Third time is enemy action.

It's a big 'Verse and people turn up missing all the Gorram time. It's the way things are. "Missing" is a relative term. Just ask any parent when they've lost track of their kid, even briefly. The folk out on the Rim tend to be of one of two types: Either the colonists or professionals who've found themselves a home and rarely leave it, or the folk who work in the Black and rarely stay in one place for long. Folk like that are, often as not, going to be 'whereabouts unknown' for extended periods of time.

Of course, none of that really applies when someone's taken from wherever they are by some level of coercion.

That sort of thing happens all the time. Fact of life. But when two of the folk you know get snatched the same day it's more than a little unusual. Of course, having a competitor of KHI's out here on Hale's, as well as a number of other Rim worlds, recruiting for 'security forces' a couple days before the incidents didn't give me the warm fuzzies.

I wasn't worried so much about the competitor. Like most of the major shipbuilding firms, they were competitive but played fair. That, and they weren't that big a player in KHI's markets. But the timing was still suspicious and the hiring had been referenced in the aftermath of the disappearances.

Honestly though, neither of the snatchings were much of a surprise. Sentry had a list of enemies as long as he was tall. With the sort of business he did and the company he kept, it wasn't much of a surprise. Folk on either side of the law were apt to want a piece of him and, technically, I couldn't blame them.

With Mikie, my first thought was "Wait. What? Again?"

While I doubted most of the folk living on Shadow now knew of her past, a fair number of us out in this little corner of the 'Verse remember well her being spirited off by the Alliance. What a lot of people didn't know was what happened in the aftermath of that incident. How the locals from Hale's Militia and a few friends raided the Sun Tzu to get her back. Or how the Operative in charge of the whole mess was found dead, pinned to the bulkhead with his own blade, after the rescuers had gotten clear. Except they never published the pinned to the wall part.

Now, it was possible that the two incidents were coincidental. Just a fluke of timing. Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Third time was enemy action. And there wasn't a third time. Until a couple days later when x0x0 went missing.

I was used to her coming and going fairly often, so it wasn't a big surprise when she called in saying she was coming to see me after landing. But then interrupting to say she'd been hit and was going down.

With a damaged boat on final, there wasn't a lot you could do except prep the rescue teams and hope the pilot could work a miracle. Which, in this case, seemed to be x0 making it to an escape pod and punching out before her Osprey broke up West of the colony. The rescue team got to the boat and prelims looked like she'd fired the self-destruct charges.

The escape pod made it clear and landed fairly hard not far from the Blue Sun compound, but when the rescue team got there the pod was open and x0 was no where to be found.

Now that was odd.

While it seemed unlikely, it was the classic 'third time,' which implied enemy action of some firm. But just who was the enemy? And what had x0 meant by "dropping off the girl" before her boat went down? They'd found a stuffed animal in the wreck, hadn't yet identified who it belonged to. Was someone after Aurora? Or was there someone else involved?

Hopefully, she'd turn up soon. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I'd grown rather find of x0x0. I didn't want to see her hurt.