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

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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.