she could trust within certain factions who held positions of political power, such as the Legate of the Laandsrat council, she had no way of knowing just how much influence her old friend, Calina Tereshchenko, would have in keeping a bargain. Especially when the council she presided over included the UAP. She trusted Calina, but she didn't trust the rest of the council from somehow overruling Calina's honor. The UAP would have reason enough to betray an agreement just to get their hands on a few criminals. The Orion Confederation had already proven that they would go to whatever lengths necessary to either get their hands on or kill Jo Massenberg, including illegally blockading a planet, so stabbing a couple of smugglers in the back probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Going to Xue was a toss up. He certainly had the clout to get to the bottom of things and keep them safe... Possibly even clear their names of any involvement. However, even though it was remote, there was a chance that he had actually been the one to set them up to take the fall. Or he could consider it an offense that they'd been spotted by the law and blame them for it. No, turning her over to Xue was too risky; at least not without knowing for sure what his part in all of it was.

The only option, then, would be to bargain with the J'Est Neb. They were pirates, sure, but Imrhien knew that pirates generally had a code of ethics. Sure, they weren't nice people, especially if you had something that they wanted, but there was a sense of honor that pervaded even the nastiest, most evil of them. Ironic as it was, for pirates, your word, your integrity was a powerful thing. Being an oathbreaker made you worthless as a businessperson. It stood to reason that if they struck a bargain, the J'Est Neb would be honor-bound to keep it.

Regardless of legality, Imrhien's goal in all of this was to keep all of them alive and free. True, she wouldn't have chosen to turn Jo Massenberg over to the authorities in the best of scenarios, but her desire to help Jo and to keep her crew safe coincided perfectly, so it wasn't really a conflict of interest. She wondered, though, if the captain would see it that way, or if he would question her motives. Either way, she was determined - if keeping Tray and the rest of them safe meant disobeying his orders or earning his distrust in her, then so be it. She would rather have him alive an furious with her than dead and not. Mikie and Davion weren't a concern. They both knew quite well which way the wind blew when it came to bargaining with the feds, and so would need very little in the way of convincing.

So far, they seemed to be in the clear, at least. There had been no bulletins calling for their arrest on the Cortex. It was remotely possible that the Starfleet vessel hadn't managed to identify the ship beyond her model; it was more likely that they had and either hadn't divulged the information to anyone beyond their own Federation, or else they had and the intel was being kept very quiet.

That last possibility was the one that had kept her going through the grueling pace Tray had set for them. They had returned to Booty Bay to regroup, gather their wits, and come up with a plan. Without more than a few hours of rest, they had journeyed to Araxis in order to stash the rest of their payload in a cargo hold that would be exceptionally difficult to trace back to them, as well as to sniff around for any hint of pursuit. There had been none, and so they were returning to Booty Bay, their safe haven, to rest and plan their next move.

Imrhien was exhausted. She didn't dare leave her seat on the bridge for longer than it took to use the head or refill her coffee mug out of fear that they might run into trouble. To leave the bridge unattended would have been suicidally reckless. Mikie had, unfortunately, decided to partake in a bit too much opium, presumably to relax and unwind. She hadn't recovered enough to cover the bridge so that Imrhien could get some sleep, and no one else on board could handle the ship nearly as well as Imrhien or Mikie.

While Imrhien was keeping a vigil over the bridge and their surroundings and Mikie was nursing a hangover the likes of which would make gods weep, Tray and Davion were busy scouring the nets, attempting to track down pieces of the puzzle. They were going to have to figure out what the big picture was damned quickly, because there were too many unknowns, all potentially working against them. Who knew about Jo Massenberg's body on that ship? Had her body been on that derelict on purpose, or was it entirely coincidental? Who had set them up to take the fall? And why? Had they confounded or fulfilled the plans of whomever was pulling the strings? That thought turned Imrhien's stomach - that they were playing right into someone's hands without even knowing it.

She was still deep in thought later when Tray stepped onto the bridge, moving up to stand behind his pilot in order to peer at her scopes, his hands almost unconsciously dropping to her shoulders, gently massaging her tense muscles. After a few moments, he told her that he had somehow managed to track down the originator of the job, or at least track the job one step beyond Xue. He had intended for her to change course from Booty Bay to Xin Caodi to investigate the lead immediately, but changed his mind as soon as he saw her tired eyes. He needed his crew to be functional, and with Imrhien pushed possibly to the limits of her endurance and Mikie still nursing her opium hangover, he decided a rest stop wasn't out of order.

"We'll stay over at Booty Bay long enough to refuel, take on supplies, and for you to get a full night's sleep," he told her. "And then, we set course for Huli Jing. There's a rodent in the city we need to talk to."