Notes: Because the other mama in the room had to chime in at some point ;)
Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Xilinn
***
Interlude: Xilinn
Picture by Leonardo Rios
Xilinn stared out Lizzie’s viewscreen as the stars sailed by far faster than she was prepared for. It wasn’t Xilinn’s first time flying in Lizzie, but she hadn’t been boosted to this degree before.
In the more crowded spacelanes, it wasn’t possible to go this fast either; a collision would be deadly, which meant knowing where the ships were and who was cutting what edge on the gravity waves that defined most of the lanes in the first place. It was one of the things that made piracy in the Central System so difficult; the potential take was astronomical, but the chance of an accident was high enough to make it a terribly risky proposition.
That might be the only highlight of this trip for Xilinn. Reaching this sort of speed would have been impossible without being in lightly-traveled space with an AI as smart as Lizzie to do the intense calculations required for the travel. It was the sort of thing she’d only dared to dream about as a child, before her parents’ expectations caught up with her and Xilinn settled into a standard career, in a standard quad, for a standard life.
Not that there had been anything standard about Zakari. Her eyes closed as she remembered her closest spouse, the father of her children. His face had been as round as a moon and shone just as bright, and he’d laughed with her and dreamed with her and touched her with a tenderness that she came to crave. By the time Pol was born, Xilinn had decided to limit her sexual contact to Zak, to the distaste of their other partners. And then once he was gone…
Oh, how they’d made her pay for it.
She would have given anything to have him back, anything to settle his soul back on Trakta in the family mausoleum. It had seemed hopeless, but Kieron had found a way. Kieron, who’d loved Zakari as fiercely as Xilinn had, who was kind to their children and polite to their quad. Kieron had returned a piece of Xilinn’s own heart, one she’d thought gone forever. When she’d learned what Lizzie and Ryu were discussing, she’d insisted on being brought into the fold.
“It’s easier if we don’t,” Ryu had said bluntly. For all that they’d been living together for months, in Elanus’s own home nonetheless, Xilinn still hadn’t known whether or not to trust him. Assassin… but Ganians had different rules than Traktans did around killing, and he hadn’t succeeded, after all. “You should stay here and mind the house with Pol. You’ve got a hearing coming up as well, and—”
“Don’t tell me what to do again.” It rankled something deep in Xilinn’s soul to be dismissed in such a way. She’d been taken for granted back home, then punished the moment she stood up for what she believed in. She was finished with that dynamic. “I’m not a child you need to coddle or a chess piece to move around a board. Tell me what’s going on, Lizzie, please.”
Lizzie, good girl that she was, did so. She played the recording for Xilinn, gave her her impressions, and in the end let her be part of the decision-making process with an air of relief. Of course, she’s just a child. And Xilinn’s conclusions were...well.
“We can’t expect them to get themselves out of this.”
“No,” Ryu agreed.
“But it would be pointless to alert the nearest inhabited planet and ask for them to send a force.”
“It would.” Apart from the fact that the nearest inhabited planet was a farming colony populated almost entirely with bots, they were strictly non-interventionist and would have no reason to go after someone foolish enough to go down onto Hadrian’s Colony.
“And equally pointless for us to go there looking for some sort of fight.”
Ryu had stroked his chin thoughtfully. “It’s more than the weather won’t allow for any sort of direct interference, I think. We’d have the advantage either way, being in space; I doubt they’ve got the sort of armaments that could shoot through the atmosphere.”
“But we don’t know that for sure.”
“No.” And it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to guess at, either.
“Then we help them help themselves,” Xilinn said. “We equip ourselves for a rescue mission but plan on staying above the planet, not going down to it.” Not unless the need was extremely dire. “We could have them off of there in less than two weeks, if Lizzie’s calculations are correct. Which I know they are,” she added, and Lizzie made a happy sound.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ryu said softly. “I know you feel like you owe Kieron, but he would never expect you to—”
Xilinn held up a hand. “He never expects anything from anyone, which is part of the reason I’ve got to do this. The rest…” The unease that had been growing in her for weeks was getting stronger and stronger, made worse by the fact that Trakta had cut off all unofficial communication with everyone—even its former allies. They’d gone completely dark except for a weekly proclamation of events, and as someone who was used to reading between the formal lines, Xilinn could tell that things were bad.
What’s happening to my Szusza? To Filip and Ophred? Her former spouses were supposed to be looking after Szusza, but Xilinn didn’t believe that they would do so equally. And she loved their other children dearly—were they suffering now? It would take someone truly masterful to penetrate Trakta’s silence and get her the answers she needed in order to keep from going mad.
Kieron and Elanus, together, were the masters of just about anything. With the girls to help them, they were unstoppable.
“I love Kieron like family, and I owe Elanus a debt,” she said at last. “I do have some hopes for after we rescue them, but that can wait.” It would have to.
Not for long, though.
