Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eleven, Part One

 Notes: Life finds a way! Or: Kieron is a lucky son of a gun.

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eleven: Part One

***

Chapter Eleven, Part One

 

“Open your eyes.”

The words filtered in like they were coming through gauze, or dirt. Kieron had buried himself in snow and sand enough times on Hadrian’s Colony that he knew the experience inside and out—granular, suffocating, surrounded in a way that clung and stung. This…was not like that. Nor was it cold like snow would be. He was surrounded by something soft and wet and warm. A bath?

No. The smell was too bright for that, too medicinal.

“Open your eyes, I think they’re going to work this time around.”

Regen tank. Kieron assessed the feeling of cooler air on his face, especially around his eyes and nose and mouth—he’d been wiped clean, but he wasn’t being let out yet. How long had he been in here?

“Eyes, Sparky, or I might start thinking it’s just me you don’t want to look at. Is that it? I’ll leave if that’s it, but if I were you and I’d been staring at nothing but the back of my own eyelids for five days—excepting those times when you didn’t have eyelids, or eyes for that matter—I’d definitely want a change of scenery. What, am I not pretty enough for you?”

“Shut…up…” Kieron managed after a moment’s effort to muster up his voice.

“Sparky!” Elanus sounded way too enthusiastic for Kieron to deal with, but there was no escaping the man right now, not when Kieron was up to his neck in a Regen tank. “There you are at last! I’d been thinking I might have to dunk you under again after all, but you’re finally coming around. Perfect. Now open your eyes, I want to make sure this set is actually working.”

“Set?” Kieron squinched his eyelids tight, then blinked them open. Everything was a blur above him—which was strange. He’d never experienced that side effect from Regen before. A head came into his field of view, slowly resolving into a familiar face. Still blurry, though. “Why…sets?”

“Why?” Kieron thought Elanus was smiling, but it was hard to tell when his voice was such a mixture of earnest and manic. “Oh, well, it turns out that there are some things even complete submersion in Regen can’t cure right off the bat. You were melting when you got back to Cloverleaf Station, Kieron—literally melting. I want you to pause and think about that right now, mkay? Think about how it felt to drag you into the clinic, only to literally have to pour you into the fucking Regen tank. Have you ever poured an individual anywhere before and expected them to live through the process? Because this was a first for me, and if I never have to go through it again it’ll be too soon.”

The memory of what he’d been doing to get so messed up finally resurfaced in Kieron’s mind. His hand bumped the top of the tank in a futile effort to reach out and grab Elanus. “Catalina made it back okay?”

“She did.” Elanus’s smile softened, becoming more genuine in an instant. “She was in pretty rough shape herself, but she’s recovering nicely. Nothing like a little TLC to bring my baby back to tip-top condition. Mentally, it’s a little rougher,” he admitted. “She’s startling at everything and anything. It’s a good thing I was able to get her a private hangar, because her trust of people and machines right now is at absolute zero on the Kelvin scale with the exception of me…and interestingly enough, you.”

Kieron was nonplussed. “Me? Why?”

“Are you kidding me? You sailed in to save her out of nowhere! You’re basically her knight in a shining greenie suit. She won’t stop asking about you—honestly, half the reason I’m glad you’re awake is so she can see for herself that you’re getting better, because shit is she worried about you.”

“Your…ship is worried about me?”

Elanus sighed. “Not just a ship, remember? Catalina is sentient. She’s an entirely new AI-based lifeform, and she’s got all of the hang-ups that come along with that, including unreasonable crushes. I think it’s safe to say that she’s crushing hard on you.”

Kieron would have thought this was all a dream, if not for the fact that you didn’t dream on Regen. He decided to change the subject—ships with feelings for him were just too much to deal with right now. “Why are my eyes blurry?”

“Ah.” Elanus patted the side of the Regen tank. “Did you know that there’s actually a limit to how much radiation damage Regen can repair at one time without completely draining the tank and renewing the fluid?”

“I…” Kieron did know that, actually, but that was a huge amount of radiation, far more than any person would ever be able to survive long enough to need fixing.

“Well, I drained and refreshed this puppy twice for you. Slow and steady progress was made each time, but there were some unintended side effects, and one of those was consistent malfunction of some of your more delicate neurons. Not in your brain,” he added, and Kieron breathed a sigh of relief. “Your brain actually came out of the bullshit you put it through way better than I’d have thought. The greenie helmets are better shielded than the rest of the suit since they’re not intended to be flexible. But enough seeped through that your vision, your sense of smell, and your sense of taste are going to take some time to reemerge. The first few attempts at new eyes were completely scrapped by the Regen, in fact—the neurons just wouldn’t connect the way they needed to in order to be effective.” He shook his head. “Congratulations on surviving something that the computer put your chances of living through at point-three percent.”

Huh. “When did you calculate that?” he asked.

“When I was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with you after you went silent, of course,” Elanus replied, and now there was no lightness whatsoever in his voice, nothing but a flat tone with a faint edge of desperation. “You didn’t think I was just going to stick around back here waiting for you forever, right? I was halfway through making a plan to massively upgrade your ship’s shielding when Catalina announced her presence.”

He sighed again. “I didn’t know what had happened to you. I thought maybe you’d hit an asteroid and lost functionality, or been crushed altogether. I did not think you’d free-sailed your way through radioactive space to retake Catalina by force, but to be fair, I don’t think anyone in the known universe would have gone with that option.” He hesitated, then reached out and pressed the flat of his palm to Kieron’s face. Elanus’s skin was even warmer than the Regen, and the pressure against his brand-new skin was startling enough to make Kieron gasp.

“Thank you,” he said. “For bringing my baby back to me. I know you don’t really understand her yet, but try to accept that you probably saved my life when you rescued her from Deysan. I appreciate it more than I can ever tell you, but…Kieron, I never wanted it to cost you your life.”

Elanus must not know about the bomb. “I didn’t have a choice,” Kieron said.

Elanus snorted. “There’s always a choice. Are you thinking of the little present Deysan stuck to the ship? I can think of three different ways you could have gotten that bomb off the top of the Lizzie instead of flying through space just off the top of my head, and I’m sure you could too if you put a little effort into it.

“Listen, I’m grateful, all right? Just…you’re not unimportant in the grand scheme of things, Kieron. Not to the universe, and not to me. Okay?”

Kieron didn’t know if he could accept that as truth, but hearing it made him feel unexpectedly emotional. He swallowed. Now wasn’t the time for arguments, and besides…it was kind of nice to hear that someone thought he was important, even if it was just a tender lie. “Okay.”

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Ten, Part Two

 Notes: SHOWDOWN THROWDOWN, WOOHOO! Also some graphic illness and body horror, so be warned.

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Ten, Part Two

***

Chapter Ten, Part Two

 

For almost half a minute, nothing happened. Kieron felt despair well up inside of him, fueled by the sickness spreading through his body. What if Catalina was somehow deaf to the world? What if Moritz had exerted a more forceful kind of control over her, what if Kieron was about to cook in his greenie suit out here, clinging to the hull of a baby ship like a barnacle while Elanus went progressively more insane back at the station?

“…I mean, c’mon, the Lizzie is amazing and you know it. No other ship—apart from Catalina, of course, but she’s more than just a ship—could do so well for you out there…”

Kieron turned his head toward the surface of the ship, fighting the urge to puke as he closed his eyes. Well…there were worse ways to die than with Elanus’s voice in his ear. It would be nicer to go with his hands on Kieron’s body, but he couldn’t have everything. Besides…he didn’t want anyone to have to watch this. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

Was it like this for Zakari? How long did he have to think about it? What was going through his head, what was he feeling? Did he cry? Probably he’d cried, Zakari had cried at the smallest things. He had been the most empathetic of all of his spousal group, which had gotten him some teasing but also made him a natural locus for comfort and problem-solving. Surely he’d cried, when he knew he was about to die. It was only human.

Kieron wasn’t going to cry. Not over his own fate. But Catalina…he did feel terrible for her. If she really was sentient the way Elanus had described…

Pink light washed over his face, and for a moment Kieron thought his eyes had started bleeding. Then he realized that no, the pink was outside of him—it was a change in the ship’s skin, all centered around where he was pressed. Catalina was responding to him! He forced himself to focus on the pulses, trying to understand them. Was it some sort of code, or…

The signal for unloading in a cargo bay! He moved to the side to clear the door, and a second later a gap started to appear. With it came Catalina’s scream. He could feel it in her hull, echoing through his physical connection to her. It hurt her to open her outer doors, hurt her badly, some sort of biofeedback loop Moritz had set up, perhaps, but she was still doing it. Slowly, bit by bit, she was doing it. As soon as the door was open enough for Kieron to slip through, he did so. The door closed behind him, and the warning lights inside of Catalina began to shut down.

Kieron’s throat ached, and his whole face felt swollen, as though he’d been hit in the face with a piece of rebar. He needed to focus, though—he was inside, but the job wasn’t over yet. Moritz hadn’t been sucked out into space, so he had to be in here somewhere. Kieron needed to find him and neutralize him.

He needed to be able to open his fucking eyes, first. When had he even closed them? They felt…gummy, gluey, and if it wasn’t blood then it was probably lymph and he—

“Son of a bitch!” The curse sounded slightly mechanical, relayed as it was over Catalina’s radio transmitter, but that didn’t do anything to diminish the rage in it. Kieron forced his eyes open, only to see the crenelated bottom of an environmental suit’s boot heading for his faceplate.

It didn’t crack the faceplate, but the impact still reverberated through Kieron’s suit. As Catalina repressurized the cabin, impacts like these would only hurt worse and worse. The next stomp he raised his arms to block, but his motion was sluggish, too slow to be any real help.

“You piece of shit!” This time the kick was to his ribs, followed by another, then another. The next smashed down so hard on his leg he thought his kneecap fractured. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, huh? Did you want to be a hero? Want to be, what, more than just a fucktoy to Elanus? You’ve just sealed your fate. I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to kill your friends and all their children.”

No! Kieron couldn’t let that happen. Him, well, he’d been out for long enough that the radiation probably was going to kill him before he could get back to Cloverleaf Station, but he wasn’t going to die before he made sure this piece of shit couldn’t hurt Zakari’s family. He needed to fight back, but there was no chance to even catch his breath when Moritz just didn’t stop beating him. But he couldn’t…he couldn’t let him…

A new alarm blared from the console at the front of the cabin. Moritz swore and turned back toward it, threats and violence toward Catalina herself in every breath. He’d already opened his EV suit’s helmet, now that the atmosphere was back to breathable.

Now. Kieron had to do it now. He took a deep breath, then rolled himself over onto all fours. It took a dizzying five seconds to orient himself, but the interior of Catalina was much like the Lizzie’s. Which was good, because he didn’t have any energy for a misstep at this point.

Kieron reached out blindly to his left until his hand impacted the edge of the med kit. He pulled it down, fumbled it open and rummaged inside of it with sausage-like fingers until he found what he was looking for. He just had to get to his feet and—

“Ha!” A fresh kick took him down again. Kieron felt one of his ribs break that time. In terms of agony, though, it could barely compare to the fire already racing up and down his spine and through every nerve. Moritz crouched over him, his bald head gleaming under Catalina’s lights, his carefully sculpted facial hair scruffy and indistinct after weeks on the run.

“You really are a fool,” Moritz declared. “What, were you thinking you could heal yourself after what you’ve just been through? I don’t even need to kill you—you’ll be dead in five more minutes. Even with the Regen in that kit, you’d be a goner soon enough. What were you even hoping for, you da-aaaaaaaahhhh!”

His screams as Kieron slapped the defibrillator device against his face and activated it were intensely satisfying. The way he twitched and fell over a second later was even better. Five seconds of direct current and Moritz was down for the count. Now was Kieron’s chance.

If only…if only he could…

The Regen injection was right there. Right…there. If only he could—he tried to move again, but his hand had erupted in flames, or maybe fallen off entirely from here.

“Catalina,” Kieron coughed out thickly. “Go back to the station. Your daddy is waiting for you. Go home.

“Go home, Catalina.”

Then he passed out, gratefully.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Ten, Part One

 Notes: Time to get some good, old-fashioned radiation poisoning in the name of rescuing the damsel in distress. When Kieron goes wild, he really goes.

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Ten, Part One

***

Chapter Ten, Part One

 

It only took a minute to triangulate the most likely position of Catalina and her domineering passenger given the size of the asteroids out there and where the probes had been left active. That was one more minute Kieron didn’t have to spare before traversing the space between them. Closing up the greenie suit, bringing a probe back into grabbable range, and collecting the one thing he thought might actually save his life once he found Catalina took more time he didn’t have. Once he opened up Lizzie, the clock really began. He approximated his survival in the greenie at exactly twelve minutes, but for the last three and a half of those he’d probably be either in agony or unconscious from radiation poisoning.

He was going to have to spend so much time in the fucking Regen tank if he survived this.

“All right,” he whispered to himself, programming the course into his implant and linking it up with the probe waiting just outside Lizzie’s door. “Time to go.” He forced his way through the safeguards, opened up the hatch, and…

Felt nothing, not even a tingle. That was the insidious thing about radiation poisoning—it started so subtly. He’d probably feel better than usual in another few minutes, which was good because he was going to need the boost in order to navigate the asteroids between here and Catalina, especially since some of them were armed with explosives.

Kieron gripped the probe, then triggered it with the route he’d picked out. Its little exhaust ports puffed, and a second later they were underway.

Most of the asteroids were easy to see coming. The probe adjusted its course automatically, taking in the data its fellows broadcasted and carrying him unerringly forward. Kieron overlaid the route on the faceplate of his helmet, using his implant to check and double-check that things were going according to plan. So far, so good. They were a third of the way to where he expected Catalina was, and he still had six minutes of probably decent physical health before things got bad. At this rate he’d—

The probe suddenly darted down, pulling so abruptly Kieron almost lost his grip on it. A second later he noticed a small, reddish cylinder with a bright green light on one end dart through the space they’d just occupied. One of Moritz’s explosives, no doubt.

He recognized the type—once they stuck tight, they were triggered. The timer for each of them could be independently controlled, but messing with them meant setting them off. Kieron was vaguely grateful that he’d opted not to waste time fucking with the one stuck to Lizzie—that was going to be a job for future-Kieron, or more likely future-Elanus. Right now, he needed to make sure he survived this tenacious floating bomb.

What did he have, what did he…ah. Fumbling a little, Kieron reached for the compartment on the probe that held its solar sail. The probes almost never lasted long enough to need the solar sail for power out here, but they came standard with this model. Kieron grasped for it, his eyes on the cylinder that kept darting back and forth, like a fish hunting through dark water for prey as it came closer and closer to them. He needed to get something in front of it, needed to distract it before it got any closer, because it was definitely getting closer. Uncomfortably close, close enough that he could see the flicker in its light, close enough that he could watch the lens reshape itself as it zoomed in on him. If this thing was broadcasting an image back to Moritz, he was fucked.

Not as fucked as if he let himself be blown up right now, though. Finally, finally Kieron got the probe’s solar sail out. Detaching it from the casing, he triggered it to expand and threw it in the direction of the explosive. The sail began to spread, glittering as it soaked up all the dim, deadly light from the quasar that it could, a brilliant red octopus floating up through an ink-black ocean—

The explosive found it. There was a moment where the sail crumpled around it, swaddling the device like a child, before it blew up.

There was no concussion wave—nothing to carry it in. The explosive was small enough that it hardly made a dent against the darkness, but it would have been more than enough to end both Kieron and his ride. And he didn’t have another handy sail to distract another one with, so if they were followed again…

The space around them stayed clear, though. The probe got back on track, only losing forty-eight seconds to the detour in the end. Kieron cursed the loss all the same. He was feeling bright now, sprightly, but in that weird way where he also couldn’t quite feel his limbs. Like, he knew they were there, that they and his brain and his heart were all cooking in the fierce radioactive glare, but he couldn’t quite single them out. They were fuzzy, numb and strangely buoyant all at once.

“Where are you,” Kieron muttered as they cleared the next large asteroid. There were only two left of an appropriate size to be hiding Catalina, and also close enough for him to reach before death. He’d counted on it being the first one. Without that help…he held his breath as the probe rounded it, and—

There she was. There was the ship that was Elanus’s child, there was Catalina. She was beautiful, even from this far out—camouflaged to match the surface of the asteroid, but Kieron could still see her silhouette. Versipellious skin, morphable and teachable—magnificent. She was small, but he could already tell that she was something special. As he watched, he saw a faint glow pulse down the ship’s body and back up. Some sort of charging mechanism? How she maintained her anti-radiation shields?

Her heartbeat?

Stop being fanciful. Or rather, it was time to be even more fanciful, but Elanus-style.

There was only one way onto Catalina, and that was through her main hatch, just like with the Lizzie. Undoubtedly, Moritz had commanded her to keep it sealed—had commanded her to do everything she could to preserve his life. As he was her captain while she was out of touch with Elanus, that was all she had to go on. She was a child, obeying a cruel uncle while waiting desperately for her father to come reclaim her. What would she do, if she heard him suddenly?

Well…Kieron hoped she’d let him in. He opened the file that he’d downloaded to his implant and piped it into the greenie’s radio, wincing at the effort it took. Fuck, his brain was starting to resist using the implant. He needed to get this done, fast. Hopefully Catalina didn’t have any proximity alarms ready to trigger, because he was going to have to get close for this.

It had been ten minutes now. Moritz was probably trying to talk to him. Kieron had very little time to make a go of this. Releasing the probe once he was close enough to Catalina that he bumped right up against her hull, he set his hands down on her skin.

Then, he activated the voice file and let Elanus do the talking.