Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Eleven, Part One

 Notes: We've arrived at base! Time to start fucking some shit up :)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Eleven, Part one

***

Chapter Eleven, Part One

 

It was dark out when they disembarked from the rackety ship after landing. Kieron couldn’t see much—he didn’t have advanced implants and wouldn’t have wanted them if he could have them, since his early training was enough to make him paranoid more than he wanted to be—but he lifted Blobby slightly out of the pack so he could get a recording as they walked across the gritty landing field toward low, flat buildings in the distance that were entirely blacked out except for faint reflective markers along the base of them.

No one had come to meet them, but Kieron knew that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched. On the contrary; if this operation was run by his mother, then they were definitely being watched. Monitored in person, via video surveillance, and probably via low satellite as well. “Three sets of eyes,” he remembered learning as a child. “Always have at least three ways of monitoring your target before you strike.” Good thing they hadn’t carried that lesson into the field, or Elanus and Catie might not have gotten away.

Trapper was the first to disengage from the group once they got to the main building. “I’m gonna go talk to the boss,” he said gruffly, not quite meeting Carlisle’s eye. “Give him an update on the situation.”

Wait. Carlisle isn’t the boss? That was news to Kieron. She certainly acted like the boss.

“Fine,” Carlisle replied, not sounding put-off or surprised by that. Instead, she disregarded Trapper immediately after and looked over at Alissa and Doubles. “You ought to check in with the medic just in case,” she advised Doubles. “The extra color’s mostly gone, but a little Regen would help mend the broken blood vessels faster.”

“Doc’s not gonna give me Regen for a little thing like that,” Doubles said with a sigh.

“He might, we’ve got a bit of a surplus after the last job,” Lis said unexpectedly. “Worth a try.”

“Tell him I authorized it,” Carlisle added.

“Boss won’t like that.”

“The boss can talk to me about it.” Lis took her at her word and shuffled Doubles away as fast as she could, and Carlisle finally turned to Kieron. “So.” She folded her arms over her chest in the dark hallway, as grimy and gritty as the rest of this world. “That leaves you.”

Kieron smiled. “Where’s my cell?”

“You don’t necessarily have to go to a cell.”

Bullshit. “I doubt whoever your boss is would agree with you. Trapper is already reporting me as a hostile to them.”

“If you’re willing to put yourself in my hands, I can put you under personal house arrest. You’ll be confined to my quarters and won’t be able to leave without an escort, but it’s better than being in the cells, trust me.”

He didn’t trust her at all, but that was okay. She clearly didn’t trust him either, and thought keeping a close eye on him was safer than handing him over into someone else’s watch. “Sounds good.”

“You have the hand over the gear, though.”

Kieron pulled his pack a little closer to his chest. “No.”

Carlisle raised an eyebrow. Since it was the eyebrow over her missing eye, the effect was pretty strange, but the intent still came across okay. “You’re going to have to hand it over either way. I can put it into a secure storage locker where no one can get it out except for me, or I can throw it into general supplies. Our quartermaster will have it taken apart and repurpose its battery in under a day if that’s what you want.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck— Blobby wasn’t the same as Catie and Lizzie. At least, not yet. But he was more than just a machine, more than an AI-powered automaton. He was an eager, obedient, bumbling little kid of a bot, and the thought of letting go of him was painful. But if someone tried to disassemble him…Blobby wouldn’t let that happen if it wasn’t Elanus, and that would cause trouble for both of them that Kieron wasn’t ready for. “Fine,” he said at last.

“You can have it until after we get to my place,” Carlisle said graciously, then set off down the corridor, confident that Kieron was following her. And why wouldn’t she be confident, he acknowledged with a silent huff. She’d dug inside of him and hollowed out the things that mattered in record time. Not even Elanus could match her skill at information gathering, not that he’d ever tried to be subtle.

Kieron fell in behind her, dipping one hand inside the bag as he went to tap out a message to Blobby. Morse code…it was such a tedious way of communicating, but Catie had gone through a phase for a few weeks where it was the only way she wanted to talk, and she’d refused to translate. Kieron had learned out of sheer self-defense, and then once he was finally starting to feel confident Catie had decided to speak in binary instead.

He wasn’t even sure Blobby knew Morse code, but it was worth a shot.

Going…to…be…apart. Be…safe. Be…careful. Be…quiet. I’ll…find…you. He wanted to add more, to tell Blobby he didn’t have to be afraid, that he should be sure not to let anyone figure out what he really was, but then Carlisle was opening a door with a palm print and a twist of a key around her neck. The lights flickered on as she walked in, then motioned for Kieron to follow her. “Kitchen,” she said as they entered. “Sitting room. Bedroom. Bathroom.” She pointed to the couch. “You’ll be sleeping there.”

“Homey,” Kieron said dryly as he looked around at the distinct lack of personal touch. The walls were a dirty beige, the floor was the color of mud with no carpet in sight, the furniture was all scarred, repurposed military stock.

“The communication devices are here and here.” She pointed to a spot on the wall by the door, and then toward her bedroom. “They’re set to shock anyone who isn’t me, so I wouldn’t try using them if I were you. The door locks at my touch and can’t be reprogrammed by anyone else, so don’t try. There are no windows, so you won’t be able to climb out, and the ventilation system is too small for you to crawl through.”

“You’ve thought a lot about how I might try to escape from here.”

“I’ve thought a lot about how anyone might try to escape,” Carlisle replied. “Part of my job.” Her comm beeped, and she listened to whatever message was coming through with a frown. “I’ve got a meeting.” Probably with her boss. “I’ll put your things in storage on the way.”

Kieron uneasily handed over his pack. “Be careful with it.”

“I will be. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Of course not.” Mutual distrust in place, Carlisle let herself out again. Kieron was a little surprised by how much the sight of her leaving with Blobby hurt even as he tucked a small, singular piece of the bot into his pocket. Just a sensor…but he might be able to use it to help him find Blobby later on. If he couldn’t, Elanus sure as hell could.

Next up…figuring out how to get the hell out of here. Kieron was under no illusion that he’d be allowed this sort of freedom for long, so he needed to make the most of it.

New release!

 Hi Darlins!

Just an FYI, Paradise is out today! Book Two in my "space dads getting their shit together so they can be a family while the rest of the universe is prepping for war" series is here! Yeah, this is the wedding book, yay!

https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Liminal-Space-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B0DFVH3Y2F

 

Lord of Unkindness Ch. 22

 Notes: Let's introspect a bit more, shall we? Back to action soon!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 22

***

Chapter Twenty-Two

 

Ciro dreams about magic.

Well, not exactly. He dreams about flying, but flying to him has always represented his magic. When he manifested his first familiar as a child, only seven at the time, his mother had taken one look at the pair of birds on his shoulders as he’d walked proudly into the dining room that morning and come over to him, kneeling down and hugging him around the waist so that she didn’t disrupt his birds.

“Look at you, Le Le,” she’d said, pressing her lips close to his ear as she whispered. “Look at your beautiful magic. You can go anywhere with magic like this, Ciro. Absolutely anywhere.”

“Like your fish, mama?” He’d always loved her koi, such powerful swimmers for all that it was hard for them to get around inside the Tower.

“Yes, Le Le, like my—”

“Mei, for god’s sake, stop coddling him,” his father had snapped, and heavy hands had come down on both their shoulders to pull them apart, scattering Ciro’s birds into the air.

The dream scatters with them, and a moment later he’s looking out of the eyes of his familiar as they fly over a landscape delineated in shades of grey, roads and bridges giving way to trees, then rocky desert. In the center of this barren landscape is a single great tree, its branches bare of leaves but moving with the rustle and preen of a great unkindness of ravens.

Even as he lands among them, Ciro is awed by the sheer breadth of power these birds represent. He flits among them, stopping to touch every now and then, comforted and calmed even though he knows now, without a doubt, that this is the most wishful dream he’s ever had. No one since the Pied Piper of Hamelin has had so many familiars, and the way bloodlines are diminishing it’s not likely that anyone else ever will. He certainly won’t be contributing to that mess.

Nephele had been congratulated by his father for manifesting the beady-eyed, swarming little bastards she called her “squad”—big, fat rats that harkened back to the originator of their family name. His father liked it, both for its nod to tradition and because the rats weren’t as intimidating as his dogs. It had taken Ciro a long time to understand just how much of his father’s worth was tied up in his manifestations, the way they looked and behaved, how menacing they could be. Dogs were fierce, predatory; dogs were something he could take out in the street without getting stares. But birds?

“Strange. Somewhat cowardly. But useful,” he’d concluded after testing young Ciro’s abilities. Ciro still remembered how it felt to have his father grip one of his familiars in his hand while pulling its feathers out with the other, watching how they turned to smoke and returned to Ciro before touching the floor. It had hurt, even though the magic had come back to him. Hurting his familiars was as good as hurting him.

Now, though, managing that pain is second nature. Normal witches, with their single familiar, they have barriers between them to prevent spillover, but people like the Hamblys leave those connections wide open to help them manage their magical creatures, to guide them and guard them. And, occasionally, lose them.

No wonder Annette screamed so loud when hers were killed.

Unable to confront his own memories any longer, Ciro takes off from the tree and flies up into the sky. The rest of the flock goes with him, spiraling up into the air on a thermal like a group of vultures instead of what they are. There are so many of them that, when Ciro looks down at the ground, it’s nearly blotted out with black bodies, all of them swirling upward, higher and higher, delighting in flying with him. His own magic surrounds him, strengthens him, and Ciro caws with joy as he flies straight toward the sun, heat shimmering on his feathers and lifting him ever higher. It’s pure bliss, and when he finally wakes up, he’s got a smile on his face and grit in the corners of his eyes.

And his stomach is rumbling like a rockslide.

7:45 in the morning. Holy shit, he’d slept most of the day and night away since Angelo left. No wonder he’s so hungry. He reaches blearily for his phone and checks to see if he’s missed any messages. There’s only one, sent last night at 9.

See you tomorrow, babe. Nice and vague, but there was a limit to how specific Angelo could be under the circumstances. He must have been successful, must have found Annette and got her to agree to come back.

Shit. Ciro might as well eat before he wasn’t capable of keeping anything down anymore.

He got to his feet and his raven immediately flew to his shoulder. The bird felt weighty, solid in a way he hadn’t felt for some time. It was big, too—almost big enough to make two ravens. “That must mean we’re feeling better, huh?” Ciro says idly to his magic as he heads for the kitchen. Angelo stocked the fridge with all sorts of things, colorful and flavorful and healthy. It’s funny how decadent it feels to make a thick slice of toast, cover it with mashed avocado, and throw an egg on top. A few scallions and sliced tomatoes later, it and the coffee are ready.

Ciro eats slowly, savoring each bite he takes as he heads out to the little garden space at the back of the house. He opens the door and steps out into the cool morning air, breathes in the fresh, clean scent of plants and water—not so much fragrance with the blossoms shy in the darkness, but it’s still wonderfully relaxing. His raven flies over to the wall that separates their little slice of safety from the rest of the world, and Ciro thinks nothing of it. It’s fine, everything is fine, and then—

The raven flies off.

“Wha—” Ciro chokes on his last bite of toast and ends up coughing most of it into a hydrangea bush. He washes the crumbs down with coffee even as he reaches out for his magic.

Get back here!

There’s no response. He can—he can still feel it, it’s not like his magic is gone, perse. It feels like it does when it flies across a room without him, or when it’s working in another part of the city, but this is different. He doesn’t have any of the rest of his birds with him right now, and familiars are independent enough to be tricky on the best of days.

Ciro’s magic has just abandoned him, flown off into the morning sky, and he has no idea why. He does know it’s not safe out there, though. He tries again to command it back to his side, but he can’t because he has no magic to make the idiot bird listen to him. Shit, shit, shit… He runs back inside, dumps his mug into the sink, sprints to the front door, flings it open, and—

A familiar woman with curly red hair wearing a pale blue sundress is just pushing a pair of sunglasses up on top of her head. Ciro freezes, his breath solid in his lungs. Oh my god.

“Ciro.” Annette smiles tentatively. “Hi.”

Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Lizzie

 Notes: I just had to visit with my girl. Couldn't keep away. Back to regular programming next week!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Lizzie

***

Interlude: Lizzie

 

Lizzie ran the odds. She observed the results, changed variables, re-ran the statistics, looked at what she was left with, and then…

If she could have cried, she would have. She was given to understand that many species found crying cathartic, and it seemed like she could use some catharsis now. As it was, she had a bunch of numbers that might not even mean anything, too many emotions for her to put a name to, and a deep sense of loneliness and loss that made her think crying was really the only way out.

It really didn’t surprise her when the lights began to flicker. She ought to pull out of her room’s electrical grid, but it was satisfying—if only slightly—to see something responding to her distress. It wasn’t like she had any other recourse. All she had was herself and this terrible knowledge, no Kee and where was Elanus and Catie wasn’t talking to her and she always talked when Lizzie reached out, Catie was never silent and it was awful, awful, awful knowing why she wasn’t now, and—

“Lizzie?”

She went still, every algorithm freezing for a moment as Ryu walked into the hangar. Shoot, she should have locked the door, or at least made sure it was closed so he couldn’t see her freaking out in here. But now he was stepping over to her, his eyes roving her hull like he was searching for some sort of damage, which was strange and very human behavior because obviously she was fine.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.” Oof, that didn’t come out in the right register. Ryu raised an eyebrow at her and tilted his head in a way Lizzie knew meant “pull the other one,” whatever the other one was supposed to be.

“You aren’t. I got an alert for power disruptions in the house’s grid. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it wasn’t an unknown coder trying to hack their way in—it was you.”

Double shoot. Lizzie knew, technically, that Ryu was in charge of the house while Elanus and Kieron were away. Xilinn couldn’t be because she wasn’t a citizen, and Pol was too young, and Lizzie was just a well-built ship as far as most people were concerned. But functionally, she took care of herself and the house. It was easy. Ryu wasn’t even supposed to need to look at things like power consumption levels and blips…

Except Elanus had programmed access to the house’s coding into Ryu’s implant, and abnormalities set of a literal alarm in his brain.

Triple shoot. She’d forgotten that, too. She wasn’t supposed to forget things.

“Lizzie.” Ryu didn’t have Kieron’s soothing voice or calming presence, but there was something comfortingly take-charge about him. It occurred to her for the first time that Ryu…was an adult. He was the adult, and she could tell him things, share things with him, and ask him for advice rather than having to figure out everything on her own. He might even have something useful to say. Probably not, but…

“Talk to me, or I’m running the antivirus software.”

No, she couldn’t let him do that right now! That would put her to sleep for hours! Kieron needed a solution right now!

“I was contacted by Kieron.”

Ryu’s stern expression brightened a bit. “Oh, good! It’s been a while since they reached out, I was beginning to think something was wrong with them.”

“Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.” Tersely, Lizzie recounted her conversation with Kieron and the clues he’d given her to indicate that things had gone horribly awry on Hadrian’s Colony. Telling the whole story made Lizzie feel even worse. “I should be there with them,” she said at the end of it. “I should have asked Kee if I could go.”

“You did,” Ryu pointed out, one hand stroking his chin as he stared at Lizzie’s hull in thought. “He told you that he preferred for you to stay here and help manage the house and Elanus’s affairs, and you’ve done just that. You’ve done a very good job of it, too.”

“But if I’d gone with them, none of this would have happened!” Lizzie finally let some of her emotions reverberate through her voice. Ryu winced and covered both his ears. Maybe not that much reverberation. “I could have been on hand to help them! I could have saved Catie and saved Elanus and saved Kee!”

“You have absolutely no way of knowing that,” Ryu said sharply. “In fact, odds are good that you’d be wrapped up in the problems they’re having now if you’d gone along. You were looking into the weather patterns, right?”

“Yes.”

“Because they got trapped on the surface thanks to not knowing they were about to be hit with an entire season of storms.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts. That lack of knowledge wasn’t your fault, and neither was the lack of decent preparation that got them stuck.”

Lizzie fizzled a bit. Was he insinuating something bad about her fathers? It wasn’t okay to talk badly about her fathers! “No one knew.”

“Exactly.” Ryu’s voice had gone soft. “No one, not even Kieron who covers every angle, not even Elanus who’s genuinely brilliant, knew that things were going to go this wrong. Catie certainly didn’t, but you don’t blame Catie for being there and not responding quickly enough to save both of them, do you?”

Of course she didn’t! “No!”

“Then there’s no reason for you to accept the blame for yourself either,” Ryu said, and…but…if she’d only…if—

“No. Stop it. It’s not your fault. You’re smart, but not even you can see the future.”

“All right.” Lizzie could accept that…just barely. “But what should I do now? Kieron was in trouble, and he told me that the people he’s with think I’m in orbit above the planet right now, but even if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to land on the surface for another—” She ran the numbers again on the climate reports she’d been able to glean from ancient cruiser data, Catie’s own recordings before she went dark, and the faint sensors she could detect from the surface. “Three standard months.” Anything could happen to her family in that amount of time. What was she going to do, what was she going to do, what was she going to—

“Okay. Lights, Lizzie, lights, let’s get them to…yeah, there we go.” Ryu patted her hull. “Don’t worry. Let’s ask Xilinn to bring Pol home a little early from school, and we’ll all talk about what comes next.” He smiled. “You don’t have to figure it out by yourself.”

Lizzie had never been so happy to be less than perfectly competent before in her life.