Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

Notes: OH NO PLOT! WHAT? IS THAT A CLIMACTIC CONFRONTATION I SEE COMING? I think it is ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

***

Chapter Twenty-One, Part Two

 

Photo by Cem Salini 

The moment seemed frozen, a chill spreading through the air and restricting everything, even the breath in their lungs.

Trapper. The man who’d been ready to shoot Carlisle out of the sky when they escaped from the compound. The man who Kieron had rammed with the skimmer, sending him flying and inevitably breaking bones. He sounded a bit wheezy even now, but there was a fierce satisfaction in his voice as well. And why not? They’d been careless, and now they were caught.

“Engage concealment protocols,” Elanus said, the first one to break the ice—of course. “Girls, hide those signals.” It was too late to deny their existence, but he seemed confident that at least they could keep things from getting worse. There was a deep hum, a flicker of Catie’s lights, and then…

“You think you can hide?”

“Comm power, please,” Elanus said smoothly. Catie’s walls rippled anxiously with changing colors, but she complied. “I actually feel quite confident in our ability to hide,” Elanus said into the void.

“And yet here you are, talking to me right now.”

“Isn’t that what you want?” Elanus asked lightly. “To talk? Hopefully to use whatever little piddling satellite capacity your people have to hone in on our position? Mm, sorry, I’m afraid we’ve already blocked that capability. We’re completely invisible to all your sensors right now.”

Was that true? Elanus was speaking like it was, but then he was the master of projecting confidence.

“I think the ability to talk is all you’ve got, in fact,” he continued. “Because if you actually saw us in any meaningful capacity, you’d be attacking us right now.”

“We don’t—”

“You do. Don’t even pretend you don’t, because you do. You’re opportunistic scavengers who would rather attack from the shadows in an effort to take out your prey than even attempt something like that head-on, and I don’t want to hear your justifications because, quite frankly, there are none.”

“You landed on our sovereign territory without permission, and you expect a parley?”

Elanus laughed, sounding as carefree as ever, but Kieron heard the coldness beneath the merry sound. “Sovereign territory? Any official charter for settling this planet was nullified the moment over ninety percent of the population died, and even then, the original charter was for thirty years, I believe, and without engaging the continuation clauses and paying the necessary fees, that original term ended almost twenty years ago.”

There was a long pause, and then—“You think you’re pretty fucking smart, don’t you? But we’re the ones who saw your ship arrive, we’re the ones who were just waiting for you to slip up and broadcast to them, and we’re the ones who have enough mobile weaponry to atomize any attempt you make to get supplies from up there down here. Our satellites might not be perfect, but they’re more than enough to track any drops. Judging from the ship we shot up earlier—” Elanus’s hands tightened into fists “—you don’t have the offensive capabilities to survive a fight for them, either.”

“Do you have the speed for it, though?” Elanus shot back the second Trapper stopped speaking. “Your ships rely on conventional fuels that are undoubtedly in limited quantity, unless you’ve set up some sort of hidden refinery or specialized algeic growth tanks, which I sincerely doubt as that would require the capacity to be a decent resources manager. Even if you do track a drop, you’d have to beat us there, and you don’t even know where we are.”

“We know where—”

“Knowing we’re on the same continent as you doesn’t count,” Elanus interrupted briskly. “That’s a given, but I repeat, if you had the slightest idea where we were right now, you’d already be attacking us because you feel confident in your ability to take out our ship. You’re not, so you don’t. Frankly, I doubt you’d get within a hundred miles of a drop point before we were able to swoop in and vanish again.”

That was a blatant fabrication—once they got to the drop, which was going to be heavier than Catie’s entire frame, the retrofit would have to happen on site. Kieron marveled at his fiancé’s ability to bullshit through the most fraught situations. Had he done this before?

Something niggled at the back of Kieron’s mind…Elanus in an argument with another man, drawing him out, killing him through his own hubris…then it was gone.

Fucking memory loss.

“So, nice try, but I think we’re going to have to pass on your attempts at intimidation for now, thanks so much. Don’t worry, we’ll see ourselves out.” Elanus waited for Catie to shut down the com, then said, “Okay, we’ll have to change the drop plans, break up the pieces into smaller packages that can be retrieved the way I indicated, but it shouldn’t extend our stay by more than a week or so, and—”

“Now, hang on.” Trapper was back. “It’s clear you’re not a man to take lightly, so let’s be reasonable about this.”

Oh, now they want to be reasonable.

“There’s no need for us to get violent with each other,” he went on. “You made a mistake in coming here, but we made a mistake in attacking without due cause. Let’s call that even. What about a trade, instead? You share your ship’s cloaking technology with us, and we’ll give you something precious in return.”

“You don’t have anything we want,” Elanus scoffed, but that cold feeling was starting to creep over Kieron again.

He held up a hand even as Trapper said, “Are you sure about that? Because the man of yours we captured, he sure bled a lot while he was running around over here. We did a few tests on what he left behind, and would you believe, he’s got a relative living among us?” Trapper’s voice deepened. “A mother, nonetheless. One of our little lost boys found his way home after all these years.”

Kieron shook his head at Elanus, who was looking at him wide concern in his eyes. “She’s dead,” he muttered. “She…” She has to be dead.

“Say hello, Carlisle.” There was a moment of silence, then a short scream and a curse. “She’s missing an eye,” Trapper went on, “and half the bones in her right arm are broken, but it’s her. Check your visual feed if you don’t believe me.”

Elanus pulled it up, and a projection appeared in the middle of the hold. It was Trapper in an old-fashioned chest stabilizer standing beside a bloodied woman who looked absolutely filthy from mud and gravel. She glared ahead with her one good eye. “Don’t you dare,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare come for me.”

“You can listen to her if you want,” Trapper added, “but if you don’t come for her, boy, I’ll make sure her last days of life are an agony you can’t even imagine.” He grinned sharply. “I’ll give you an hour to think it over.”

The image vanished, and a suffocating silence fell over them all once more.

She’s alive. My mother is alive.

For now.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One: Part One

 Notes: All right, back to plot! We're closing in on a finale here, darlins :) Exciting!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

 

Picture by Frank Tunder 

Kieron ended up spending the next four days well out of the way.

He wasn’t deliberately setting out to isolate himself. He wasn’t getting lost in a sea of his own thoughts or a maelstrom of emotions that he didn’t want to face and could barely look at anyway. No, overall, he was happy. His family was coming together; there was hope that they were going to escape from Hadrian’s Colony without having to wait for the storm season to pass; and the people he loved most in the universe were safe.

Kieron understood that at heart he was a simple creature. He had never been a man of wild hopes or big dreams. Those were for bigger, wilder people whose wants couldn’t be contained in small spaces. Undoubtedly his therapist or, more likely Elanus, would have a lot to say about that if he actually said it out loud, but there was no point. Kieron was content with the way things were. He liked his life. He liked the people in it. And he had learned definitively at this point that chasing answers from the past only led to pain. All Kieron wanted to do at this point was live in the present.

He didn’t quite trust himself to look forward to what would happen after they got off Hadrian’s Colony yet. It was probably going to involve a lot of the talking that he didn’t want to do. But if Elanus asked, he would do it with a glad heart because nothing was more important to him than being healthy, safe, and sane so that he could take care of the ones that he loved.

Part of staying healthy, safe, and sane was knowing when listening in on certain conversations was only going to drive him up the wall and exiting them.

It wasn’t that Kieron wasn’t smart, but he was not smart enough to follow the math that Elanus and their two daughters were bantering around. Most of the time, there wasn’t even any conversation involved at all, just discussion between Elanus and his implant and the girls in their hard drives. It was a way of being together and solving problems collaboratively on a level that Kieron had never experienced before and, quite frankly, didn’t really care to.

He wasn’t able to talk with Pol and Xilinn much, and even Ryu gave over the com so that Lizzie could focus all of her energies on helping establish trajectories, weight limits, and weather reports. That meant Kieran ended up spending a lot of time with Bobby. He didn’t mind. He liked it, actually, being around someone who made him remember that he wasn’t the most inexperienced person here.

“Those are some good-looking legs,” he told Bobby on the second day out from help’s impending arrival. It was raining outside. Naturally, it was raining outside, but the worst of the lightning storms had passed, and the forecast was as good as it was going to get for the time being. Kieron, as much as he loved Catie, had grown absolutely sick of being locked in her interior, and he could tell Bobby was stir-crazy as well. So they’d taken themselves for a walk, a walk that necessitated Bobby, well, work on his walking.

[Are you sure?] Bobby tapped out. [They feel weird.]

You haven’t done a lot of bipedal stuff yet,” Kieron told him. “I think it’ll probably feel weird for a while, but they look great. You want to give them a try?”

[I guess so,] Bobby said. He took a few tentative steps, stumbled, then darted back to lean against Kieron’s legs. [I don’t think I can do it.]

Kieron smiled and pet the little robot on top of the head. “I know you can,” he told him. “You’re so clever. You’re so…” What was the word Elanus had used to describe him? “Protean,” he said after a moment. “Adaptable. Just work on it a little more, and soon walking around on two legs will be like nothing to you.”

[You make it look easy,] Bobby said, with a bit of a desultory echo to his taps.

“It’s really hard for human babies,” Kieron replied. “It takes them months and months to learn how to stand, much less walk. You’re doing a great job.”

[Thank you,] Bobby replied.

“You ready to try again?”

[Yeah, okay,] and he did. This time he made it five steps before tripping. The next time he took twenty. After that, he skipped right ahead to running, and it turned out being able to leap over the barriers in front of him was a lot more intuitive for Bobby than having to stumble over or go around them.

[This is easy!] he tapped out as he ran in literal circles around Kieron. [I love hydraulics.]

“Just wait until you try out some springs,” Kieron replied with a grin, which meant of course Bobby had to try springs instead of hydraulics, which led to some rather hilarious pratfalls as he adjusted the tensile strength. Eventually, though, he was able to leap almost fifteen feet through the air, land on a single limb, and turn flips all in the space of a couple of hours.

“So cool,” Kieron applauded at the end of it, then frowned as he realized his hands had practically gone numb from the chill. “We better head back in, though, before Elanus wonders where we’ve gone off to.”

[Okay,] Bobby said. They returned to the ship, where sure enough, Elanus had lightened his trance state so that he’d know the moment they came in.

“You’re soaked through, this is stupid,” he said the moment Kieron stepped over Catie’s threshold. “This is not the place to get soaked. What are we going to do if you get pneumonia? Are you insane?”

“That’s not how you get pneumonia,” Kieron pointed out as he shucked off the poncho that Catie had thoughtfully made for him.

“Oh, so now you’re the expert on how people get pneumonia on Hadrian’s Colony, huh? For all you know, it is carried in the water. Maybe it’s a seasonal variety of illness that can only be dredged up by the force of winds stirring waters from miles below sea level. You don’t know.”

“Neither do you,” Kieron said, but he let Elanus fuss over him while Bobby soaked the attention up like a sponge. It was nice. It was homey. It was exactly what he wanted.

When Lizzie and all her passengers finally came into close orbit around Hadrian’s Colony two days afterward, Kieron was tentatively ready to accept that this was going to be a good thing. That something wonderful, in fact, was happening to them. Their rescue was here. Their family had come for him, for all of them.

“Can you see us?” Lizzie asked.

“You shine briiight,” Catie told her. “So briiiight!” The refit had done a lot to boost her signal. Lizzie didn’t just appear like some random object in the night sky on Catie’s sensors; she blazed like a close contact star.

“Approximately five hours and you’ll be able to drop the parts,” Elanus said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Another fifteen hours of refits—”

“More like eighteen, Daddeee,” Catie said.

“To hell with it, rounded up to twenty. Twenty hours of refits, and we could be off by tomorrow afternoon.”

They looked at each other and grinned, and then—

“We fucking see you people now” came over Catie’s wide-open radio transmitter.

 

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

***

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.