Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seven, Part Two

 Notes: Time to up the foolishness! INCREASE FOOL FACTOR BY TEN!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seven, Part Two

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Chapter Seven, Part Two

 

Suddenly coming face to face with the Elanus who Kieron had first met was jarring. Gone was the annoyingly curious, sporadically charming man who’d been dogging his footsteps and questioning everything. This was the CEO who was accustomed to being obeyed without a second thought, the man who was clearly prepared to ruin Kieron’s future on Cloverleaf Station if he didn’t get what he wanted, now. This was the guy that Kieron was going to have to keep alive out there in the asteroid field, and he wasn’t making it easy.

“You have to slow down,” Kieron said as they entered the field. It was easy to navigate right now, with all of their latest data already input into the helm’s AI, but there was no guarantee of accuracy, and the farther they went, the harder steering was going to become.

“The traces are already faint. If we wait any longer, he may move out of range,” Elanus replied tersely.

“He might already have moved out of range. There’s no sense in risking your life on a maybe. Take it slow, or a mistake could be deadly.”

“This mistake has—” Elanus bit off whatever he was going to say next, but the look on his face was a potent mix of poisonous rage. “You don’t understand.”

“I know,” Kieron said, as close to placating as he could manage. “But I want to. Okay? I do, but we have to be smart right now. Don’t let your partner kill you by making you rush this part.”

Elanus huffed a heavy breath through his nostrils, then slowed the ship’s power down by twenty-five percent. He nodded at the secondary control panel. “Search for more signs of those trace elements. Make sure the AI is recording—I want an updated search path and a map of potential hiding spots as soon as possible.”

“Got it.” Kieron put his head down and went about his task, extending the sensor reach as far as he could go without compromising its strength and doing his best not to watch Elanus as he piloted the state-of-the-art ship. It had AI helm control, of course, but Elanus was on it the entire time, shaving seconds off their path, reorienting them around asteroids and unexpected debris—doing everything he could to speed them up without actually speeding them up.

Kieron appreciated the fact that Elanus had actually listened to him. Maybe working together with him wouldn’t be an absolute fiasco, even when he got uncomfortably demanding. Kieron could handle demanding, as long as it meant Elanus taking his input into account. As good a pilot as the guy was, and as advanced as his ship was, Kieron was still the one with actual experience in this capricious asteroid field. He knew how quickly it could surprise you, and he wasn’t about to let them get stuck or killed out here before he’d found Zakari.

“More iso-paxitran,” he reported quietly. “From two parts per million to five parts.”

“We’re still following our last path,” Elanus replied, his gaze firmly on the viewport. “No significant deviations required yet. Fuck, we should have been processing the sensor data while we were here, it would have saved us so much time.”

“We still would have had to head back to the station soon,” Kieron reminded him. “We were coming up on the Lizzie’s radiation absorption limits.”

“We have the suits.”

“You told me you didn’t think they’d be necessary.”

“Is there a reason you’re being a pain in the ass right now, Mr. Carr?”

Danger, danger. “Just a little reminder that slow means success out here, Mr. Desfontaines,” he replied stiffly. “You think I didn’t want to charge out and find Zakari as soon as he went missing? I’d be dead right now if I had though, and dead a dozen times over if I rushed it. The only advantage we have is our knowledge of the asteroid field and the security of having a home base. Don’t let that advantage go to waste.”

Elanus shook his head. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here. That son of a bitch has taken what is essentially a child—a youthful living creature, wholly dependent on her pilot for almost every decision she makes—and thrown her into a highly stressful situation that never gets better. Deysan is relying on her AI and sensors to keep him safe, when it should be the other way around. I didn’t have time to let Catalina grow up before Deysan took her, time to let her circuitry learn and evolve and…now she’s stuck out there, and it’s damaging her psyche, Kieron. Do you get that? She is being traumatized every minute we leave her out here with him. The longer she stays, the harder it will be for her to recover.”

Kieron frowned. “There’s no way to…I don’t know, wipe her drives clean and—”

“No, no, what part of living being do you not understand?” Elanus snapped. “I can’t just remake her central processors, that would be like killing her! She wouldn’t be herself anymore, and I’m not going to do that to her unless that bastard damages her beyond repair. How would you like it if someone gave up on you just because you had a plethora of mental issues? Which, hey, you do!”

Ouch. But Kieron could see Elanus’s point. “I want to save her,” he said at last. “I want to help you get her back, but I want us to—”

“—eeeeee—”

“That’s her!” Kieron could tell the moment he lost any and all of Elanus’s attention. The sound was similar to what he’d recorded on Cloverleaf Station, but softer. Like someone whispering for help instead of shouting it. Or…

“—to get around this big one up here, it’s the only asteroid in this section that’s large enough to hide them and if we’re close enough to get a signal this clearly, then—”

“What if it’s a fake?” Kieron asked.

Elanus turned wild eyes toward him. “What the hell do you mean?”

“What if your partner is forcing her to make this noise? I mean, come on—there’s no way he wouldn’t know she was broadcasting this, right?” Kieron pushed. “He might not have cared when they were entering the asteroid field because there was no way to go after them—if you hadn’t come by I’d have brushed it off as an anomaly. But he must know it’s going on now. Why is he letting her make it? Or making her make it?”

“He’s not that smart!”

“He was smart enough to escape with her!” Kieron protested. “Just—check around for surprises before you go flying us into a subsection of the asteroid field that’s killed more people than any other place here!”

“Keep your eyes on your sensors and shut the fuck up,” Elanus replied, turning back to the control panel with an air of finality. “I know what I’m doing. We need to—” A proximity alarm began to sound, and the Lizzie came to a stop. “What—no—”

“Too many unknown variables ahead to compute a safe course,” the ship announced. “Waiting for clearance before continuing.”

“What?”

“There’s too much floating around out there for your ship to handle it,” Kieron said gently. “It’s okay. We’ve got probes loaded, let’s send them out and collect some data and then we’ll come back better prepared to get through this part of the field and—”

“Fuck it.” The proximity alert cut off as Elanus punched a code into the control panel. The ship lurched a second later as he took control of the helm.

Kieron stared at him, his mouth falling open. “Are you insane? You can’t hand-fly an asteroid field!”

“Watch me.”

“Elanus!”

“Seeing as how we might die if you keep distracting me, you’d better sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.”

Dumbfounded, Kieron watched as Elanus carefully piloted them closer to the tight-floating debris field in front of them. They made it a meter in…ten meters…twenty meters…

Dink.

“Impact on aft portside hull,” the AI intoned. “Damage minimal.”

“Elanus…”

“Shut up.”

Dink. Dink-dink. Dink dink—thud.

“Impact on front starboard hull. Panel is at eighty-two percent capacity.”

“We need to turn around,” Kieron insisted. “We don’t know how to fly this safely!” He triggered the probe release. “A day, maybe two, and these will help us figure it out, all right? But we have to leave before this gets any—

Thud. Thud—CRUNCH. The ship actually went into a spin with the last hit.

“Impact on aft portside hull. Panel is at fifty-five percent capacity.”

“We have to turn around!” Kieron snapped. “Elanus!”

“We’re so close!” The other ship’s cry was getting louder, a pathetic keen.

Thud. THUD. CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH.

“Impact on—”

Elanus shut the audio off.

Kieron knew he wasn’t going to turn around. Not while he was in control of the ship. Which meant…

He could kiss his future here goodbye.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, and—one, two, a sharp elbow to Elanus’s ribcage to get him bent over and a second strike to his temple to put him down, and Kieron slid into the pilot’s seat and reversed their course immediately. They took more hits, more than he cared for, but after a few tense minutes they were back out into a section that the AI could handle. He detached his sweaty fingers from the controls and sat back with a sigh, wondering how long it was going to be after his boss woke up that he was kicked off the station.

Wait…what was that red blinking light? Kieron tapped it, then turned the audio back on for good measure.

“—cal emergency! Medical emergency! Lifesaving measures must be taken now! Medical emergency! Medical emergency! Lifesaving measures must be taken now!”

Medical emergency? What the… Kieron looked back at where he’d laid Elanus on the floor, and…oh shit.

Oh…shit. Was he even still breathing?

Kieron dove for the ship’s specialized med kit. Let Lizzie pilot herself back to the station—he had to keep Elanus alive until then.