This is a long delayed entry in a continuing story that started with The Return and The Return Home. Read those first to catch up.

River’s Run – Part 18

“Now listen up, cause I got time to explain this only the once,” Badger said into the wave screen. “I heard it through the crime vine that he and his bunch pulled a stunt at a bank on Ariel and got away with a lot of coin. Legal coin, all theirs, mind you, but the coppers tried to stop them for other stuff and a few people got stuffed.”

“What people?” asked the blond haired woman at the other end of the wave connection.

“Coppers, no real people. So, his crew got the coin and you know Mal always pays what he owes, eventually, so…there’s the thing.”

“Why do you care?” she asked, suspicion in her voice and eyes.

“Cause Mal set me and my cousin up with a sweet deal and I kind of owe him. Besides, the deal has now gone to shit and we need coin, more coin than I can lay me hands on to avoid the coppers and other blue belly types. So you tell Zoe I gets 50%.”

“Twenty.”

“Fuck. All right, forty.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Bitch,” Badger said in a low voice.

“What was that?”

“Thirty.”

“You called me a bitch. Which I am. But now it’s twenty again.”

“Will saying sorry help, love?”

“No. Twenty.”

“It’s highway robbery!” Badger lamented. “I’m the one setting up the deal.”

“And I’m the one risking my neck.”

“All right. Twenty. But you’ll need a big crew to pull this off. He’s being held in a maximum security prison on Londinium.”

“No, he’s not. He’s being moved in a few hours to a military prison.”

“How the gorramn hell do you know that?”

“Because you know I’m on Londinium right now and have been following things a lot more closely than you have it seems,” she retorted. “Parliament just declared martial law and that means all civil liberties are suspended. A connection of mine says Mal is first to go before a military tribunal, which I just know will find him guilty, with a hanging party waiting in the wings, just so Shin and