Chelen City: Chapter Eight, Part One

 Notes: Finally diving back into plot! Enjoy a fabulous introduction.

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Eight, Part One

***

Chapter Eight, Part One

 

Elanus had always been a believer in the maxim “The best defense was a good offense.” He didn’t like to wait for action to come to him and then respond to it. Admittedly, this had led to some less-than-stellar decisions over the course of his life at times when a natural, immediate would have been better than the practiced one he handed out. There were plenty of reasons why he’d been a bachelor for most of his adult life, and his “calculated bastardry” was one of them. Lucky for him, Kieron didn’t mind him being a schemer at heart.

In this case, though, he was beaten to the punch. And by one of his very own targets, too. The possibility of that happening had been all the way down at Plan G, although in retrospect he should have ranked the potential higher. Especially since the person to contact him was Fritz.

The request for an interview was sent in video form, and a more carefully curated blend of folksy approachability, professionalism, and cute innuendo Elanus had never seen. Fritz was one of the few men to wear his head-hair as elaborately as he did his facial hair, with tightly braided swirls and spirals and elevations here and there, giving the whole thing a wavelike look. His skin was dark brown with gold highlights along the cheeks and eyes, and his lips were a pouty, glossy red. He wore a brown suit that perfectly matched his skin tone, with a repeating pattern of the wave in his hair on it, only in the same gold as his makeup. He was…very handsome. Almost exhaustingly so.

It must take him an hour to put himself together in the morning. Elanus was all for looking his best, but he tended to prioritize the mental over the physical.

“El-anus Desfon-taines, back at last,” Fritz’s message began. “And with hardly a word about the things you’ve been up to for the year you’ve been gone. People are curious about you. You left so dramatically, you spent months in one of the most remote places in Federation space—you even went to the trouble of taking on that station’s contract, don’t think I don’t know—and then you finally come back only to prepare the way for a boyfriend and a ship full of refugees. A boyfriend that hardly any of us have seen, much less know anything about, although a little bird tells me that there’s a story there.”

Fritz grins. “I’d love to hear some of it from you, but I don’t mind going digging for it either. Would you like to control some spin? Come on my show! I’m fully booked this week, but I’ll bump any one of them if it means getting to see your precious face again.”

Precious face? Elanus fought the urge to gag. Pretentious son of a—

“Do let me know. I promise not to go live with any of my information about you until next week at the earliest, so there’s plenty of time.”

You’re going to regret threatening me.

“This isn’t a threat!” Fritz added, raising his hands in the air. “It’s a simple statement of fact. You’re a person of interest in the media, and you’ve been avoiding giving an account of yourself. You’re intriguing, especially in wake of your partner’s death. This is honestly stuff you should have handled weeks ago if you didn’t want to get bothered about it now. I promise to lend a sympathetic ear.” He grinned suddenly. “If you bring your boyfriend, I’ll even let you vet some of the questions.” He gestured toward his implant with a “tapping” gesture. “Message me!”

“Wow.”

Elanus turned in his chair to see Kieron standing in the door of his home office, arms crossed. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Since ‘dramatically,’ I think.” He shrugged. “If it was meant to be a secret, you should have closed your door.”

Elanus thought about it for a moment, then sighed. “It’s not a secret, it’s just not something you need to concern yourself with either. Fritz wants a story, that’s all.”

“And…do you want to give him one?”

“I want to talk to him, at least.” Elanus gestured at the other chair in the room and waited for Kieron to sit down before continuing. “He’s one of the people I’m considering as a candidate for hiring an assassin.”

“Really?” Kieron looked at the frozen image of Fritz projecting from the center of Elanus’s desk. “He doesn’t look the type.”

“He’s cutthroat,” Elanus replied. “He was a lawyer before he switched fields. He’s a hell of a researcher, too. If anyone could dig in and figure out what was going on between Deysan and me, he’s at the top of the list.”

“So you want to find out what he knows.”

Elanus laughed. “There’s no way he’ll let anything big drop. I’m trying to gauge him for…well, a lot of things. Interest. Sincerity.”

“Clearly he’s interested, if he’s reaching out for an interview,” Kieron pointed out.

“True, but that might be less about me and more about wanting a story. I am a pretty big scoop right now.” Immodest but true.

“Mm.” Kieron cocked his head a bit. “Do you want to do the interview, then?”

“I think I do.” He might as well. It saved him some legwork.

“And…do you want me to come with you?”

Elanus reached for Kieron immediately, and lucky for him, Kieron took his hand and let himself be tugged over. He rolled his eyes as Elanus settled him in his lap, but that was a fairly normal reaction. “I always want you with me, but you shouldn’t do anything you don’t want to. If you’re there, he will try to pry information out of you.”

Kieron frowned. “Then…I better not go. But I don’t like the idea of you going alone, either.”

“Oh, darling.” Elanus smiled. “I won’t go alone. I’ll take Ryu along.”

And see if Fritz has any reaction to seeing me in control of the man he might have hired to scare me with an assassination attempt.

Chelen City: Chapter Seven, Part Two

 Notes: I've got sick kidlet, sick hubby, and sick me today, so...yeah. Happy to post, but ugh.

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Seven, Part Two

***

Chapter Seven, Part Two

 

“House rules,” Kieron said to Ryu as the tube indicated they were five minutes from home. They were the first words he’d spoken since leaving the hospital, not bothering to take part in the small talk between Elanus and Ryu. That was fine—Elanus understood Kieron’s perspective, he really did. Letting someone he didn’t trust into their space was a big deal, and one that Elanus still wasn’t entiiiiirely sure was necessary, but he wasn’t going to tell Kieron that. If nothing else, Ryu would be someone new for the girls to interact with, and…

Come to think of it, house rules were a damn good idea.

“You don’t talk to anyone outside of our home about anything that happens in there. Not what you eat, not where you sleep, especially not what you say to our family or what you might overhear them saying. The second I get proof you’re spreading rumors or telling tales or selling secrets or any fucking thing, I will kill you and save your would-be assassin the trouble. Got it?”

“I already know you’ve got Deysan’s ship in there,” Ryu said with an eye roll. “Everybody does. It’s not a secret, but fine, I promise not to talk about the Catalina.”

It was jarring to hear his daughter referred to that way. Elanus knew that it was, technically, her official designation—the title with which he’d introduced his masterpiece to the world. It was bizarre to think about how far beyond that she’d come, how much she’d grown.

“On that note, keep your swearing to a minimum in the public spaces in our home,” Kieron went on. “If you’re asked to play and you say yes, play nicely. If you decline, don’t be a dick about it.”

“Your ship ‘plays’? Oh, that’s just too cute.”

“Ryu, I will hit you myself if you don’t watch your tone,” Elanus snapped. “This is serious. You have nieces, right? Think about how gentle you are with them, and bring that energy into being with the girls. That’s all I ask.”

“I could ask for a lot more,” Kieron muttered, but he didn’t push it, which was good, because Elanus’s patience had abruptly run dry.

“I’ll introduce him,” he said to Kieron as the tube pulled into their landing platform. “You ought to be clear for a call with Xilinn in our room in three minutes. See if you can get a timeline from her for coming here.”

Kieron’s eyes widened. “You want her and Pol here?”

“Not forever, but—” But if he invited them out of the refugees’ housing and into his home, it would be considered a permanent move. That was the law on Gania, something he’d somehow forgotten in the craziness of the past few days. “Until they can get settled in a place of their own,” he amended, because yeah, he wouldn’t be sending them back to group housing if he could avoid it. He needed to see about hurrying up the work visa process for everyone, getting them into educational programs or job training or extra therapy, whatever they needed to start making a real life for themselves here. It wasn’t fair to keep them in limbo.

Kieron pulled his head down for a kiss. “Thank you.”

“I’m right here,” Ryu said, deadpan.

“You can be out the door and falling through the air if you pre—”

“You go, we’re good, it’s fine!” Elanus opened the door and motioned Kieron to their bedroom. The house was suspiciously quiet, no chimes or laughter or music to indicate anyone was watching them. He could feel the girls’ interest over his implant, though. “Let me show you the guest room,” he said to Ryu.

“What, you only have one?”

“Only one I care to offer you. It’s the most secure,” Elanus said as he walked Ryu up one story, then down a dark-paneled hall to a room on the left-hand side. He opened the door, then activated the visitor protocol.

“Stand in front of the door, please,” a pleasant voice announced. Ryu complied and let it take his picture, scan him for biohazards, and finally take a DNA sample when he grabbed the handle. “Thank you, Mr. Chen-Martelle.”

“Using the standard voice operating system, really?” Ryu murmured as he walked into the room. “I expected better of you.”

The was a flare of static, as though someone had started speaking, then clapped a hand over their mouths. Elanus smiled as Ryu looked suspiciously at him. “Two escape routes,” he said, pointing at the window first. “Standard fire danger set-up there, and over here, the drain in the shower expands into a tunnel that will take you to a common area if you crawl for two miles.”

“Two…miles.”

“It’s a last resort.”

“I’ll fucking say,” Ryu replied. There was another surge of static. “What the hell is that?”

“That is probably my daughter—which one, I’m not sure—keeping herself from chewing you out for being rude,” Elanus said. “Speaking of the girls, would you like to meet them?”

“They’re ships,” Ryu said even as he followed Elanus back out of the room, which composedly closed up behind them. “They’re AI ships, sure, but they’re not children.”

“You say that now…”

“I say that and I mean it! AI is impressive and important, absolutely, but it’s not the same as an actual, nascent, raised-from-birth intelligence. I don’t know what data you used for training, but—”

“It’s not data,” Elanus interrupted as they got into the lift to the top floors. “There’s no training. There’s a computerized brain, yes, but it’s supported with custom hardware to create a true lifeform. Catie and Lizzie aren’t AI intelligences. They’re an entirely new form of life.”

Ryu shook his head. “You’re crazy. That’s not possible. It’s never been truly possible.”

They got to Catie’s hangar. The door opened, and—

A hologram of a bright pink dinosaur in a tutu came up and punched Ryu square in the nose. Or, it tried to punch him. It didn’t land, obviously, but Catie coupled it with a blast from her regulators that sent Ryu staggering. “Don’t be mean to myyyyy daddy!” she shouted. Her dinosaur form then turned and pranced away, off to link arms with a Ceropian squid-beast for a very impressive ballet.

Ryu looked at Elanus. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “What…the fuck?”

“He broke a rule!” That was Lizzie. “Elanus, your guest broke a rule. Now he has to do a dance!”

“I have to…what?”

Elanus grinned. He couldn’t think of a better way to take Ryu’s mind off his troubles than the pure, beautiful chaos that was his daughters.

As long as the poor guy didn’t lose his mind, it was a good beginning.

Chelen City: Chapter Seven, Part One

 Notes: Here we go, diving back into the main plot! Enjoooooy :)

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Seven, Part One

***

Chapter Seven, Part One

 

It took another two days filled with Elanus fixing a raft of things going wrong at work, Kieron reluctantly looking after Ryu, and the girls finally making up after the fight that had made everyone in the house miserable for too long for Elanus to break through the final layer of encryptions on Deysan’s research. What he was left with…

Was gibberish. A mishmash of data that was utterly useless as written. He stared at it for two minutes without blinking, trying to make sense of the first few lines and failing utterly, before he started to swear.

It took a little longer than he liked to calm himself down after that, but Elanus did his due diligence. He went through the date piece by piece, scanning and scouring until he’d worked his way through about one percent of it by hand.

No patterns. No figures. Nothing to help him figure this out. Either the process he’d used to de-encrypt this was wrong—possible but not likely—or Deysan had been an enormous liar who actually hadn’t figured out a cure to Elfshot Disease—much more likely.

Or…hmm. Or perhaps he was missing a key. The more Elanus thought about it, the more he liked that prospect. Deysan was such a fool in so many ways, but he knew research. There was substantial evidence that he’d spend a lot of time and money on this particular project. Even if he hadn’t come up with a true cure, he’s probably advanced the state of understanding in plenty of ways. And it would be so like him to hand over a key to someone close to him as a way of tying them to him while making himself seem like the vulnerable one. Classic manipulation. Small wonder he’d been such an excellent crook.

Well. That made dealing with the list of suspects when it came to the assassination attempt much more pressing than it had been before, but it didn’t change the major players. Caria Jayde, Fritz, and Restaria Sanclare had just moved to the top of Elanus’s social calendar.

Well, almost to the top. The number one person who needed dealing with was a certain gentleman waiting with ill grace to be signed out of his private hospital room. Elanus was looking forward to it, if for no other reason than he wanted to put Kieron in a better mood. Getting Ryu off the books, so to speak, would do that.

Elanus walked into Ryu’s hospital room and clapped his hands together gleefully. “Discharge day! At last, am I right? You’ve got to be more than ready to get out of here and back home.” Kieron followed at a slower pace, suspicious of every corner and giving every face in the hall a second glance. It was so…adorably hypervigilant of him.

Ryu scowled. “Don’t I look ready?”

“You look absolutely charming, as usual.” Actually, he looked a little worse for wear, but who wouldn’t after a week in the hospital recovering from a stroke? Elanus went over to the wall and finished the sign-out with a flourish, then turned back to Ryu prepared to escort him down to the nearest Tube and out of their lives for the time being.

Only to see him and Kieron locked in a staring contest.

“What?” Ryu snapped.

“What’s wrong?”

“What the hell do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong.”

“Liar.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you if you think I’m going to let you walk out of here without telling us why you went from being eager to go home to looking like leaving this place is the last thing you want,” Kieron replied without missing a beat.

Ryu practically snarled at him. “You can’t keep me here. I’ve been signed out, I can go.”

“So, what, are your feet glued to the floor then?”

“Fuck—”

“What’s the problem?” Elanus asked before the conversation could devolve any further.

“Nothing!” Ryu said. “Your boyfriend is delusional, that’s all.”

“Something’s got him worried,” Kieron said, ignoring Ryu now that he had Elanus’s ear. “Look around. He knew today was his discharge day and he’s been mobile for over fifty hours now, and yet he hasn’t packed anything.”

Huh. That was true—Ryu’s stuff was strewn all over the room.

“He’s got his implant running over his eyes nonstop,” Kieron went on. “Some kind of scan, I think. And he hasn’t shaved or showered today.” Kieron turned his attention back to Ryu for a second, then sighed heavily. “God fucking damn it. Someone tried to kill you, didn’t they?”

Elanus gaped for a second, then looked back at Ryu. “What?”

Ryu folded his arms over his chest and pointedly didn’t look at either of them, which was answer enough for Elanus.

“What the hells?” he exclaimed. “Someone tried to kill you here?” With what he was paying and the levels of security he’d arranged, he was stunned. “After Kieron left, I assume.”

“Obviously.” Ryu rolled his eyes. “Both times were at night. Poison in the ventilation and in the water in the bathroom. Targeted to my room specifically, since I didn’t hear any alarms, and if I hadn’t been testing for it I wouldn’t have noticed until it was too late. One time could have been a simple courtesy…”

“But twice is a genuine effort,” Elanus said with a nod.

“You people are truly messed up,” Kieron muttered.

“I can’t say for sure it was anyone on staff,” Ryu went on. “There are too many security holes. But I also received word that my apartment is currently being ‘fumigated,’ which is ridiculous, and was told to find alternate accommodations. The only other person I could stay with is my sister, which is impossible.”

“She doesn’t like you?” Kieron asked.

“She loves me,” Ryu snapped. “But she’s also a single mother with twin babies and I’m not going to bring this kind of drama to her home right now. It’s fine, I’ll get an anonymous hotel room and—”

“No.” Elanus shook his head. “If they could find you hear, they’ll be able to track you down in a hotel.”

“Well, where else am I supposed to stay? Outside? Should I go camp in the mist, ooh, yeah, that’s safe! Or maybe I should run to another city where I know nothing about the infrastructure and can’t find ways to save myself, so I can save you the trouble of having to follow through with your word, and—”

“You’re coming home with us.”

Elanus and Ryu turned equally shocked expressions on Kieron. Elanus, for his part, was sure he’d heard wrong. Kieron loathed Ryu. “What was that?”

“He’s coming home with us. Obviously.”

Ryu laughed. “Not a chance. I’d rather weather a third attack here than go home with you two.”

Kieron pinched the bridge of his nose, looking like he’d rather be saying anything other than what he was about to. “You won’t survive a third attack. Two poisonings and neither worked—the next attempt definitely won’t be poison. It’ll be something you can’t evade. It’ll be big, probably too big to hide, but the blame will be diverted because whoever is behind this has power and money.

“But…” Elanus tried. “You don’t like each other.”

“So?”

“So…won’t it make you uncomfortable having him in our home?”

“Absolutely,” Kieron said. “But I’d rather have him there than have his stupid death on my stupid conscience because he’s too stupid to know how to protect himself under the circumstances.”

“Hey!”

“Shut up. You’re coming back to our house and that’s final. If you want to live, that is,” he added like it didn’t matter much to him either way.

Elanus knew better. He smiled at Kieron, who was carefully avoiding his gaze.

Ryu unfolded his arms. He clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut, and shouted “FUCK” so hard that even the sound-dampening walls were challenged. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Great!”

Yeah, good. Great. Oh boy.

Oh…boy.