Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

Notes: OH NO PLOT! WHAT? IS THAT A CLIMACTIC CONFRONTATION I SEE COMING? I think it is ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

***

Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

 

Photo by Cem Salini 

The moment seemed frozen, a chill spreading through the air and restricting everything, even the breath in their lungs.

Trapper. The man who’d been ready to shoot Carlisle out of the sky when they escaped from the compound. The man who Kieron had rammed with the skimmer, sending him flying and inevitably breaking bones. He sounded a bit wheezy even now, but there was a fierce satisfaction in his voice as well. And why not? They’d been careless, and now they were caught.

“Engage concealment protocols,” Elanus said, the first one to break the ice—of course. “Girls, hide those signals.” It was too late to deny their existence, but he seemed confident that at least they could keep things from getting worse. There was a deep hum, a flicker of Catie’s lights, and then…

“You think you can hide?”

“Comm power, please,” Elanus said smoothly. Catie’s walls rippled anxiously with changing colors, but she complied. “I actually feel quite confident in our ability to hide,” Elanus said into the void.

“And yet here you are, talking to me right now.”

“Isn’t that what you want?” Elanus asked lightly. “To talk? Hopefully to use whatever little piddling satellite capacity your people have to hone in on our position? Mm, sorry, I’m afraid we’ve already blocked that capability. We’re completely invisible to all your sensors right now.”

Was that true? Elanus was speaking like it was, but then he was the master of projecting confidence.

“I think the ability to talk is all you’ve got, in fact,” he continued. “Because if you actually saw us in any meaningful capacity, you’d be attacking us right now.”

“We don’t—”

“You do. Don’t even pretend you don’t, because you do. You’re opportunistic scavengers who would rather attack from the shadows in an effort to take out your prey than even attempt something like that head-on, and I don’t want to hear your justifications because, quite frankly, there are none.”

“You landed on our sovereign territory without permission, and you expect a parley?”

Elanus laughed, sounding as carefree as ever, but Kieron heard the coldness beneath the merry sound. “Sovereign territory? Any official charter for settling this planet was nullified the moment over ninety percent of the population died, and even then, the original charter was for thirty years, I believe, and without engaging the continuation clauses and paying the necessary fees, that original term ended almost twenty years ago.”

There was a long pause, and then—“You think you’re pretty fucking smart, don’t you? But we’re the ones who saw your ship arrive, we’re the ones who were just waiting for you to slip up and broadcast to them, and we’re the ones who have enough mobile weaponry to atomize any attempt you make to get supplies from up there down here. Our satellites might not be perfect, but they’re more than enough to track any drops. Judging from the ship we shot up earlier—” Elanus’s hands tightened into fists “—you don’t have the offensive capabilities to survive a fight for them, either.”

“Do you have the speed for it, though?” Elanus shot back the second Trapper stopped speaking. “Your ships rely on conventional fuels that are undoubtedly in limited quantity, unless you’ve set up some sort of hidden refinery or specialized algeic growth tanks, which I sincerely doubt as that would require the capacity to be a decent resources manager. Even if you do track a drop, you’d have to beat us there, and you don’t even know where we are.”

“We know where—”

“Knowing we’re on the same continent as you doesn’t count,” Elanus interrupted briskly. “That’s a given, but I repeat, if you had the slightest idea where we were right now, you’d already be attacking us because you feel confident in your ability to take out our ship. You’re not, so you don’t. Frankly, I doubt you’d get within a hundred miles of a drop point before we were able to swoop in and vanish again.”

That was a blatant fabrication—once they got to the drop, which was going to be heavier than Catie’s entire frame, the retrofit would have to happen on site. Kieron marveled at his fiancé’s ability to bullshit through the most fraught situations. Had he done this before?

Something niggled at the back of Kieron’s mind…Elanus in an argument with another man, drawing him out, killing him through his own hubris…then it was gone.

Fucking memory loss.

“So, nice try, but I think we’re going to have to pass on your attempts at intimidation for now, thanks so much. Don’t worry, we’ll see ourselves out.” Elanus waited for Catie to shut down the com, then said, “Okay, we’ll have to change the drop plans, break up the pieces into smaller packages that can be retrieved the way I indicated, but it shouldn’t extend our stay by more than a week or so, and—”

“Now, hang on.” Trapper was back. “It’s clear you’re not a man to take lightly, so let’s be reasonable about this.”

Oh, now they want to be reasonable.

“There’s no need for us to get violent with each other,” he went on. “You made a mistake in coming here, but we made a mistake in attacking without due cause. Let’s call that even. What about a trade, instead? You share your ship’s cloaking technology with us, and we’ll give you something precious in return.”

“You don’t have anything we want,” Elanus scoffed, but that cold feeling was starting to creep over Kieron again.

He held up a hand even as Trapper said, “Are you sure about that? Because the man of yours we captured, he sure bled a lot while he was running around over here. We did a few tests on what he left behind, and would you believe, he’s got a relative living among us?” Trapper’s voice deepened. “A mother, nonetheless. One of our little lost boys found his way home after all these years.”

Kieron shook his head at Elanus, who was looking at him wide concern in his eyes. “She’s dead,” he muttered. “She…” She has to be dead.

“Say hello, Carlisle.” There was a moment of silence, then a short scream and a curse. “She’s missing an eye,” Trapper went on, “and half the bones in her right arm are broken, but it’s her. Check your visual feed if you don’t believe me.”

Elanus pulled it up, and a projection appeared in the middle of the hold. It was Trapper in an old-fashioned chest stabilizer standing beside a bloodied woman who looked absolutely filthy from mud and gravel. She glared ahead with her one good eye. “Don’t you dare,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare come for me.”

“You can listen to her if you want,” Trapper added, “but if you don’t come for her, boy, I’ll make sure her last days of life are an agony you can’t even imagine.” He grinned sharply. “I’ll give you an hour to think it over.”

The image vanished, and a suffocating silence fell over them all once more.

She’s alive. My mother is alive.

For now.

 

Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part Two

 Notes: All right, friends, let's clean a house! And by clean, I mean lean on an unfair advantage...but is it magic if you don't do it yourself?

Title: Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part Two

***

Chapter Two, Part Two

 Photo by Robert Clark

A Whirlwind Job

 

“You can’t be serious.”

 “It’s cleaning a house,” Hiram said, turning in a full circle as he looked around the sitting room. “How hard can it be?”

“You haven’t scrubbed a floor in your entire life,” Phlox replied, their voice full of disdain. “And we can’t even see this floor to scrub it underneath so much grime. Scavengers, indeed. It looks like they tracked half a forest through this place.”

“It’s a little worse for wear,” Hiram acknowledged, “but I think it’ll shape up very nicely. We just have to get through the initial bumpy phase, and then living here will be as sweet and simple a life as we could ever have asked for.”

“I never asked for a sweet or simple life,” Phlox pointed out huffily. “You never asked for a sweet and simple life either, I’d like to note. You’re only doing this because—”

Hiram snapped his fingers twice. “Don’t go there. I don’t want to hear it.”

“You never do,” Phlox grumbled.

Hiram wasn’t listening anymore. He headed back over to the front door where he’d left several of the bags and boxes he’d unpacked from the wagon. One piece of luggage was a nondescript burlap satchel, the sort of thing you might expect to see full of dried beans at a farmer’s market. Hiram opened the drawstring on the top of it and plunged his hand inside.

“You’re going to lose a finger one day if you keep reaching into that bag like that,” Phlox said.

“I beg to differ,” Hiram replied. “Everything in here is very well trained and—ow!” He pulled his hand back out and sucked on a scrape that had appeared on his index finger. “Cheeky bastard,” he muttered.

“I did tell you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hiram reentered the bag with a bit more caution and moments later found the thing he was looking for. “Aha!” He pulled out a small, round silver box. It had a hinge on one side of its lid and a clasp on the other that was held shut with a slender silver needle. “There we are.”

Phlox’s voice quivered as they asked, “Is that the…?”

“It is,” Hiram replied, his voice full of satisfaction at having found it.

“You don’t mean to…”

“I do.”

“It could blow this whole house over!” Phlox said frantically.

Hiram chuckled. “Don’t be so dramatic. We’re just going to open it...” he eased the silver needle out of the latch. “…a tiny little pinch. Hiram cupped the box between his hands, then cracked open the lid.

Whoosh!

Out came a surge of wind so fierce that it blew him back against the front door, which almost gave under the impact. Every window in the house shattered.

“Close it! Close it!” Phlox shouted.

Hiram, using all his strength, managed to snap the lid down after a few more seconds. The pair of them stared around the sitting room at what his little trick had just wrought. Shards of glass glittered along the edges of the floor, and several of the shutters were broken, but the thick layer of grime that had crunched beneath his soles with every step he took had all been pushed back to the far side of the house. He could see the actual floor now, make out the grain of the wood beneath his feet. It was rather nice once you got a look at it.

“I told you so,” said Phlox.

Hiram laughed a bit breathlessly. “So you did,” he agreed. “So you did. But, you know, the walls are still standing at least, and now I know just how careful I need to be.”

“You’re going to do it again?” Phlox sounded aghast.

“With caution,” Hiram said, ever so gently closing his fingers around the latch once more. “With a great deal of caution.”

Say what you would about Hiram, but even when he’d been one of the most powerful men in the Empire, he had been capable of exercising a great deal of caution. He didn’t always, but he was very capable of it.

Now that his mind and hands had regained their equilibrium with his box of winds, Hiram was very quickly able to direct the flow of air where he wanted it to go. From the upstairs to the downstairs, he gathered all the refuse, all the dust, the grime, the pieces of rotten or stolen furniture, and an enormous number of spiders downstairs into a heap right in front of the gaping back door.

When he finally put the box of wind away, he was tired but satisfied with the work. “There now,” he said to Phlox, “wasn’t that faster than sweeping and mopping for half the day?”

“Considering you still have a home, I suppose I must concede the point,” Phlox said sourly. “But what are you going to do with it now, blow it all out onto the garden? That’ll be filthy.”

“I was actually going to ask you about that.” Hiram felt a bit sheepish. “Perhaps the best way to deal with this, before I set up a good place for a refuse pile, of course, would be a little bit of…targeted incineration.”

“You want me to handle it, in other words.”

“If you would be so kind.”

“With my magic.”

“If,” Hiram said through gritted teeth, “you would be so kind.”

“Magic coming to your rescue yet again,” Phlox said haughtily. “When are you just going to admit that I’m right?”

“On the fifth day of never,” Hiram replied genially. “Now, if you don’t want to use your magic—and I completely understand why you might not, being as out of practice as you are—I’ll just fetch a broom and—”

“Shut up.” The pile flared brightly, the heat of it washing over Hiram’s chilled hands. It felt like being eased into a warm bath, and a second later there was nothing to be seen on the floor, not even a scorch mark.

“Beautifully done,” he said. Hiram was capable of admitting when other people did good work, even when those people were bloodthirsty fire elementals.

“Naturally,” Phlox replied. “Now that you’ve thoroughly aerated this charming little cottage of yours, what do you plan to do next?”

“Well.” Hiram looked around the room and his eyes caught on his bags once more. “I suppose I should set the place up to be livable, or as livable as it can be before we add to our belongings.” He reached into the burlap sack again and brought out a smaller leather bag.

“Oh, you’re not planning on using the furnishings from the travel tent,” Phlox objected. “Nothing in there matches, you know. You won’t be able to have a soul over because they’ll spend so much time laughing at your abysmal taste, they won’t have the breath to talk.”

“My taste isn’t abysmal,” Hiram protested as he opened up the bag. “It’s eclectic.”

“It’s absurd.”

“It’s interesting.” He pulled a rug that he’d been gifted in the Elasgus Mountains by the chief of a Deyrian tribe and laid it out on the floor. It was made from thick wool, hand-knotted, and was wonderfully comfortable under the feet. That the pattern they’d chosen for it was an up-close portrait of their three-headed skeletal crone goddess depicted in lurid shades of red, green, and yellow was perhaps a bit unfortunate. But who looked that closely at the things they stepped on, huh?

“Absurd,” Phlox repeated.

Hiram ignored them as he went on decorating the sitting room. To the side of the rug, he put an ornate, three-legged table that was topped with an actual toenail from one of the stone giants that had been bedeviling the Deyrians. No one would never know it was a toenail just to look at it, of course. It was beautifully flat, perfectly oblong, and rather a nice mauve color.

Beside it Hiram set out two chairs. The first was a squashy, comfortable red armchair where he’d whiled away many delightful hours reading spellbooks and musing about potions. The constant contact with magic had, in fact, imbued the chair with a bit of a snarky personality over the years, but it hadn’t kicked anyone out of it in months now. It would be fine.

On the other side of the table went a low stool with a  crescent moon-shaped seat and a broad wooden X for legs that, upon reflection, Hiram decided would do better upstairs. Up went the stool, plus the desk he’d brought from his own workshop back at Vordure Palace, all of his potion-making equipment, another rug—this one a delightful shade of blue that only occasionally transfigured into clouds and began to rain—and his bed. There was actually room for the entire bed up in this loft instead of the shrunken-down version he’d been using for weeks now.

Hiram sat on the edge of the bed and bounced a little bit. Softly sprung, it still carried the scent of ambergris at the edges of it. Hiram inhaled deeply, letting the earthy sweetness of the scent fill his senses. It was a smell he would always associate with Andy. Shows of affection between them had been rare by the end, and yet there had been a time when they’d spent so many nights together that his smell had permanently worn into the furnishings.

Hiram laid back on the comforter, closed his eyes, and let his heart hurt for a moment. That moment stretched into two, then three, and before he was fully aware of it, Hiram had almost fallen asleep.

“You didn’t do the cellar,” Phlox reminded him.

“‘Mm,’” he mumbled, not bothering to open his eyes.

“The cellar, Hiram.”

“Mmm.” Hiram crawled further up into the bed. “I’ll get it tomorrow.” For now, he would take what comfort he could in sleep.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One: Part One

 Notes: All right, back to plot! We're closing in on a finale here, darlins :) Exciting!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

 

Picture by Frank Tunder 

Kieron ended up spending the next four days well out of the way.

He wasn’t deliberately setting out to isolate himself. He wasn’t getting lost in a sea of his own thoughts or a maelstrom of emotions that he didn’t want to face and could barely look at anyway. No, overall, he was happy. His family was coming together; there was hope that they were going to escape from Hadrian’s Colony without having to wait for the storm season to pass; and the people he loved most in the universe were safe.

Kieron understood that at heart he was a simple creature. He had never been a man of wild hopes or big dreams. Those were for bigger, wilder people whose wants couldn’t be contained in small spaces. Undoubtedly his therapist or, more likely Elanus, would have a lot to say about that if he actually said it out loud, but there was no point. Kieron was content with the way things were. He liked his life. He liked the people in it. And he had learned definitively at this point that chasing answers from the past only led to pain. All Kieron wanted to do at this point was live in the present.

He didn’t quite trust himself to look forward to what would happen after they got off Hadrian’s Colony yet. It was probably going to involve a lot of the talking that he didn’t want to do. But if Elanus asked, he would do it with a glad heart because nothing was more important to him than being healthy, safe, and sane so that he could take care of the ones that he loved.

Part of staying healthy, safe, and sane was knowing when listening in on certain conversations was only going to drive him up the wall and exiting them.

It wasn’t that Kieron wasn’t smart, but he was not smart enough to follow the math that Elanus and their two daughters were bantering around. Most of the time, there wasn’t even any conversation involved at all, just discussion between Elanus and his implant and the girls in their hard drives. It was a way of being together and solving problems collaboratively on a level that Kieron had never experienced before and, quite frankly, didn’t really care to.

He wasn’t able to talk with Pol and Xilinn much, and even Ryu gave over the com so that Lizzie could focus all of her energies on helping establish trajectories, weight limits, and weather reports. That meant Kieran ended up spending a lot of time with Bobby. He didn’t mind. He liked it, actually, being around someone who made him remember that he wasn’t the most inexperienced person here.

“Those are some good-looking legs,” he told Bobby on the second day out from help’s impending arrival. It was raining outside. Naturally, it was raining outside, but the worst of the lightning storms had passed, and the forecast was as good as it was going to get for the time being. Kieron, as much as he loved Catie, had grown absolutely sick of being locked in her interior, and he could tell Bobby was stir-crazy as well. So they’d taken themselves for a walk, a walk that necessitated Bobby, well, work on his walking.

[Are you sure?] Bobby tapped out. [They feel weird.]

You haven’t done a lot of bipedal stuff yet,” Kieron told him. “I think it’ll probably feel weird for a while, but they look great. You want to give them a try?”

[I guess so,] Bobby said. He took a few tentative steps, stumbled, then darted back to lean against Kieron’s legs. [I don’t think I can do it.]

Kieron smiled and pet the little robot on top of the head. “I know you can,” he told him. “You’re so clever. You’re so…” What was the word Elanus had used to describe him? “Protean,” he said after a moment. “Adaptable. Just work on it a little more, and soon walking around on two legs will be like nothing to you.”

[You make it look easy,] Bobby said, with a bit of a desultory echo to his taps.

“It’s really hard for human babies,” Kieron replied. “It takes them months and months to learn how to stand, much less walk. You’re doing a great job.”

[Thank you,] Bobby replied.

“You ready to try again?”

[Yeah, okay,] and he did. This time he made it five steps before tripping. The next time he took twenty. After that, he skipped right ahead to running, and it turned out being able to leap over the barriers in front of him was a lot more intuitive for Bobby than having to stumble over or go around them.

[This is easy!] he tapped out as he ran in literal circles around Kieron. [I love hydraulics.]

“Just wait until you try out some springs,” Kieron replied with a grin, which meant of course Bobby had to try springs instead of hydraulics, which led to some rather hilarious pratfalls as he adjusted the tensile strength. Eventually, though, he was able to leap almost fifteen feet through the air, land on a single limb, and turn flips all in the space of a couple of hours.

“So cool,” Kieron applauded at the end of it, then frowned as he realized his hands had practically gone numb from the chill. “We better head back in, though, before Elanus wonders where we’ve gone off to.”

[Okay,] Bobby said. They returned to the ship, where sure enough, Elanus had lightened his trance state so that he’d know the moment they came in.

“You’re soaked through, this is stupid,” he said the moment Kieron stepped over Catie’s threshold. “This is not the place to get soaked. What are we going to do if you get pneumonia? Are you insane?”

“That’s not how you get pneumonia,” Kieron pointed out as he shucked off the poncho that Catie had thoughtfully made for him.

“Oh, so now you’re the expert on how people get pneumonia on Hadrian’s Colony, huh? For all you know, it is carried in the water. Maybe it’s a seasonal variety of illness that can only be dredged up by the force of winds stirring waters from miles below sea level. You don’t know.”

“Neither do you,” Kieron said, but he let Elanus fuss over him while Bobby soaked the attention up like a sponge. It was nice. It was homey. It was exactly what he wanted.

When Lizzie and all her passengers finally came into close orbit around Hadrian’s Colony two days afterward, Kieron was tentatively ready to accept that this was going to be a good thing. That something wonderful, in fact, was happening to them. Their rescue was here. Their family had come for him, for all of them.

“Can you see us?” Lizzie asked.

“You shine briiight,” Catie told her. “So briiiight!” The refit had done a lot to boost her signal. Lizzie didn’t just appear like some random object in the night sky on Catie’s sensors; she blazed like a close contact star.

“Approximately five hours and you’ll be able to drop the parts,” Elanus said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Another fifteen hours of refits—”

“More like eighteen, Daddeee,” Catie said.

“To hell with it, rounded up to twenty. Twenty hours of refits, and we could be off by tomorrow afternoon.”

They looked at each other and grinned, and then—

“We fucking see you people now” came over Catie’s wide-open radio transmitter.