It's a done deal

Part of the trip back to Ariel had been to get with Legal at KHI so the shysters could draw up some ironclad paperwork for Lily. It was probably the strangest request they'd ever had. Turning the decree of a colonial Mayor into binding citizenship for a genetic construct of dubious origin, and then wrapping four people who weren't married, at least not yet, into a legal family around her.

It was the kind of thing that would get written up in some legal journal so some law professor could make his class agonize over how they'd write it up. Legal managed to shoehorn Lily's citizenship and our 'parental rights', including clauses to deal with the fact that there were four of us playing parent, on the frontier, where any of us could die without warning, into all of ninteen pages. It was one of the most compact complex legal documents I'd ever seen. All it would take was signatures.

Just wish it hadn't taken a Reaver raid to get the five of us together so we could sign the papers.

The Reavers dropped in a small boat. Only a few of them, fortunately. The townsfolk were on top of things quickly, dropping the Reavers while I made my way out to their boat to do a little 'maintenance with high explosives' to their drive core. Probably lost some salvage doing that, but who wanted to reuse parts from a Reaver boat anyway?

The excitement was the excuse to finally get everyone together in Fook's, and get our signatures down to make it final. Sabrina first, by Lily's request. Me, Immi, then Td. With a stroke of one of Grandfather's pens, we'd become a legal family.

Buddha help us all.

Weird thing was, and there always seems to be a weird thing, was what Lily told us about the raid. Or what had happened before it rather: about her being taken aboard the Reaver ship her 'Daddy' had led and someone there trying to get into her programming. Thing was, it didn't take and it pissed whoever it was off.

Lily said it wasn't her Daddy, 'catscratch' she called him. Which meant there was at least one more Reaver with knowledge of her programming. Another 'cured' Reaver, maybe? There weren't many of them, but it gave me more food for thought. Blue Sun was involved in something darker than usual out here and it was starting to look like we'd have more than one major problem to deal with in the future.

On a completely different tack, I'll give it to Td for trying to make things right with General. had to be a hard thing to do. General wasn't feeling forgiving though and I Wasn't entirely sure I bought his reason for resigning: saying he'd done it to derail the trial when the only reason we were going to trial was because he didn't drop the investigation in the first place. Still, it was a step in the right direction.

Just not sure how many steps are left.