Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Fifteen Part One

 Notes: Hey, we're free! Except we've also got a freeloader on board...what could POSSIBLY happen next?

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

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Chapter Fifteen, Part One

 

 

Photo by Jorge Sa Pinheiro

They fled.

After the initial rush of escape was over with and he thought the autopilot could be trusted to follow Carlisle, Kieron used the skimmer’s onboard scanner to show him exactly where all the trackers were. Once identified, he systematically ripped each and every one of them out, then showed Blobby the remnants. “Can you do another scan and see if you detect any more of these?” he asked. “It’s fine if you can’t.” Blobby’s size had diminished by a fourth, pieces abandoned in the pursuit of freedom, and Kieron burned with guilt over it.

Blobby made a spider-like shape and hovered over the components, then wobbled over to the main control panel. He synthesized the proper connector and plugged himself in. A few seconds later, two more lights gleamed on the scanner. They were tiny, set to ping off each other in a way that would only stand out to someone who knew the proper frequency to test on.

“Good job.” Kieron couldn’t get to both of them, but he managed to damage one to the point that it couldn’t reflect the ping any longer. “We got it, buddy.” Blobby let out a little chirp made from rubbing two of his pieces together, then climbed up into Kieron’s lap and settled in like a tiny, mettaloid catterpet. Kieron stroked his baby’s surface as he made sure the skimmer was still close on Carlisle’s tail, then stared across the floor at the man he’d hauled along for the ride.

General Hadrian Carr.

Kieron had already seen his grandfather diminished, nothing like the younger, upright version of himself that haunted his nightmares, but at least when he was awake he still had the shouty, brutally confident poise of the man Kieron recalled. But now, still unconscious and with skin a pasty gray color that probably should have alarmed Kieron but didn’t, it was very hard to find anything intimidating about the man.

Death came to everyone eventually, but the General had the look of someone who hadn’t seen Regen in years. Of course, Kieron would be surprised if anyone in the compound got access to Regen regularly—maybe for dire emergencies, but not the restorative treatments that kept humans youthful far beyond when they would normally have aged and decayed. Kieron had been given them as a child, twice a year. They’d had the means back then. Even now, after the collapse of the old colony and his time as a refugee, he’d still only gained about five years of biological age on someone like Elanus, who’d been bathing in Regen on a quarterly basis for his whole life, and not just thanks to Elfshot disease.

The General looked sick. Old and ill, and Kieron took a grotesque amount of satisfaction from it even as he recognized that, if they were hunted down and it came to a firefight, the only thing that would potentially save him was holding this old bastard’s life in his hands. Best case scenario, they escaped their hunters, found Elanus and Catie, and managed to find a tiny sliver of good-enough weather in which to escape from the planet entirely. Worst case scenario…

It didn’t bear thinking about. So Kieron sat there, and comforted his baby boy, and made sure he was following Carlisle. Staying on her tail got harder as rain, then sleet began to fall, and he finally had to turn the autopilot off and take over manual maneuvers to keep her in his sights.

The skimmer’s power was starting to get low, its fuel almost exhausted and its batteries reluctantly taking over. They were going to have to find a place to land soon, or they’d end up crashing. Kieron was reluctant to send a transmission ahead to Carlisle’s ship, so he used the skimmer lights to blink out a warning to her instead. After a few tries, she blinked back, then her ship veered to the right, toward what looked on the viewscreen like a plateau. It took a moment more to realize that the structure wasn’t actually solid, it was a series of rippling folds of stone, all of them jutting haphazardly out of the ground before somehow they’d been sheared off at about the same height.

“Well, that’s precarious,” Kieron murmured. Given how incredible unstable the ground was, he was startled anything could stand more than a few hundred feet high. He followed Carlisle anyway, down one of the deeper canyons until her larger ship couldn’t go any further. They stopped, and he set the skimmer down and cut all power with a grimace. This deep into the canyon, any sunshine hitting the skimmer’s solar cells would be totally insufficient to charge it. Turning it off now meant it was as good as dead unless they ran a line from Carlisle’s ship.

At least we won’t be immediately visible here. They’d made it over a hundred miles in a little under an hour of travel. One last look at the vanishing image of the map told Kieron they were about fifty miles from the creche, which seemed like the logical place to go in order to make it easy for Elanus to spot them.

Kieron set Blobby on the floor. “Salvage whatever you can from those, buddy,” he said with a gesture at the trackers. “Then we’re out of here.” Without power, the skimmer was quickly growing cold inside. The General looked worse than before, slumped over in his chair with a thin line of drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. Kieron hunted down a blanket in the emergency stores and tucked it over the rancid old man, ignoring the way his own hands were starting to shake from the cold.

There was a knock on the outer door. Kieron startled, then felt silly about it. It’s just Carlisle. Who else is out here? He manually undid the pressure locks, then raised the hatch. There she was, in a full EV suit that would help her regulate her temperature way better than any of the clothes he and the General had. “Let’s get you all over to my ship,” she said, her voice stiff through the helmet. “We need to figure out what to do next.”

Kieron stared at her for a moment. He was exhausted, freezing, in pain from a dozen small injuries and at least one broken bone that he hadn’t had time to focus on yet, and felt on the verge complete mental collapse. It was all so much, and yet all so familiar at the same time.

What do we do? We put it away. Fight it off and board it up and never, ever let our guard down. It wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t sane, but it was what he knew, and he needed that experience more than ever now.

“Of course,” he said, and put Blobby on his shoulder before turning to the General and mobilizing his chair. “Lead the way.”