Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Elanus

 Notes: We're cooking now, darlins. Be careful, the kitchen might burst into flames.

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Elanus

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Interlude: Elanus

 

Photo by Praveen Sundarajan 

 

Elanus liked this part of the plan. Naturally, he did—this was the part of the plan where he got to be center stage. Kieron might bitch about “risk/reward” and “statistical likelihood of you annoying someone into shooting you” but honestly, his sweetheart needed to have more faith in him. No one could hold attention like Elanus could when he was in the mood for it, and wow was he in the mood to be on everyone’s mind and monopolizing their eyes right now.

The other part of the plan, the one where Kieron used Catie’s admittedly brilliant cloaking technology to sneak back into the base after Bobby shot Carlisle with an emetic that was messy enough to make anyone want to put her away for a while rather than deal with all that, that part he didn’t care for. It was so risky for Kieron. Catie’s tech was good, the best, undeniably—Elanus would know, since he’d overseen the manufacture of it all himself—but there were a lot of bodies in that compound. If someone so much as bumped into Kieron at the wrong time, his cover would be gone; he’d be in the middle of enemy territory without backup other than Bobby, who Kieron had already expressly said was to retreat after delivering the shot to Carlisle.

Of course he hadn’t, because Bobby loved Kieron to the point of exhaustion and Elanus could understand that. But he was playing it very safe, staying hidden and well out of sight. And with Elanus not wanting to risk Catie by getting her too close to the compound, the best option was to waltz in and hold their eyes firmly on him while Kieron figured out how to get Carlisle out.

And stars, this would have been so much easier if they could have just said “fuck it” or if she could have had the good sense to die before messing up her son’s mind beyond all belief, but Elanus could handle complications. He could, better than most people in fact. And it all started with the Swarm.

The Swarm was not, in fact, something he just made up off the top of his head right before swanning out there into the open, thank you very much, Kieron. It was the culmination of years of tinkering, a subtle, mobile self-defense system that he’d designed for the anti-assassination market and never got around to putting out as Catie’s original systems took up more and more of his focus.

The Swarm, which he was able to mobilize with some of the leftover parts from Bobby’s creation and a massive algorithmic download by the girls, was an AI-directed, piecemeal shield made of over a thousand moving parts that only disengaged from his body when they needed to block an attack. On him, it looked like he was wearing a particularly glittery shirt, but the pieces working in concert could deflect everything from energy weapons to old-fashioned bullets to chemical attacks. The pieces were astonishingly mobile, and with a few modifications from Bobby’s code—thanks for the beta test, baby boy—Elanus felt confident he could stand up to whatever these idiots could throw at him for the time it took to get Carlisle out.

First things first, to meet and greet. He walked along the dirt path, ignoring the pain in his leg to keep his gait steady—no way was he giving up that weakness while they were watching. Once he got within visual range of the base, he tapped into the signal that had hunted them down earlier. “Good afternoon, folks,” Elanus said genially. “I hope you were serious when you said you wanted to negotiate, because if you made me waste my time walking in this fucking mud puddle of a planet you call home just so you could bitch and moan like a bunch of babies, I’ll give my orbital team the go-ahead to burn you out regardless of whoever you’re holding hostage.”

There was a moment of silence before a response came through. “Oh, we see you perfectly clearly, Mr. Desfontaines.”

Elanus smirked. “Oh good, you know who I am. Saves us so much time and trouble, doesn’t it?”

“We sure do know it. And we know if you were serious about bombing us, you’d have done it already, but you’re whipped. Carlisle’s boy’s got you locked down tight, doesn’t he?”

“Mm, sometimes he does,” Elanus said with a wink. “But it’s all completely consensual, I promise you. I’d never let a boy lock me up otherwise.”

“We don’t need to listen to your disgusting homosexual agenda, you—”

“Oh, like you know anything about agendas, homosexual and otherwise,” Elanus snapped right back. “You people have got to be the worst team I’ve ever seen when it comes to executing a goddamn plan. How long have you been on this planet, and you’re still having your movements controlled by the weather, of all things? If you had your own orbital station, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Better yet, if you had a habitat dome that extended into the upper atmosphere, you could launch from the ground any time you wanted instead of waiting for the wind to be right, my god. It’s embarrassing to watch you stumble around so chaotically. I can help you change that, though.”

“We want cloaking technology.”

“You don’t need cloaking technology,” Elanus said in a long-suffering voice. “The last thing you need is cloaking technology if you actually want this colony to be a viable place to live instead of a place you sit and wait and die of boredom in for months at a time. You need infrastructure, you need raw materials and the technology to work them, you need the building blocks of an actual civilization, not to live on the Fringe and putter around like the universe’s most incompetent pirates.

“When’s the last time you actually took another ship in space, hmm? It’s probably been years. And mercenary work is thin on the ground right now with so much Central System aggression turning inward, isn’t it? Nobody’s reaching out—everyone is trying to consolidate their own position in space, except for you people. There are times to buck the trend, gentlemen, but right now isn’t one of them.”

There was a longer pause, and when Trapper came back on he sounded a bit hoarse, like he’d been shouting. “The hell you know anything about our situation, Desfontaines! And the hell you’ve got the things you’re talking about for trade. I know you’ve got cloaking tech, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and that’s the price for Carlisle. All the rest of it is nothing but smoke, pretty words to try and distract us from the fact that we’ve got the upper hand here. So fuck you and take this seriously.”

“Oh, I do take you seriously,” Elanus assured him as he glanced at the readout screen his implant was projecting across his right-side vision. There was Kieron’s tracking marker…he’d been immobile for the past two minutes, but now he was moving again. Very, very slowly. Shit. Elanus needed to drag this out. “I do, I promise, but I’ve also got to be honest with you. The cloaking technology you’re referring to is intensely proprietary. I’m talking billions of credits here; I’m staking my companies’ fortunes on it, in fact.”

“I thought you were the AI ship guy,” someone else’s voice cut in. There was a tussle on the other side of the connection, and Elanus bit back a grin.

“I’m that too,” he said. “But that ended up being so messy, so many people fighting over the tech and the kidnapping incident and spending all that time on the Fringe when I should have been on Gania and let me tell you, it left me soured on the whole thing. No, I’ve set that aside for now in favor of metamaterials, and the cloaking technology is the peak of my process thus far.”

“Then that’s what we want.”

“I understand that, but what I’m telling you is that what you want is not going to happen in the way in which you want it, got it?”

“…what?”

“I’m saying that—”

The marker stopped, then seemed to shake a little. “What the fuck was that?” someone screamed over the com.

Ah. Kieron must be using his Swarm. Which meant Elanus needed to get the fuck out of the way before—

He didn’t even hear the shot before it burst into atoms five feet in front of him, the interlinked shield using a proprietary blend of quantum flavordynamics to keep all forms of blowback from touching him. Elanus stared at the conflagration and grinned. “It worked!” he crowed.

“You weren’t sure it would work?” Kieron snapped.

“Worry about yourself, baby,” Elanus replied as he broke into a job back toward Catie. “Or do I need to be worried about you too?”

“We’re fine, I just need to—oh, shit.”

The com cut off abruptly.

“Kieron?” Nothing. “Kieron?”

Nothing but silence.