Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Nine, Part Two

 Notes: Ooooh, let's have some threats, shall we?

Title: Hadrian's Colony, Chapter Nine, Part Two

***

Chapter Nine, Part Two

 

The second Kieron sent the transponder code, he began thinking about a backup plan. The truth was, he had no idea whether or not Lizzie was actively monitoring above this planet right now. Sure, she and Catie could communicate, but that was because they had complementary programming and a bond that went beyond spacial mechanics and into the realm of “it’s a sister thing.” Lizzie was always listening for Catie, and vice versa. But Lizzie was accustomed to Catie being the go-between for communications with Kieron and Elanus, especially at such a long distance. Without her to wave the proverbial flag and get Lizzie’s attention, this might be a futile exercise, in which case…

Well, Kieron was right beside the control panel, which was lifted off the flight deck flooring and surely had its own insulators. If the floor was to be electrified at any moment, getting on top of the panel was a good call. Once he was up there, using Trapper as a human shield was the next step. The man was arrogant, still sitting there spinning his chair in little semi-circles as he smirked at Kieron, just waiting to prove him wrong. He had a small hand blaster on his right side, Kieron’s left—how nice, he’d be able to grab that easily once he got his other arm around the man’s neck. Once he had a human shield, he’d be in a decent negotiating position again.

Of course, there were a lot of things that could go wrong with that scenario, not the least of which being his mo—Carlisle, who was watching him like a predator searching for the weakest link in the herd. Kieron decided to confront the staring head-on. Besides, conversation would be a good distraction from the ticking clock. “What?” he said flatly. “Afraid I’m going to make a break for it?”

“You don’t have anywhere to go,” she replied, and Alissa laughed in agreement.

Kieron didn’t say anything, he just met her unblinking stare with one of his own.

“Um…boss?” Doubles asked from where he’d slumped down at the table. “What’s with the…thing?”

“There’s no thing,” Carlisle said evenly.

“Oh, she denied it without even trying to talk around it,” Alissa said, heading over to sit next to Doubles. She stroked her short, thick fingers across the back of his hand, her deep blue hair glowing green in the strange yellow light. “Now we know there’s a thing.”

“Thirty seconds,” Trapper intoned.

“If you’ve got something to say to me, then just come out and say it,” Kieron said.

Carlisle shrugged. “I’ve already said my piece, and you denied having any formal training. You can’t blame me for trying to figure out your lie, can you?”

“I’m not lying.”

“I know a soldier when I see one, Desfontaines.”

Kieron sighed. He wasn’t going to be able to put her off forever…which was fine. He just needed to put her off for long enough to distract everyone. “Why, because you spent some time in a fighting force yourself? Is that how you lost the eye?”

She stiffened minutely. “That’s none of your business.”

“Hey, you’ve made me your business, turnabout’s fair play.”

“Dude,” Alissa broke in with a scowl. “If you haven’t noticed, you’re a fucking prisoner right now, okay? We’ve got you dead to rights, so how about you just stand there and look pretty until your people call back or we get tired of waiting, huh?”

“No.”

Surprisingly, this came from Carlisle.

“No what, boss?” Doubles asked.

“No, Desfontaines is no prisoner.”

Trapper rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you made a deal, whatever. Functionally, his ass is ours right now. Has been from the moment he stepped onto our ship.”

“Mm. No, I don’t think so.” Carlisle took a step forward, her eyes intent on Kieron’s face. “The second you boarded, you were looking for outs. Weaknesses in our defenses, in our alliance, in our hardware. You’re not the type to gamble with your life, not when you’ve got a kid to try and get back to. You’re determined to survive, and that means you’re planning for the worst already, aren’t you?”

Kieron hated the way his mother was able to read his strategy like she was seeing inside his head. “You’re projecting.”

“Hardly. The control panel is also electrified, by the way.”

“Boss—” Trapper began, but Kieron cut him off.

“No it’s not. You haven’t shielded any of the visible couplings in the steering chassis. You’d blow out your own ability to drive.”

“Not at the voltage we’re talking about.”

“In a ship this old, with most of its storage space going to weapons and food, I doubt you’re willing to take the risk of blowing something accidentally.”

She smiled slightly, as if pleased he’d seen through her bluff. “We’ve got a secondary protective system.”

Kieron smiled. “Gas in the vents?”

“Boss,” Alissa murmured, “how does he—”

“Maybe you’re pirates after all,” Kieron continued. “That’s the sort of thing a person does when they’re worried about being boarded or transporting hostiles. Neither of which I’d put past you. Regardless, none of you are wearing masks to protect you from…probably concentrated nitrous oxide, isn’t it? So it’s a matter of who wakes up first, or you’re betting you can get to masks faster than I can because you know where they’re stashed.” He glanced around, then slammed a hand down ten inches below the top of the control panel on the hidden drawer he knew he’d find in this model of ship. The drawer popped open, and two small nasal rebreathers fell out.

Trapper immediately drew his weapon. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, Desfontaines, but you keep pulling crazy shit like this and I’ll shoot you for the hell of it.”

“Save your breath, Trapper,” Carlisle said calmly. “He could disarm you faster than you could pull the trigger anyway.”

Trapper looked betrayed. “Boss.”

“What have you brought on our ship, Carlisle?” Alissa demanded, pushing to her feet.

“Watch your mouth, Lis,” Carlisle snapped without turning away from Kieron. “Or you’ll play even harder into his game. He’s trying to divide us, to make us forget that we’re waiting for a transmission from his people.” All three of the others suddenly turned and stared at the radio like they’d forgotten it was even there. “Exactly,” Carlisle went on. “It’s been, what, two minutes now, Trapper?”

“Closer to three,” he said. He pushed to his feet and backed away from Kieron, keeping his weapon up.

Shit. Kieron could have attacked then, but there was still a chance he could get out of this without bloodshed. Four against one was bad odds. “Listen,” he said, raising his hands carefully so everyone could see them. “I’m not here to cause anyone harm. You’re the ones who played that game first, if you remember.”

“Yeah, then you turned out to be some sort of crazy badass who even makes the boss nervous,” Trapper said. “No way we’re dealing with you now. I say we shoot him and dump the body.”

“Seconded,” Alissa immediately said. Doubles just blinked and looked like he wanted to shrink in on himself.

“Your people haven’t checked in,” Carlisle noted. “I think you’re lying about them being out there, Desfontaines. And if you’re lying about that, then you could be lying about everything.” She pulled her own gun, and Kieron bit back a curse. “Too bad.”

Time to go nuclear. “My battery pack is set to explode.”

There was a collective blink. “What?” Alissa asked after a second.

“The uranium battery pack in my environmental array. It’s rigged to blow the second my vitals stop transmitting to it.”

Alissa, Trapper, and Doubles all looked dumbfounded. Carlisle, on the other hand, looked oddly satisfied.

“What the fuck?” Trapper exclaimed. “That’s bullshit.”

“Check for the signal if you don’t believe me. You’ll pick it up.” Blobby could take care of that, Kieron was certain.

“It’s like you wanted to be caught,” Doubles said with a whine.

“I didn’t want anything to do with any of you.” Truer words were never spoken. “You forced this. Now, you can either be patient and wait a little longer to hear back from my people,” and I can work on my next backup plan, “or you can disrupt my vital signs and blow yourselves, and your ship, sky-high.”

Carlisle began to speak, but a new voice cut through the tension and broke it to pieces. “Kee? Is that you?”

Kieron grinned and flicked the microphone switch. “Hey, Lizzie. It’s me.”

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Eighteen

 Notes: Oooh, things are getting intense! Who knew communication could be so hard? (we knew, we all knew)

Title: Lord of Unkindness, Chapter Eighteen

***

Chapter Eighteen

 

“No!” Ciro sits up and pulls away in one motion, and Angelo’s not fast enough to keep his head from hitting the pillow before he too sits up.

“Ciro.” He holds out a placating hand, but Ciro isn’t having it.

“That’s a terrible idea. Are you insane? That’s bullshit!” He wants to get up and pace, but he’s naked now and can’t quite stomach getting back into his old, filthy clothes. He settles for sitting at the far edge of the bed and pulling the blankets right around his waist, so no roving hands can distract him. “The last thing I need to do is attract attention by pulling my magic toward myself! How do you think they found me the last time?”

Angelo looks unimpressed with his objections. “Given that your family is ridiculously wealthy and runs a telecom company, I think there are literally dozens of ways they could have found you. Bribing people for access to CC camera systems, hiring hackers to look for any sort of digital footprint you might have left—hell, even hiring an old-fashioned private investigator to find you. Or a firm of private investigators. It’s not like you tried to hide yourself in the wilderness, baby. You chose a city. A shithole of a city, but a city.”

Ciro shakes his head. “They do their tracking with familiars. You know that, you know they don’t like to hire contractors unless they have no choice. No one in the family is a good enough hacker to trace me—I was the best of them all. And private investigators are a useless expense when magical investigators will do just as good. They work on regular humans and on witches.”

Angelo sits up and crosses his legs, settling in for the argument. “All right, let’s consider that. Your family lives on the other side of the country. This is a big damn place. Even with all their familiars, given the fact that you had no reason to pick Vernon in particular, that’s a lot of ground to cover and familiars are delicate. Nephele didn’t have hers run all the way from Massachusetts to California, that’s for sure.”

“Not her,” Ciro agrees. “Her father. Uncle Magnus is the one who found me.”

“Cockroaches are even more of a stretch than rats.”

“They’re hard to kill and they fit in luggage,” Ciro replies doggedly, batting at his bird when it flies irritatedly at his head. “Stick a hundred into a hundred different bags at the airport, send them to a hundred different locations, and let them start sniffing for trace. I’ve seen him do it before.”

“Even if you’re right,” Angelo says, “the best defense isn’t to send your magic away! It’s to coalesce it around you into a strong defense!”

“I’ve got over a hundred ravens! That’s a huge fucking flock of coalescence!” How does Angelo not see that all this does is make it even easier for Ciro to fuck up? How does he not see how dangerous it would be for him? “This isn’t going to work,” Ciro says, looking around the room for wherever Angelo has stashed his own clothes. They’re not the same height, but he’ll figure something out.

“Whoa, whoa. Hang on.” Angelo reaches out a hand but doesn’t touch him. “Please don’t be hasty. I think…” He frowns thoughtfully. “I think we’re talking around a misconception. Ciro, do you think you don’t have any power outside of your familiars?”

Great, now they’re talking witchcraft 101. “My familiars are my power,” Ciro says impatiently. “That’s how it works with witches like me. Our familiars are the physical and spiritual representations of our power, existing outside of us but connected to us. We control and commune with them, and can restore them with time and effort if one is used up, but they’re primarily a static creation.”

Angelo nods slowly. “And what are other witches’ familiars for?”

“The same fucking thing,” Ciro snaps.

“But they’re not the same thing, because other witches don’t require their familiars to be present in order to do their magic,” Angelo says. “They help, for sure. It’s easier to do magic when there’s a familiar to channel it or augment it, but they’re a construct. A tool to utilize magic, not the person’s magic in and of itself.”

Ciro shakes his head. “That’s a whole separate class of witch. We’re different from them.”

“No, you’re not.”

Ciro clenches his hands. “Yes we are, it’s the first thing we’re taught as children! Our magic lives in our familiars! We have nothing without them!”

“Ciro.” There’s a tenderness in Angelo’s face that makes Ciro’s hackles rise. “That’s not true.”

He can’t stand it any longer. He gets up and grabs for his filthy, waterlogged jeans. Pulling them on feels like pulling on a layer of cold slime, but he persists until they’re up all the way.

“Ciro, stop!”

“You’re wrong,” he snaps without looking at Angelo. “You just don’t get it. This is a fundamental aspect of my magic—you think I don’t understand my own magic?”

Angelo, not to be outdone, gets out of bed. Unlike Ciro, he doesn’t give a shit whether he’s clothed or not. He’s bathed in the golden light of his own magic, and his nudity is less of a vulnerability than it is simply a fact. Ciro feels envy rise up as he glances at him, but refuses to meet Angelo’s eyes as he comes closer. “I know this was the way you were taught,” Angelo says, frank but calm. “But your family aren’t the only multi-familiar witches I’ve worked with over the years, and several of the others have used their magic very, very differently, with great success.”

“Not my family, though,” Ciro points out—harsher than he needs to be, harsher than he wants to be, but this is a matter of life and death now. Both their lives, potentially, but he cares about Angelo’s far more than he does about his own. “Not my family, so you can’t say that whatever ability you’re talking about crosses over. None of us work magic outside what’s kept in our familiars, and—”

“Your mother did.”

Ciro goes blank. He…he can’t think of anything to say to that. He doesn’t know anything to say to that, because he doesn’t know enough about his mother to refute it. He wants to refute it—this is an argument he can win, that he needs to win for both their sakes, but…

But he remembers little things. Little magics his mother used to do with her hands, like healing a cut on his face or mending a bruise on his knee. He remembers how she could coax a flower to give off a stronger scent, or widen its bloom. Warming him up with a touch when he was cold, or the one time they went sledding and she was able to pull him, on his sled, up the steep, steep hill over and over, never faltering, never falling, never getting tired.

Her familiars had been fish. Koi. His father had hated them, but she never listened to his insults or hatred. His mother had been a goddess in the water, and she’d done the sort of specialized work with her fish familiars that had helped cement their family’s value and expertise in the magical community.

Cheng Mei could do magic without her familiars at hand. Not dramatic magic, not that Ciro had ever seen, but…

“It’s not the same.”

“It can be,” Angelo says. “Your mother’s skills at hands-on magic suffered during her marriage to your father, but they never went away entirely. This is something that you can learn.”

Ciro shakes his head. “I don’t think I can.”

“I think you have to.”

“I—”

Now it’s Angelo’s turn to raise his voice. “What are you going to do without your magic? Hunker down in a wilderness somewhere and hope against hope that you’re never spotted by the wrong magic user? What about when your father gets desperate enough to share your family’s business with other people and hires specialized bounty hunters to hunt you down? What about when he decides to do business with a blood clan?”

Ciro balks. “He hates blood magic.”

“He hates having you out of pocket even worse,” Angelo insists. “He’ll get there eventually, especially if what you told me is right and your uncle isn’t able to resume his work for the family. He’s going to need your strength to prop up your family’s status in the magical world, and he won’t care who he has to hurt to get it.”

Ciro stares at Angelo in dismay. “Then it’s even more important that I get away from you, soon,” he says grimly.

“No. You’re safe here,” Angelo says. “My parents’ magic is strong enough to turn eyes, magical or otherwise, away.”

“Then I’m stuck here forever.”

“Ciro—”

“And so are you,” he goes on, knowing that he’s hit on a thread here that he’s got to pull. “This place won’t let me stay without you, will it? It’s meant to be your sanctuary, not mine. I can only be here with you, and you can’t stay here forever.”

“I can stay as long as I need to,” Angelo says.

Ciro shakes his head. “You can’t. You can’t, you’ve got a business and employees and other people to help. You—your whole life revolves around helping people, and familiars, and—you can’t give that up for my sake.”

“I won’t be giving anything up,” Angelo insists. “I’m here because I—Ciro. You—you know.”

You know I love you. And he does know, he feels that, but he also knows he doesn’t deserve for Angelo to turn his life inside out. Not for as long as it might take him to learn an entirely new magical discipline, which could take months…years. “I won’t do that to you,” Ciro insists quietly. “I can’t. I’ll—I’ve got to leave.”

“No.”

“I’ve got to. I won’t trap you here, I won’t…” He turns blindly, looking for his shirt, for anything he can shove on his feet to make the first few miles easier.

“Ciro!” Angelo grabs his hands and pulls him back to face him.

“I won’t.” Ciro pulls his hands free but doesn’t look away. He needs Angelo to see this next part, see the truth in his face. “I would rather die than trap you.”

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Nine, Part One

 Notes: Back to the uneasy detente between untrusting factions. *sigh* Sometimes I wish real life didn't mirror my fiction so closely.

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

***

Chapter Nine, Part One

 

They searched his bag before they let him on board their ship. Of course they did. Luckily for Kieron, Blobby had apparently done some thinking and decided that the best way for him to go from here was with camouflage. It turned out Blobby was a master of disguise, and had no problem splitting himself into pieces if it sold the look. And the look he was going for was—

“An environmental data relay?”

Oh, was that what he was pretending to be? Good thing Carlisle’s mechanic, Lis—“Alissa to you, you bastard”—had told him what it was. Kieron picked up the baton from there.

“Obviously.”

Alissa, one of the shortest adults Kieron had ever encountered before at four and a half feet tall, glared at him suspiciously. “I thought you only landed here by chance. Why would you need to lay out the tech necessary for an environmental data relay if your goal is to get off Colony?”

Kieron scowled right back at her. “Did you forget that it was the incessant, unending storms that were keeping us here in the first place? There’s almost no data out there when it comes to environmental conditions on this planet. We needed more information if we were going to get out of here safely, so we picked this place as ground zero and I started laying beacons. We were going to move out in fifty-mile chunks until we covered most of this part of the continent.”

“I thought you had support in-system. Why not get them to collect data for you? Why bother with all this unless you really do plan to settle here?”

Kieron sighed. “We do have support in-system, but it isn’t here yet. And are you missing the part where the ion storms mess with ground-to-space monitoring? Didn’t you have to do something like this when you first decided to make this your home base?”

“No, because—”

“Lis. Enough.”

Alissa rolled her eyes but acquiesced to Carlisle’s order. She glanced through Blobby’s components one last time—a heavy, square black box that comprised most of his body mass, a few random “sensors,” and a minimalist control device that Blobby had integrated his visual circuitry and additions into. She turned it all around, then asked, “Where’s the battery kept?”

“It’s sealed inside on manufacture,” Kieron replied.

“Bullshit. No one does that.”

“They do if the battery is made from uranium.”

Everyone in the mercenary group, even Doubles—who was way less purple now, but still a bit unsteady—stared at Kieron like he’d just grown another head. “What the fuck?” Trapper, the pilot he presumed judging from the guy’s retro-styled flight suit, burst out. “Who the fuck uses a uranium battery in this day and age?”

“Someone who doesn’t want their device to stop working.”

“That’s idiotic! There are so many less toxic ways to do that!”

Kieron shrugged. “There are safeguards built into the structure of the device. The only problem comes when you try to dismantle it.”

“Sounds like something a spy would use,” Carlisle commented wryly.

“Sounds like something someone cheap would use,” Kieron replied. “We don’t have the money for the latest gear. This stuff is over half a century old. You won’t be able to get it to work with your ship’s systems, so don’t even try. It might end up accidentally passing on a virus that you have a hard time getting rid of.”

“Let’s just leave it here,” Doubles said groggily. “And leave this guy here too.”

“Yeah,” Kieron said. “Do that.” That would actually make a lot of things in his life easier.

“No.” Carlisle quickly dashed his brief hopes. “I need to check his story out. If we’re looking at potential oversight from the Central System, we need to know about it. If you really are an incidental arrival,” she said to Kieron directly, “then we can figure something mutually agreeable out. But if you’re lying to me…”

Kieron arched an eyebrow. “You’ll what, shoot me? Dangle me over a croc pit? Fire on my kid again? Good luck finding her.”

“Oh, I think if your family goes for long enough without hearing from you, they’ll come looking for answers,” Carlisle replied, her confidence clear. “And when they do, we’ll capture them. I bet as long as we’ve got you to bargain with, we won’t even have to fire on them again.”

Kieron was uncomfortably aware of the fact that she was right. Elanus was brilliant, but he was brilliant in the way scientists were, leaping from idea to idea and making esoteric connections that Kieron had no hope of following, then somehow turning them into a tapestry of knowledge and action. He could think strategically, especially when it came to business, but he wasn’t tactical. He didn’t consider the risks of his choices the same way Kieron did. And when he was worried about someone he loved, he was downright reckless.

Plus, his leg was still very broken and he was low on painkillers, and Catie was damaged and probably not helping keep him calm, and… No, Kieron couldn’t rely on Elanus’s judgement to keep the two of them safe.

“You, on the other hand.” Carlisle looked at him consideringly. “You’ve got the bearing of a military man. Academy student?”

“No.”

“Central System naval corps?”

“No.”

She smiled. It wasn’t pretty. “Private military then. Or possibly black ops, if you’ve been honest so far.”

Kieron shook his head. “I never formally served in a military unit.”

“I don’t belie…” Her voice trailed off, and Trapper stepped into the gap.

“Look, pick at the easiest piece of the guy’s puzzle to start with. He says he can contact people in-system? So let’s see if he really can.” He nodded his fuzzy blond head toward the front of their long, lean rattletrap of a ship. “We’ve got a com array that can reach anyone close enough to support your story. Send out a message and lets see if they get back to you. If they don’t…then we think about reassessing your honesty.”

“With a wrench,” Alissa added. “Maybe a pair of pliers.”

“Hang you upside down for a while and see how you like it,” Doubles muttered.

Carlisle didn’t say anything for a moment, just stroked her hand over her chin for a moment before finally waving her hand toward the entryway. As Kieron moved to follow Trapper, though, she said in a low voice, “This ship is equipped with anti-boarding tech. Your shoes don’t look particularly resistant to electrical pulses, so don’t try anything rash, all right? You won’t like the result if you do.”

They can electrocute me via the flooring. Great. “Understood.” Not appreciated, but definitely understood.

He moved into the dark ship interior, vaguely lit by pale yellow and green lights along the floor and walls. It was as spartan as a ship could be, with a few rooms branching off from the main hallway—he said rooms, but really more like simple bunks with doors attached—until they entered a larger room at the front of the ship, one probably three times the size of Catie’s cabin. This place had a few more homey touches, with a gun in the middle of being cleaned on the table and a deck of some sort of playing cards on a bench, but at the very forefront of the ship was the flight deck.

Trapper sat down in the pilot’s chair and flipped a few switches, and a light turned on. “Input your code,” he said, gesturing to the number bar. No implant hookup for this ship; everything was done the old-fashioned way, via your hands.

Good thing Kieron made it a habit to memorize his girls’ basic codes, including their emergency contact numerals. “Fine.” He went over and typed out the seventy-two-digit number, then punched the “send” key.

“How long for transit time?” Carlisle asked Trapper.

“If they’re in system, shouldn’t be much more than a minute’s lag time. If they’re not…” He grinned, a sharp expression promising pain. “We’ll know soon enough.”