Percy nearly gets everyone killed.

Episode Synopsis:

Lucretia is helping Percy with her martial arts training.  Important stuff, since Percy has entered a competition on Mars, their next port of call.  One problem, Dante knew about neither the training nor the competition – of which neither he approves.  Family drama ensues, leading to Percy and Dante refusing to talk to each other like a pair of children.

But no time to resolve that, Rudolfo calls, he’s got an easy assignment for them: escort two dangerous prisoners, already in custody, from Mars to the new maximum security prison on Mercury.

[expand title=”More…” swaptitle=”Less” tag=”strong”]

This new prison is only for the really, top-tier criminals.  Fully automated and located on the permanent sunnyside of the planet.  With no guards, there is no one to assist, bribe or take hostage in an escape attempt, and no way to survive outside for more than a few minutes if they did.

The police have no love lost with bounty hunters, and so they jerk Dante and Lucretia around.  When they arrive to pick up the two prisoners, there’s only one.  Much to their inconvenience, they must take the first prisoner back to the Trans-utopian, then leave him there while the two of them return to pick up the second one.

The first is a handsome young man, who is locked in a holding cell aboard the the Trans-utopian. As Dante and Lucretia leave to get the other, Dante warns Percy to stay completely away from this prisoner.  Don’t even talk to him.  He is highly dangerous.

No sooner than Dante and Lucretia leave, Percy is down at the cells having a heart-to-heart with the silver-tongued, murdering criminal.   When Caravaggio attempts to intervene for her safety, she hacks him into forgetting all about it so she can continue.

Back on the Mars station, the second prisoner escaped from the cops, and Dante and Lucretia must chase him down and capture him.  The whole process, of course, took a whole lot longer than anticipated and during their absence, the prisoner, Jeremy, really wins over Percy.

On the flight to Mercury, Percy continues her secret visits to Jeremy.  He uses her doubts about the incorruptibility of the criminal justice system to sow the seeds that he’s not really guilty of the things he’s been convicted of.  While he doesn’t even try to get her to let him free, he does convince her to give him her camera, which is capable of recording and projecting a three-dimensional image of a person, then program it to say and do things.  That way, he’ll have recording of her to remember her by in his long, lonely confinement on Mercury.

The orbit of Mercury will be tricky, Percy will need to change the orbit several times to keep the Trans-utopian in the penumbra or the planet, so she must stay aboard the ship and remain diligent.  Instead she sabotages the ship and play act out her leaving the ship and running away with a Jeremy using hologram projections.

In another foolproof security component of the prison, people must arrive on the dark side, then a special, fully-automated, high-temperature resistant shuttle picks them up and transports them to the prison.

On the way, our villains start to get cocky, because they know something our heroes don’t.  There’s an armed man up front, who shows himself.  Forced to surrender their guns, they are tossed out on the sunnyside to die, while the shuttle returns to the Trans-utopian.  To make matters worse, there wasn’t a guy, it was a hologram, and they make sure Dante knows it was Percy that made it all possible.

When the prisoners return to the ship, Jeremy tells Percy that Lucretia died in an accident and Dante is critically wounded and needs immediate medical attention.  Against Caravaggio’s warnings, she lets them in.  Jeremy immediately knocks her senseless – well, even more senseless than she’s been throughout the episode, but she’s able to come around enough to use the holograph projector to distract them, and escapes.  She starts to sabotage the ship even more.

Things are looking bad for Dante and Lucretia, until they aren’t.  The shuttle returns to pick them up.  They blow a hole in the Trans-utopian to get back onboard.  Finally Dante and Lucretia come face to face with the two criminals in a Mexican standoff.  Percy sneaks up behind the bad guys and surprises them enough that our heroes get the upper hand.

They are locked in the prison on Mercury.

Leaving Mercury, Percy apologizes, somewhat, to Lucretia, for, you know, doing things so stupid that she nearly got them all killed.  Then she has a conversation with Dante and he seemingly gives her the opportunity to leave the ship if she wants to.  She doesn’t and it’s all smiles and family time again.

The end.

[/expand]