The story has grown into a three-parter as I was writing it. I'll be back to work on the third installment in a while.

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There's a line that blurs from youth into old age. A person reaches a point where they can look back and remember how stupid, insane, and just plain lucky they were in their younger days. They may still be capable of doing the things they did back then, indeed they may be far more capable than they were then, given the experience they've acquired since. But with the experience comes the experience , and the earnest and entirely logical desire never to revisit some of the dark alleys of one's life.

Cafferty was feeling all at once like he was eight years younger and forty years older as he watched the video feed. They didn't have audio, so the whooping and savage bellowing that seemed to be issuing from the Reavers as they disembarked from their grounded vessel was absent from the raucous scene on the monitor. Every grotesque story he'd ever heard about them was coming to life right on the screen. They looked like what they were, insane savages, multilated, tattooed and pierced. Savages with modern weapons, though, and as Miloslaw had said, possessed of a dangerous cunning. The imaged shifted a bit as Kellerman adjusted the angle of the camera.

The Alliance couldn't provide support, not until they were certain. They had, however, provided a few items, including enough comm units to go around to the various commanders, a full medical kit for his usage, and a few other handy items. They'd even scrounged up a brand-new integrated-sniping system for Jian-Ku, and like any proper soldier she'd bitched about how it was different than the one she'd used during the war, casting her doubts upon the reliability of the 'new' equipment. The question nobody seemed able to answer was what it was doing laying around an administrative post with no assigned snipers to begin with, but that was the military for you. Probably had a death