The nine of them worked in silence. Every gun was cleaned twice, locked and fully loaded. The ships they had arrived in were cannibalised for parts, stripped down to the bare metal except for what was absolutely necessary to fly. They ate whatever gunk they found in the rations boxes in the back compartments. It wasn't much, and stomachs stilled thundered, but it meant they weren't slapping their faces every five minutes to keep themselves awake. Skreem was glad of that. Her pigtails had started to do it for her.

Rhama was rubbing a military-grade salve onto Gurgaston's leg, which had begun to turn a sickly green. 'It'll probably do more damage in the long run, but at least you should be able to put some weight on it.'

He held onto her arm and clambered onto his feet. Gently pushed her away and held out his arms for balance. He took a few, lazy, stumbling steps forward. 'Give me a gun,' he said. Rhama grabbed one and handed it over to him. He took a few further steps, using the weight of the weapon to balance himself. 'I'll be fine. Don't need a leg to shoot, anyway.'

'I'll stick with you,' she said. 'Cover your back when you need to run.'

'Scratch that,' Crysis called to her. 'I want you somewhere else.'

'So who's going to take care of big man when he can't run as fast as the rest of us?'

Rokoara stepped up beside him. 'Can't have him dying on me,' she said. 'Not when he still owes me a guitar.'

Gurgaston frowned. 'From when?'

'Three years ago, on Scizzor Five. Remember?'

'Can't say I do.'

'Nice Flying-V. Smokey-purple design. You used it to brain a guy.'

Gurgaston grinned. 'Oh yeah. That guitar.'

'So what am I doing, if I'm not playing housemaid?' Rhama asked.

Crysis called her over to the monitors. On the screens, a few dozen dots flashed as the incoming ships got closer by the second. 'I need an advance guard, and I've chosen my best pilot for the job.'

'They'll see us coming,' Heratrix said. 'They know what that ship can do now. They'll be on the lookout for it.'

'That's why I'm putting my best gunner on the job as well.' Crysis turned to Skreem. 'That'd be you.'

Skreem punched the air. 'Take that, Gurgaston. I'm best gunner. We always knew it.'

Gurgaston grunted as his leg smacked up against a rock. 'I get to live longer. May only be a few minutes, but it counts.'

Skreem's pigtails didn't have a comeback for that.

Doone collected the last gun from the pile on the floor. 'That's everything sorted, then.'

Crysis nodded. He waved for everyone scattered in their various groups around the room to come in closer.

They communed, seven faces staring back at their leader. 'We might not get out of here alive,' he said. 'But that's ok. Not all of them will make it out, either. And back on that base of theirs in the abyssal cluster, there'll be heads of that organisation that look around and wonder, 'how did they do it? How did seven misfits and a traitor manage to throw us into disarray?' And they'll ruminate and have meetings and eventually they'll decide that what finally did it was just that. We were seven misfits and a traitor, with nothing left to lose. And they'll realise that everyone, somewhere in them, has that recklessness about them which sees them through to the very bitter end. And you know what? If they realise that every Human, Merkiosen, Aldesarian, Kakr, and other species under the Empire banner, has that kind of madness in them, I think it'll scare them shitless.' He grinned. 'We were called Celestria's LastLiners before we left. That we may be. But we're also something more. We're the bogeymen. Myth and legend. We are chaos distilled.'

He looked each of them in the eye. He knew he might never see them again, but that was ok. In that moment they were together, a family from different parents, different worlds, different creeds and religions. But they were more than that. They were a discovered bomb found ticking under a government desk.

Crysis pumped his gun and grinned. 'Let's go make ourselves the stuff of nightmares.'