Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Four, Part Two

 Notes: Here come the truth bombs! Hopefully everyone will survive intact!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Four, Part Two

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Chapter Four, Part Two

 

“Identification.” Elanus stalked back into the control room and practically threw a badge at Kieron, who managed to grab it without fumbling. “Verify it and let’s get the hell on with this.”

Kieron inspected the badge. It was a modern one, with combination DNA marker and biometric signals tested. He pressed it to the AI’s badge reader to verify that it was a real Federation-issued ID badge, then laid it flat on the surface of the control station where the computer could cross-verify as Elanus was read. “Thumb,” he said.

Elanus pressed his thumb to the silvery area in the corner, and a second later the control station lit up in positive response. “Identification confirmed,” the station AI said in her slightly flat, never quite welcoming voice. She sounded a lot like how Kieron felt right now. “Welcome to Cloverleaf Station, Director Desfontaines.”

Director. Shit. He had an official title and everything. Kieron was so fucked.

“Good.” Elanus sat down and began operating the control panel like he’d been doing it for months, immediately going to the log of most recent events.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I could help you find it,” Kieron offered reluctantly.

“If you’ve done your job and logged everything properly into the system, I shouldn’t need your help,” Elanus replied, not even looking at him.

Fine. This was fine. Watching all his meticulous maps get shoved out of the way, losing the progress he’d made with the search algorithm, undoubtedly having to explain it all the moment this asshole wasn’t totally preoccupied with whatever he was searching for now—that was all fine. Kieron sat back in the chair that Dave had customarily laid claim to, sighing when something crunched beneath his butt. He stood back up and pulled a protein-supplement wrapper out from the back of the seat. Chunky choc-cherry flavored.

Fucking Dave.

“Eating on the job?” Elanus asked snarkily as he continued to scan the log. Kieron didn’t bother to reply, just put the wrapper in the nearest recycling unit and sat back down. He watched in silence as Elanus scrolled back one day…two days…three. He paused when he got to the rescue of the Mason’s Bay, reading through the terse report and glancing at the visual recording before moving on without saying a word.

Yeah, I do my job. What the hell is your job here, fucker? A little farther into the log, Elanus suddenly stopped scrolling. He stared down at the screen for a long moment, then delicately tapped an audio file.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

Kieron startled in his chair, unnerved by the sound of that strange scream. He still couldn’t place it, had logged it as some sort of audio distortion from one of the miners’ ships, but from the way Elanus’s face went from cool and detached to heartbroken in a matter of seconds settled that for him. This was no distortion. This was something deliberate, and it was bad news.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Elanus murmured, stroking over the audio icon. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m here now, I’ll find you.” He took a deep breath, then straightened his back and stared at Kieron. “I need to track the source of this signal down.”

He needed to what now? “There’s no way to figure out the source of the signal, since it’s no longer broadcasting,” Kieron pointed out.

“Then I need the best guess you can put together so I can get out there and start looking for it.”

Kieron’s jaw dropped. “Are you insane?” he managed after a second.

Elanus smirked. “Not today, I don’t think. Are you?”

“You can’t go out there right now. It’s deadly. Without Big Momma blocking the radiation from the quasar, you’ll be dead in a matter of minutes. Dead-dead, as in non-Regenerable.”

“I’m party to information that you don’t have, and it says I absolutely can go out there right now with no ill effects.”

Holy hells, this guy had a death wish. “No mobile, man-made technology has been found that completely blocks radiation this strong,” Kieron explained like he was speaking to a child. “Even this station isn’t perfect under these circumstances, and its walls are over fifty feet thick, with metallic alloy, concrete, and water layers. If you try to go out there, you’re going to die a horrible death.” Ask me how I know.

“I’m delighted to say that, in fact, I have a ship that is capable of withstanding such high amounts of radiation for hours at a time,” Elanus replied blithely, folding his elegant hands. “It’s right there in the name of my company. Lifeship Enterprises is concerned not only with operating on the nano-edge of technical ship specs, it wants to protect human life in whatever situation it might get itself into. That includes being stranded in a situation where high radiation is a factor. My ship continuously sheds and renews its outermost hull when the current skin has absorbed as much cross-spectrum radiation as it can. While that skin is functional, so is the ship, and so is the pilot.”

Kieron’s brain felt frozen in place, like every thought and emotion that had been churning in him since this asshole sat down was suddenly put on hold as he grappled with this statement. It couldn’t be. That just wasn’t possible, it wasn’t…but if it was…and Elanus had gotten here in one piece, after all…

The sudden urge to get on this guy’s good side was intensely annoying, but Kieron would do anything if it meant upping his chances of finding Zakari. Still, he needed to be thorough.

“All that aside,” Kieron said, although the last thing he wanted right now was to push that incredible knowledge aside, “it’s not that simple. The signal has to be actively transmitting to find it—there’s no way to trace it in space this heavy with audio interference. Have you figured out a fix for that problem too?”

Judging from the way Elanus scowled, he hadn’t.

“I assume that whatever it is you’re tracking is similarly shielded?”

“No,” Elanus said, which surprised Kieron. Before he could tell the guy “then you’re fucked,” he went on, “It’s actually the next generation in Lifeship design, way better than what I’m flying. My ship is good, but it can only stay out there for a few hours before it burns through the special mix that gives the skins their resiliency.

“I have the tools with me to grow more,” he added before Kieron could even open his mouth, “but that’s going to take time to set up, and the ship’ll still only be able to fly for a few hours before needing to refuel. The ship that’s out there has a proprietary AI-system and a biomolecular generator in its core that recycles and cleanses old particles to be used again. It’s got a body, and a brain to drive it. And inside it all, there’s a heart that years for connection.” He smiled briefly, and it made him look terribly handsome. That asshole. “I’ve created more than just a new generation of spaceship. Catalina is an entirely new lifeform. She’s my child. And three weeks ago, she was stolen from me.”

Kieron was surprised at how invested he felt, even if half of what this guy was saying had to be hyperbole. “By who?”

Elanus bared his teeth in a snarl. “By my fuckface of a business partner, who cut a deal with a competitor to give them Catalina, the only working model of this design, for an obscene amount of money. And,” he added reluctantly, “he also did it for the chance to fuck me over. We’ve been on the outs practically since we began the company, but I never thought he would go this far.”

“Why didn’t he go straight to your competitor instead of running out here to the middle of nowhere?” Kieron asked.

“Because my baby is loyal and I’m smarter than I look,” Elanus replied briskly. “Now that we’ve shared out life stories, maybe we can get back to figuring out a way to track down Catalina’s signal and rescue her from that festering asswhore.”

“Well, you can’t just fly into the meteor field. You can’t,” Kieron reiterated as Elanus opened his mouth to inevitably argue. “Even with a radiation-resistant ship, the meteors don’t have set orbits around the quasar. I’ve been tracking them ever since I got here, and while my files are good, they’re not perfect. If you want to make it more than a hundred kilometers deep in there, you’re going to have to scout your path with probes.”

Elanus frowned. “I don’t have any…but I saw from your tracking spreadsheet that you do.”

The hells? How had he had the time to look at that, much less read any of it before he swiped it out of the way? “I do, but I’ve got my own time-critical project that requires their use.”

Elanus leaned forward. “I can see that you’re slow on the uptake, so let me make this perfectly clear: I’m your boss. My word is law on this station. If I say you have to put your little private project on hold, then you do, no questions asked. Got it?”

“If you try to requisition my private equipment for your personal gain, I’ll file a complaint,” Kieron shot back, all efforts to restrain his anger abandoned in the wake of this fresh threat. “I’ll take it over your head. You might have bought the contract to run this place, but that doesn’t mean my contract is invalidated, and I’ve got permission for private research that requires those probes during the off-season here.”

Elanus’s eyes narrowed. “Are you seriously challenging me on this?”

“Fuck around with me and find out. I’ll make your life here a living hell if I have to.” Kieron couldn’t let this guy run over him, couldn’t let him tear away everything he’d worked so hard on for the past two years.

Abruptly, Elanus sat back in Kieron’s chair, laughing out loud. “You are definitely not what I expected to find out here,” he chuckled. “All right. We’ll work something out so that we both get what we need. Sound amenable to you?”

It sounded like a series of interminable fights, but as long as it meant keeping the option of searching for Zakari, Kieron could live with that. “Got it.”

Elanus waved his hand in a rolling-type gesture.

“Boss,” Kieron added with a sigh.

Elanus grinned. “Very good.”