Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Nine, Part One

 Notes: Back to the uneasy detente between untrusting factions. *sigh* Sometimes I wish real life didn't mirror my fiction so closely.

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

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Chapter Nine, Part One

 

They searched his bag before they let him on board their ship. Of course they did. Luckily for Kieron, Blobby had apparently done some thinking and decided that the best way for him to go from here was with camouflage. It turned out Blobby was a master of disguise, and had no problem splitting himself into pieces if it sold the look. And the look he was going for was—

“An environmental data relay?”

Oh, was that what he was pretending to be? Good thing Carlisle’s mechanic, Lis—“Alissa to you, you bastard”—had told him what it was. Kieron picked up the baton from there.

“Obviously.”

Alissa, one of the shortest adults Kieron had ever encountered before at four and a half feet tall, glared at him suspiciously. “I thought you only landed here by chance. Why would you need to lay out the tech necessary for an environmental data relay if your goal is to get off Colony?”

Kieron scowled right back at her. “Did you forget that it was the incessant, unending storms that were keeping us here in the first place? There’s almost no data out there when it comes to environmental conditions on this planet. We needed more information if we were going to get out of here safely, so we picked this place as ground zero and I started laying beacons. We were going to move out in fifty-mile chunks until we covered most of this part of the continent.”

“I thought you had support in-system. Why not get them to collect data for you? Why bother with all this unless you really do plan to settle here?”

Kieron sighed. “We do have support in-system, but it isn’t here yet. And are you missing the part where the ion storms mess with ground-to-space monitoring? Didn’t you have to do something like this when you first decided to make this your home base?”

“No, because—”

“Lis. Enough.”

Alissa rolled her eyes but acquiesced to Carlisle’s order. She glanced through Blobby’s components one last time—a heavy, square black box that comprised most of his body mass, a few random “sensors,” and a minimalist control device that Blobby had integrated his visual circuitry and additions into. She turned it all around, then asked, “Where’s the battery kept?”

“It’s sealed inside on manufacture,” Kieron replied.

“Bullshit. No one does that.”

“They do if the battery is made from uranium.”

Everyone in the mercenary group, even Doubles—who was way less purple now, but still a bit unsteady—stared at Kieron like he’d just grown another head. “What the fuck?” Trapper, the pilot he presumed judging from the guy’s retro-styled flight suit, burst out. “Who the fuck uses a uranium battery in this day and age?”

“Someone who doesn’t want their device to stop working.”

“That’s idiotic! There are so many less toxic ways to do that!”

Kieron shrugged. “There are safeguards built into the structure of the device. The only problem comes when you try to dismantle it.”

“Sounds like something a spy would use,” Carlisle commented wryly.

“Sounds like something someone cheap would use,” Kieron replied. “We don’t have the money for the latest gear. This stuff is over half a century old. You won’t be able to get it to work with your ship’s systems, so don’t even try. It might end up accidentally passing on a virus that you have a hard time getting rid of.”

“Let’s just leave it here,” Doubles said groggily. “And leave this guy here too.”

“Yeah,” Kieron said. “Do that.” That would actually make a lot of things in his life easier.

“No.” Carlisle quickly dashed his brief hopes. “I need to check his story out. If we’re looking at potential oversight from the Central System, we need to know about it. If you really are an incidental arrival,” she said to Kieron directly, “then we can figure something mutually agreeable out. But if you’re lying to me…”

Kieron arched an eyebrow. “You’ll what, shoot me? Dangle me over a croc pit? Fire on my kid again? Good luck finding her.”

“Oh, I think if your family goes for long enough without hearing from you, they’ll come looking for answers,” Carlisle replied, her confidence clear. “And when they do, we’ll capture them. I bet as long as we’ve got you to bargain with, we won’t even have to fire on them again.”

Kieron was uncomfortably aware of the fact that she was right. Elanus was brilliant, but he was brilliant in the way scientists were, leaping from idea to idea and making esoteric connections that Kieron had no hope of following, then somehow turning them into a tapestry of knowledge and action. He could think strategically, especially when it came to business, but he wasn’t tactical. He didn’t consider the risks of his choices the same way Kieron did. And when he was worried about someone he loved, he was downright reckless.

Plus, his leg was still very broken and he was low on painkillers, and Catie was damaged and probably not helping keep him calm, and… No, Kieron couldn’t rely on Elanus’s judgement to keep the two of them safe.

“You, on the other hand.” Carlisle looked at him consideringly. “You’ve got the bearing of a military man. Academy student?”

“No.”

“Central System naval corps?”

“No.”

She smiled. It wasn’t pretty. “Private military then. Or possibly black ops, if you’ve been honest so far.”

Kieron shook his head. “I never formally served in a military unit.”

“I don’t belie…” Her voice trailed off, and Trapper stepped into the gap.

“Look, pick at the easiest piece of the guy’s puzzle to start with. He says he can contact people in-system? So let’s see if he really can.” He nodded his fuzzy blond head toward the front of their long, lean rattletrap of a ship. “We’ve got a com array that can reach anyone close enough to support your story. Send out a message and lets see if they get back to you. If they don’t…then we think about reassessing your honesty.”

“With a wrench,” Alissa added. “Maybe a pair of pliers.”

“Hang you upside down for a while and see how you like it,” Doubles muttered.

Carlisle didn’t say anything for a moment, just stroked her hand over her chin for a moment before finally waving her hand toward the entryway. As Kieron moved to follow Trapper, though, she said in a low voice, “This ship is equipped with anti-boarding tech. Your shoes don’t look particularly resistant to electrical pulses, so don’t try anything rash, all right? You won’t like the result if you do.”

They can electrocute me via the flooring. Great. “Understood.” Not appreciated, but definitely understood.

He moved into the dark ship interior, vaguely lit by pale yellow and green lights along the floor and walls. It was as spartan as a ship could be, with a few rooms branching off from the main hallway—he said rooms, but really more like simple bunks with doors attached—until they entered a larger room at the front of the ship, one probably three times the size of Catie’s cabin. This place had a few more homey touches, with a gun in the middle of being cleaned on the table and a deck of some sort of playing cards on a bench, but at the very forefront of the ship was the flight deck.

Trapper sat down in the pilot’s chair and flipped a few switches, and a light turned on. “Input your code,” he said, gesturing to the number bar. No implant hookup for this ship; everything was done the old-fashioned way, via your hands.

Good thing Kieron made it a habit to memorize his girls’ basic codes, including their emergency contact numerals. “Fine.” He went over and typed out the seventy-two-digit number, then punched the “send” key.

“How long for transit time?” Carlisle asked Trapper.

“If they’re in system, shouldn’t be much more than a minute’s lag time. If they’re not…” He grinned, a sharp expression promising pain. “We’ll know soon enough.”