Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two

 Notes: Rescue is underway, yaaaay! Soon we'll all be at Trakta, and then...well, shit. Guess we'll find out. Who freaking knows, with this story.

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two

***

Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two

 

The ship that had looked massive on the ground was surprisingly small set against the stark blackness of space. Still bigger than Lizzie by far—it held over a hundred lost souls, after all—but far smaller than what it should be for a group of this size. Kieron didn’t even want to speculate on the state of the ship inside. It had to be horrendously cramped with no thought given to human comforts or cleanliness.

Over a hundred people, set adrift in space. They didn’t even have an escort of Traktan vessels along with them. They’d simply been…jettisoned. Set into motion toward a distant planet, and whether they made it there or not was no longer the government’s concern. These people had been disposed of, cruelly, and in such a way that they had to be aware of it. A planet suffering from shortages of Regen wouldn’t waste any of their medical supplies on safe cryosleep for a bunch of refugees. No, they were all awake, living out this new nightmare.

And one of them had figured out how to use the radio.

“—mergency, I repeat, this is an emergency!” It was a man’s voice, low and hoarse, like someone just barely keeping it together. “For the love of—we’re people, we’re not things, you can’t just get rid of us like a suit of clothes that doesn’t fit you anymore! You can’t abandon us out here, or we’re all going to die before we reach a safe port! Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to me?”

“Lizzie…” Kieron began, but she was already linking their signals. “This is Kieron Carr, out from Cloverleaf Station,” he said briskly once the connection was made. “Give me a sitrep for your ship.”

Nothing. He got silence, then static, like the man on the other side had abruptly killed the connection. “This is Kieron Carr, from Cloverleaf Station, over,” he repeated. “I need to know what’s going on over there before I can do anything to help you. What’s your status?”

“Cloverleaf Station?” This was a new voice, a feminine one. “What…our signal can’t possibly be reaching that far.”

Kieron cut his side of the link and groaned out loud. Force of habit. What was he supposed to say, though?

“Strange and suspicious ship,” Elanus broke in before Kieron could rejoin the conversation, “ignore my confused friend for a moment and break your situation down for me. Any medical emergencies? What are your stores like? How are your environmental controls? Got any fuel? Talk to me.”

“What if you’re a pirate?” the woman said, her voice trembling.

A pirate? What in the hell…piracy was almost unknown in the universe, especially in Federation space. It was too damn expensive to operate a ship like that, and relief points were too few and far between. If you got a reputation for harming others or taking advantage of people, you’d be reported and shut down—with prejudice, if necessary.

But these were Traktans. They didn’t know any better. Almost none of them ever went off-planet—they were nearly unheard of in space. Zak had been a very rare anomaly.

“I’ll ignore that statement due to your understandable ignorance, but—no, actually I won’t. A pirate? Seriously? Why the hell would I be having a conversation with you if I was planning on taking over your ship? Or if I did want to waste my time talking to a group of people on board a vessel which clearly has no defensive capabilities, why wouldn’t I dive into the demands about what you need to give me before I—you know what, no. No. We don’t have time for this. Put Xilinn on the line.”

“Xi-Xilinn? Um…”

“Xilinn Pitu, nice woman, a school teacher, got a couple of kids—actually, we’ve got one of them—and—”

“I’m here!” Every taut muscle in Kieron’s body relaxed as he heard her voice. She was there. They’d found her. It was one thing to hope she was still with the refugees, another to know like they knew now. “I’m here, I’m Xilinn! Who are you? How do you have one of my children? Did Kriev and Laina send you after me?”

“It’s me,” Kieron cut in before Elanus could say something even more embarrassing. “It’s—Kieron.”

“Kieron!” Her voice warbled with desperate relief. “Oh, thank the gods, you made it. Did you—you brought Zakari back, did it all go all right? Is he home?”

“Yeah,” he said, his throat tight. “He’s home.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you! I wasn’t sure you were even going to be allowed on the planet, I…and the kids, what happened with the kids, are they with you? Are you—where are you?”

“I’m not far from your ship, actually.” He filled her in as briskly as possible, glossing over her family’s betrayal and trying to downplay the fact that Szusza hadn’t wanted to come with them. “Pol is here, though. He insisted.”

The child in question, who’d been sitting and listening with huge eyes up to this point, chimed in, “Because otherwise I was running away, Mama!”

“Oh, my darling.” Kieron could tell she was crying, but doing her best to hold it together regardless. “You should have stayed with Mama Laina and Papa Kriev. They would have taken care of you.”

“No! I hate them! I want to be with you and Kieron and Lizzie!”

“But you—”

“It’s done, boohoo, let’s move on,” Elanus interjected, and Kieron was for once glad of it. “Give me your ship’s specs. Active propulsion?”

“None,” Xilinn said, sounding more grounded now. “We were sent up attached to rockets, set on a course and then just…let go.”

“Shitty, but workable. Guidance?”

“Basic,” a new voice said. “We know where we are, but we have no way of avoiding anything we might come upon out here.”

“Not that it’s likely you will, but okay. Facilities?”

“Rudimentary,” the new voice opined dryly, “and I say that as someone who’s lived for months at a time on Duras Two.”

Elanus whistled. Duras Two was one of the wonders of the universe, a sandy planet with brutal windstorms that created rare mineral interactions in the atmosphere, filling every night with one of the most beautiful natural light shows ever seen. It was a hellishly difficult planet to live on, though. “Shit. Okay. That leaves out reorienting you. I can send ships in to transfer you to, but it’ll take them at least three days to converge. Can you make it that long?”

“Do we have a choice?”

Kieron could practically see Elanus’s eyeroll. “I mean, no, not really, not if you have any sense of self-preservation at all. As long as you don’t fuck shit up too badly, we can get Federation recovery vessels to you, but the only ship close enough to touch right now is at max capacity for human cargo at the moment, so you’re gonna have to hold yourselves together until backup arrives, got it?”

“Trakta won’t let any Federation vessels within a million kilometers of the planet,” the person said. “They’ve got the planetary defenses to back that up. You could spell our death warrants if you come in like that. What if they decide to simply shoot us instead of let you help us?”

Elanus hummed. “That would be bad, sure, but you’re actually moving pretty quickly. You’ll be at the far end of that range in three days, and I’ll be able to figure out how to scramble everyone’s signals so they have a hard time tracking us.”

The voice scoffed. “Sounds impossible.”

Elanus laughed. “You’ve never met me, baby. I do the impossible every day.”

“And on that note,” Kieron interjected, “you should go back to doing the impossible and leave us to do the same. Lizzie, please obscure our location in case we get pinged.”

“Yes, Kieron.”

“I’ll be close if you need to talk something through with me, Xilinn,” Kieron said gently. “But I think it’s a waiting game right now. If you’re wondering if you can trust us, though…you can. We’re going to help you.”

“I know you will,” Xilinn said. “I’ll make sure everyone else knows it too, but…Kieron…was there really no way you could bring Szusza along?”

He bit his lip for a second. “No. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said immediately, but he knew it wasn’t. None of this was all right.

The only thing that would make it better was saving them all, but that was going to take more time that Kieron had thought. No simple virus to overtake their guidance system, no—this was going to be messy.

And he would be here for all of it.