With the rogue now gone, Ren was free to elaborate. "Yeah, I was a Junker...didn't you ever wonder why I was so mechanically handy? I was a scavenger, a smuggler, and a pirate. Was pretty good, too..."
"Why not Hogosha?" Katashi interjected.
Ren snorted, and waved her hand dismissively. "Those Samura lapdogs? Pffft. No offense."
"Believe me, none taken," Kat assured her.
"Anyway - no, I wanted freedom, and the Junkers had it. So I hitched a ride to Yanagi and signed up with a Junker freighter as a mechanic, saved up some money, bought a CSV of my own, and got busy. They took me in pretty readily - my uncle's been a junker all his life. I didn't have a CD, but it was pretty easy to hold up Rhinos and those ugly little Renzu things in the Silverton field."
The former bounty hunter nodded. It's not hard to see her as a pirate, I guess. "So how'd you get caught?"
"Caught? Ha! Never got caught. I aimed to steal your gunship, and left my CSV behind on California Minor. But, well, that didn't quite work out according to plan."
"Yeah...at some point, though, it got less like that. Am I just that likable?" The incorrigible Katashi grinned, and rather hoped she didn't smash a ketchup bottle over his head.
Somewhat to his surprise, she just laughed. "You wish! No, it didn't take too long for me to figure out you're sorta a kindred spirit, and you're mechanically hopeless. But, you're also a better pilot than me. So we do pretty well together, and I figured hell, why not?"
"Why not, indeed...well, for the record, I'm damned glad to have you along. I...I'm no pirate. Like you said, I'm a hunter, not a criminal."
"Tsk, tsk. I said you were a hunter, and so you are. Just that now you'll be hunting fat traders, wrecks, and every bounty hunter that thinks they can collect on us."
"And more than that, we'll be hunting the bastard that put a bounty on us in the first place...I'm gonna get some answers, Ren. I want to find out who did this."
"WE are gonna get some answers, Kat. We're in this together. And, like it or not, you're gonna have to learn the tricks of the trade if we're going to survive long enough to do that."
