Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Ten, Part Two

 Notes: Feeling each other out, no fucks given style ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Ten, Part Two

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Chapter Ten, Part Two

 

It was physically painful to fly away from the creche. Kieron knew that his reaction was unreasonable; Elanus and Catie were nowhere near here anymore. If he was lucky, they’d made it halfway across the continent and found a place to hide that was hours away and untraceable. Even if their hiding spot wasn’t so great, Catie had the most advanced synthskin on her hull that Elanus was capable of creating. She could block radar, match any native camouflage, even create a mirage-like coating that would blur her into the surrounding area to both physical and mechanical observers. She was as safe as she could be…as long as everything was working okay. As long as she wasn’t too hurt. She had redundant systems built in to ensure that nothing was ever unsupported. Even her communications array could fairly easily be rerouted through her central processor and amplified with her sensors. She’d never done that before, as far as Kieron knew, but there was no reason she couldn’t. Elanus would be able to guide her.

Unless he was too hurt to focus. Unless Catie was too concerned for him to remember her own stats. Unless the worst had happened and Catie had multiple systems failures and Elanus was unconscious and unable to work on her hardware, and of course Kieron had run off with the bot who would have been able to intercede and make things easier for them, and—

“We’ll be there in about an hour.”

Kieron raised his head to look at Carlisle. She and Trapper were the only ones left up front with him; Doubles and Alissa had gone off to their cabin as soon as they were off the ground. Trapper had slapped a pair of headphones on and was resolutely ignoring both of them as he manually flew their ancient ship toward home base, and Kieron had honestly expected Carlisle to do the same.

“All right,” he said.

“What, no more questions?”

Kieron shook his head.

“That surprises me.” She leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms. “I thought you were more curious than that.”

“I’m not a spy,” Kieron said with a sigh. “I’m not interested in you or your people. I don’t care about the terrain we’re flying over, or the average speed we’re maintaining, or who’s waiting to hold guns on me when we land. For the last time, I want nothing to do with you and your people. All I want is to reunite with my family and get out of here.”

“Mmhmm. Your family.” Her single eye narrowed a bit. “What’s your homeworld?”

“Gania.”

She shook her head. “You’re too short to be a native.”

“I didn’t say I was a native, I said it’s my homeworld.”

“Where were you born, then?”

Great. It was time to establish a backstory. Kieron pulled himself out of his funk and went through his mental map of his past. The best lies were mostly truth, after all. “I was born in space. My parents were miners, mostly working the Fringe. My father died when I was very young, left my mother and I a ship and not a lot else. She got work on a research station near the Cloverleaf anomaly.”

“Cloverleaf?” Carlisle tilted her head. “That’s a long way from Gania.”

“Yep.” He popped the “p” at the end of the word and took a bit of perverse pleasure in how it seemed to annoy her.

“Are you going to make me drag every word out of you?”

“You don’t make it easy to share,” Kieron replied. He let his own curiosity out for a moment. “After all, I know nothing about you.” Carlisle paused, then shrugged her acknowledgement. “Why don’t we make this more interesting?” Kieron pressed. “An answer for an answer, until one of us calls it quits.”

“I don’t have to do anything for you,” Carlisle said.

It was Kieron’s turn to shrug. “True. You’re in control. You could kill me at any time. I get it. But.” He patted his bag, where Blobby was humming away, warm and comforting in his battery form. “I could do the same, especially while we’re in the air. The way I see it, we can pass the time ignoring each other, threatening each other, or being civil and informative with each other. Your call.”

Carlisle considered the options for a moment, then pushed off the wall and came to sit across from Kieron at the table. She folded her arms on the scarred surface and said, “What was your mother’s name?”

“Xilinn.” She was the best mother Kieron could think of, the one he’d wished he could have. It was a truth in a way, and he could see Carlisle knew it. “Why did you make Hadrian’s Colony your base?”

“It was better than the alternative. Why did your daughter call you Kee?”

Damn, she’d noticed the discrepancy. “It’s a mangled way of pronouncing my name,” he said. “Za-ka-ri became Kee to her when she was just a baby.”

“Why is your daughter calling you by your name?”

“Ah ah, my turn,” Kieron said. “How many people do you lead?”

“Twenty.” That was a lie, he could tell. Maybe she led twenty herself when she was in charge of a job, but he was sure there were far more than that wherever they were going.

He went back to her last question before she could ask another. “Lizzie was adopted. It didn’t feel right to be ‘Dad’ when she’d had one already. How did you lose your eye?”

Carlisle wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so prurient.”

“You know almost nothing about me,” Kieron pointed out. “And knowing someone else’s weaknesses is important when it comes to building trust.”

“You think this makes me weak?” A glint in her remaining eye told him exactly what she thought of that. “I’m looking forward to proving you wrong.”

“We can fight it out when we’re on solid ground again, if you like.” She’d probably kick his ass, Kieron reflected. He kept quiet, though, and after a moment she replied.

“Ricochet. I wasn’t wearing a helmet and I should have been. When is the last time you were scared for your life?”

“You mean other than an hour ago with your guys?”

“Please.” She waved a hand. “You weren’t afraid then. Not seriously.” She stared at him in expectation, and Kieron…

He was too tired to dissemble. “When you fired on my partner and my daughter,” he said, and let the bare, shivering truth of that out into the world for her to see. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been a parent”—you never were to me—“but watching the people I love go under fire was enough to make my heart stop. You need to know this.” He leaned across the table toward her. “You need to understand. Any effort you make to go after them, to use them to control me or to pick them up and try to ransom them, or even just to grab them and torture them for a while.”

“We don’t do that.”

“Sure you don’t,” Kieron said, and Carlisle recoiled from the sheer level of disgust in his voice. “There’s no trail of bodies littering the ground behind you, nope. No children left orphaned, no parents left childless, no lives ruined. Not from a good soldier like you. But you need to understand, I’m incentivized right now to protect myself and be a model prisoner because I have the hope that I’m going to see my family again soon, free and happy. If you take that away from me?” He shook his head. “You’ll see what happens when I no longer care about my life.”

Carlisle, to Kieron’s mild surprise, smiled. “Spoken like a true parent.” She didn’t say anything else, just got out a deck of cards from one of the drawers in the wall and began to shuffle. When she dealt him in to a hand of poker, Kieron let her.

The time still crawled, but at least he had Blobby and a companionable silence to make it better.