Niko forced her voice to sound friendly but earnest. “Sorry, friend. We’ve got somewhere we need to be.”

“You ain’t no friend of mine if you’re refusing a drink!” The pirate thrust a hairy object at Niko. She recognized it as a wineskin, picked up from who knew what planet. She reached out and took it. As she had thought, it was made from a once-living creature somewhat like a gopher, hollowed out so the head, fixed on a cork, could be removed. Its tiny limbs stuck out helplessly, and its belly sagged.

Reluctantly, she squirted liquid into her mouth and half choked as she swallowed fire. “Good stuff,” she managed, and handed it to Milly, who muttered something and took a swig, seemingly unaffected.

“Good stuff? Good stuff? The best stuff! You’re a conny-seur, you got to come with us!” Another pirate draped an affectionate arm around her, having to reach up to do so. He was small and red haired, and very drunk. His fellows, a gang of men and women also very drunk, guffawed.

Niko and Milly exchanged glances.

“Fuck this,” Niko said, and dropped the man with a single punch.

While Niko had appreciated that Milly was ex-military, like the rest of them, she had not asked her to prove herself, had not tested her in combat. What would’ve been the point of that? She was, after all, being hired as a pastry chef.

But Swans are the most sought-after dancers of all the races in the Known Universe, and there is a reason for that. Dance is central to their culture; it is part of their daily life. And even their soldiers dance, a lethal combat ballet that Niko had always heard stories about but had never witnessed.

Now she saw exactly how deadly it could be.

Milly moved faster than Niko could think. She seemed everywhere, cartwheeling, twirling, heel or wrist flashing out to disarm, to snap back a neck, to smash delicate throat tissue and leave the victim gasping for air.

Niko wasn’t bad at hand-to-hand combat, but it had never been her strength. She drew the pistol printed for her by the Thing and snatched an additional one from a fallen pirate.

At that point, things really began to heat up, because pistols were one of her strengths. She was a deadly shot, each time hitting her target, felling them one by one as Milly took out the other side of the room, eliminating her own targets until there was no one standing other than the two of them, breathing hard and looking at each other. Crumpled forms littered the hallway.

“I could’ve used you in my unit,” Niko said.

Milly’s eyes gleamed as she nodded. “I’ll take that as the compliment it is. But we don’t have time for that right now. More of them will be coming along any minute.”

An alarm sounded. Niko shot the camera immediately overhead.