For as graceful a character as Moon is, his ship was an antithesis. The shoe-boxy, blocky, sort of rectangular construct looked assembled out of Leggos. Not totally out of the question, actually, so much is built with an infinite size range of those constructors these days. (Heh, remind me to tell you about the Leggo Wars!)

A face appeared on a virtual screen that popped up on the Viz to my left, Moon’s narrow Hexalian face inscrutable as ever. Good old Moon, I thought as I took in the small zoolander lips chiseled onto his faintly blue skin. He had a very flat nose, nostrils almost slits, with not much more than a sharp ridge running the length of it from the brow of his large, deep set, vertically iris-ed, golden eyes. They seemed to be looking right through me.

“Well?” I queried.

“I’ve been here for three planetary days already,” the blue mask stated with extreme economy of motion.

He looked really excited . . . You have to know Moon, almost nothing can break him out of his supernatural serenity.

For example, once we were chasing scavs out on some obscure rim world, Kronk’s World or something like that, and after whipping through vicious crystal spike warrens, through volcanic tubules, crumbling rock canyons and all kinds of nasty dangerous stuff we’d managed to kill all of the band but the leader who, at the time, was still giving us a bit of difficulty.

Moon and I were on hover speeders, and he, with his rather aerodynamic build, was in the lead. We were very close to our quarry but still not quite in striking distance. Then the scav thrust jumped onto a local freeway and zipped into the nearby small town. I guess he thought he could give us the slip in the narrow streets.

Moon darted away to the left and I stayed on the scav’s tail. The scav took a left and Moon dropped down on him as he turned the corner, his much heavier vehicle making a nice paté of the scav.

There were locals standing around on the street, gawking, as Moon calmly got off his speeder, went up to one of them and asked, “What time do you have?” He was told. “Thank you,” he said as he turned and calmly, stepping carefully over various globs of scav, returned to the speeder and took off.

Like, give me a cheeseburger, eh? No problem, yawn . . . I have to tell you it took me the rest of the day to work off the adrenaline buzz I had worked up. Heh!

“So what makes you so happy?” I asked.

“Not happy, concerned.”

I waited for more . . . dum de dum . . . “Okay,” I said, “why are you concerned?”

“You see the flame vortex in the southern hemisphere?”

“Sure, what’s that green stuff?”

“Some kind of biological weapon. It’s being generated by the vortex.” Moon turned and looked at something off camera. When he turned back, a smooth swiveling motion, he said, “If unchecked it will totally destroy the planetary biology.”

“Ahh,” I said, understanding dawning on me. Starc has people here, family. So does the Babe. “Where’s Starc?”

“I’m here to take you in,” Moon said, turning once again off camera, then, “We’re to rendezvous in Igcenzio.” With that the vid blanked and his Leggo batch began to drop out of orbit.

“Follow him in,” I said. Talon clucked, she’d been doing that lately, “Indeed.”