After everything was said and done, the Seven went back to their rented office. It was their intent to clean up, split the bounty, then hang up their hats. At least for the time being. Each had gotten nearly 45k out of all the bounties they turned in. It certainly wasn’t a bad sum at all. Especially for less than a week’s worth of work. They spent far less than that on their expenses. On top of that, they had taken Nightmare’s guns, armor, and ships away as well. Technically, they weren’t supposed to be able to do that. Technically, that was theft.  Technically, they didn’t care. So somehow those ships ended up getting fenced through grey markets until they vanished completely.  Though the paid sum was much les

Commander Chase's handsome visage occupied Eva's comms display. He was certainly finely-chiseled and a man of discipline. She was always glad to see him onscreen. "I'm not interrupting you, am I?" he asked. "You seem a little preoccupied." Eva shook her head as she perforated another bandit fighter. It crashed into the rocky ground below. Both she and Miko had taken a contract to help defend a small planetary colony in a nearby system. The colony had been constantly getting hounded by bandits, and so the two of them decided to chip in their expertise. They helped the colony's marshal to repel a number of attacks, then subsequently went on the offensive and attacked the bandit's base of operations. The two of them were cu

“And that sums up the fifty-seven basic control mechanisms for the Prometheus Core,” said the Admiral. “Over the course of the next six cycles, we will go over the advanced control mechanisms.” Admiral Chase had lectured them on the core they were going to be testing. The display behind her was filled with technical documentation, blueprints, and data readouts regarding the core itself. Eva was almost in tears. Tiamat’s Transcendence was in full blast by this point. She thought they were going to go look at the cores, play with them, fly them, that sort of thing. Her heart shuddered and her mind blanked the moment the Admiral’s lecture started. After spending hours on the contract, and hours again on this technical information, Eva felt as though her brain was going

Mack sat in front of his PC and stared at the monitor before him. Its cold blue glow etched hard lines on his face.  It was late at night, and his eyes were bloodshot. His pupils looked flat and dead, even more so after he took a swig of his now-warm beer. On the monitor was raw footage that Eva and Miko had sent him. Just the two streams instead of the normal five.  There really wasn’t much that he could work with, and that gnawed at him. On top of that, neither of the girls had given him much direction as to where to go with any of it. Previously, they knew what they were going to get into. It usually involved a great deal of violence and excitement. But even after a few days had passed by, all they had given him was rather mundane. It was usually them tr

The four pilots split up the moment they arrived on Helios. It wasn’t as though they didn’t enjoy each other’s company (well, for the most part anyway). Simply, they had spent a couple hundred hours with each other, in that lab. They were sick of the project, of brother and sister Chase, and of each other as well.  They seriously needed a break from all of it. So they bid a temporary farewell to each other, then headed on their separate ways. Redstar went off to find her racer and jock buddies while Merlin spent some time with his crew. Miko decided to visit a hackerspace and get her coding game on. Eva decided that she needed to sweat a whole lot. Though she had worked her mind to death the past two weeks, her body had languished to some degree. Being the kind