Hadrian's Colony: Chapter One: Part One

 Notes: OMG IT'S TIME! Let's dive into Hadrian's Colony, also known as "Kieron is mindfucked, Elanus is sore about it, and the girls are just in it to keep their nuclear family from falling apart!"

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

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Chapter One, Part One

 

“I spyyy…with my little eye…a luminescent interstellarrr medium consisting of iiionized cosmic dust approximately two hundred and forty-four light yearsss in diameter.”

“That’s cheating,” Lizzie said over the com.

“No it’sss not.”

“Yes it is! You can’t see that with your on-board optics, you’re extrapolating from your long-distance instrumentation.”

“That’s not against the rulesss! Daddeee,” Catie whined to Elanus, who was sitting in the pilot’s chair covering his mouth. Kieron knew he was hiding a smile.

Kieron wasn’t smiling, but he wished he was.

“Daddeee,” Catie went on, sounding for all the world like a petulant toddler instead of an AI ship so advanced that Elanus had hunted her across half the galaxy, “tell Lizzie it’s okay to uuuse all our sensesss for I Spyyyy! You said it was!”

“I did say that,” he confirmed, and Lizzie groaned in three different octaves. “But I admit I was only considering human limitations when I said it. After all, the game is called ‘I Spy,’ not ‘I utilized my gravity-wave extrapolation algorithms to probabilistically ascertain,’ you know.”

“See? You are cheating!”

“Am not! Daddee, guess. Guesssss what I spy!”

Elanus steepled his fingers and looked up at Catie’s ceiling for a moment. “Um…is it a nebula?”

“Yesss!” She sounded astonished. “How did you know?”

“What else could it be, with a description like that?” Lizzie demanded. “It’s my turn. I spy, with—”

“No,” Catie protested. “No, my turn’s not overrr yet. He has to guess the color. What’s the colorrrr, Daddeee?”

Elanus blinked. “Um.”

Kieron took pity on him. “Pink,” he said.

“Kee got it!” Lizzie crowed. “My turn now.”

“But that’s cheatingggg,” Catie insisted. “Kieron, you’re not allowed to help Daddeeee come up with the answer.”

“If you’re allowed to use long-distance instruments to spy things instead of close optics, why can’t Kee help Elanus figure out the color of your nebula?”

“Because it’s not the same!”

The girls devolved into an argument that Elanus had to mute after a few seconds. Kieron got up from where he’d been reviewing an Alliancec file on Hadrian’s Colony and sat next to Elanus. The smile he got for it told him it was the right move. He hated having to wonder whether the things he did genuinely made Elanus happy, or whether the man was putting on a good front for him.

Then again, the mere fact that Elanus was here with him, after watching Kieron messily behead the man who’d been holding Elanus hostage, had to mean that the guy’s feelings for him were sincere. Kieron wasn’t sure why, but he knew that they were. He just needed to learn what that meant for them, now that he couldn’t remember anything before a month ago. Not meeting Elanus, not meeting the girls, not even leaving Trakta. He was a mess of unhappy memories and negative emotions, the only bright spots being the sense of warmth and well-being he felt every time he looked at Elanus or spoke with Lizzie and Catie.

He loved him. He loved the girls, AI-powered ships with glorious, pure hearts who somehow loved him back. He couldn’t remember why, though. Massive head trauma will do that to a person.

“How did you know it was pink?” Elanus asked, pulling Kieron out of his unpleasant ruminations.

“Odds are good that anything Catalina picks as a standout favorite will be pink,” he replied, and Elanus chuckled. “But I also remember this section of space. There’s only one nebula close to the colony, the Spiderweb Nebula, and it’s shockingly pink to our eyes.”

“Really?” Elanus’s eyes went distant as he activated his implant, pulling the information into his brain so he could see it for himself. “Wow, that is neon pink. Holy shit.”

“Yeah it is.” They smiled at each other, and for a moment everything was okay. Just for a moment, though.

Kieron had learned fast that Elanus was incredibly good at powering through difficult times, and he kept the conversation going without mentioning the blip between them. “Was that part of your education when you were at the colony?”

Kieron nodded. “I started learning the basics of astronavigation when I was seven.” He watched the understanding of what that meant flicker across Elanus’s face. “It was considered especially important for us to know all major astral features within ten light years of the planet. The Spiderweb Nebula was my favorite.”

“Mm.”

“What is a spider?” Lizzie suddenly asked.

“You know what a spiderrrr is,” Catie said with a long-suffering sigh. “They have them on Trakta.”

“Not where I was.”

“They’re everywherrre on Traktaaaa!”

“No they’re not!”

“Lizzie,” Elanus said before the conversation could devolve into another argument. “There are a lot of good documentaries on spiders in the Alliance virtual libraries. Some of them cover the parallel evolution of spiders on different planets, which I think you girls will find especially fascinating.”

Catie made a “hmm” noise with her engines. “I thought humans transported spiders with them when they colonized new planets.”

“They did,” Kieron put in, “but they also found native animals on some of these planets that resembled what they knew as spiders. There were even spiders waiting for us at Hadrian’s Colony.”

“What color were they?” Catie immediately demanded.

Kieron smiled. “Pink.”

He still wasn’t completely sure that going back to Hadrian’s Colony was the right decision. Staying on Gania, especially anywhere near Chelen City, was impossible, though. He’d assassinated the president of the damn planet. President Moreno was in the process of being tried for assassinating his own VP at the time, but that wasn’t material to the fact that he had murdered a very important man, and needed to be gone because of it.

They’d concealed the killing, he and Elanus had left the planet with Catie, and media outlets on Gania were reporting that Moreno had kidnapped Elanus and escaped with him as a hostage. They needed to stay gone long enough to sell that story and let the furor die down, and given that his childhood was one of the clearest things in his memory, returning here had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was likely no more than ruins, but ruins could speak if you listened well enough.

Smart or not, it was too late for second guessing. They were almost to the colony. Time to face his past, and see if that helped him reconcile his present and offer any hope for his future.