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: Elanus: Interlude

 Notes: Time for some togetherness, don't you think?

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Elanus: Interlude

***

Interlude: Elanus

 

Photo by Glen Carrie

When Elanus gave himself the time to think about finding Kieron, which wasn’t very often as he committed himself to repairing Catie and fabricating parts and healing his leg with the help of their renewed Regen, he tended to think in very vague terms. He recognized that this was unusual for him—Elanus delighted in specificity, that was part of what made him the genius engineer and businessman he was. He liked to investigate things, he enjoyed breaking them down into their component parts so he could put them back together again, he liked complexity.

He didn’t like any of that when it came to his fiancé.

Anyone born smarter than was good for them knew that creativity was just as much of a curse as it was a blessing. Elanus didn’t have to meditate on the fact that Kieron was missing to come up with a hundred different ways he might be dead right now. This godawful, star-cursed, pestilent place ensured that nothing Elanus thought of was out of the realm of possibility.

Capture and torture? Check.

Being eaten alive by a reptilian? Check.

Becoming injured and dying of a fierce infection? Check.

The list went on and on, and the only way to keep going in the face of it was through rigid mental control. Kieron focused all his creativity toward topping off Catie’s power, recreating her missing parts as best they could, and fixing himself. He also made half a dozen different types of weapons, because why the hell not? When they were both as good as they could be, Elanus told Catie to start with expanding the reach of her communications array—the new one wasn’t as good as the old one, and they were down half their heating coils now, but it was way better than nothing—to see what she detected.

He didn’t honestly expect a lot. Between the storms and the inhospitable landscape, Elanus was pretty sure they were going to come up empty. And yet, his girl managed to surprise him.

“I hearrr…a beat.”

“A beat. What kind of beat?”

“It’s an SOS, Daddeee. It sounnnds like this.” She played the sound over her speaker and Elanus froze as he heard the Morse code as clear as his daughter’s own voice.

“Where is it coming from?”

“Here.” She projected the image onto her viewscreen, including estimated landmarks indicating the creche and basic geological features. The SOS was coming from what looked like some sort of rugged—oh, what were those things called, big and flat-topped and—

“The plateau?” He inspected it, wondering if that was where the people who’d fired on Catie had set up their base. If so, flying there was going to be asking for trouble.

That said, it wasn’t like he had a choice. They were going to get Kieron and Blobby back whether they had to shoot their way in or not.

“Yes, Daddeee.”

“Are you detecting any other electronic signals from there?”

“No…but…” Catie’s pause was worrying. “I am detectinnng some seismic disturbancesss.”

“Like rocks falling?”

“Perhaps.”

Well, that was clear as mud. It wasn’t Catie’s fault, though. “Thanks, honey.” Elanus leaned back in his chair and thought for a minute. The SOS was almost certainly Kieron, or rather Blobby—there was no reason for the local population of assholes to put a message like that out even if they knew it, and Elanus was certain that Kieron was protecting them on his end as much as possible. He wouldn’t have Blobby send up a signal if it meant pulling them into danger along with him, the idiot.

There was only one thing to do. “Let’s take a look, then. Carefully, though,” Elanus emphasized. “I want your skin on the whole time, full shielding from visual and electronic surveillance. We can’t be spotted, Catie.”

“I know, Daddeee.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you rrreally think it’s Kieeeeron?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” he said, and strapped himself in as Catie began to initialize her engines. This wasn’t quite their first test flight, but the plateau was a good thirty miles away, farther than he’d asked her to go before. If things got hairy, he needed to make sure he didn’t break another stupid bone.

But Catie soothed his fears as she lifted smoothly into the air despite the increasing wind and rain, then set in on a course toward the plateau. Elanus tried to control his reactions, but he couldn’t seem to stop his heart from pounding harder at the thought that they might be heading toward Kieron now. He might be only minutes away from finding the love of his life and the little bot he knew Kieron would never abandon. He might also have a hell of a firefight on his hands soon, but Elanus was confident that Catie’s passive defenses would protect them for now.

It was dark out from the storm, and despite his better judgement Elanus asked for a focused light to illuminate the plateau in the viewscreen as they got closer to the signal. It was risky, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that this plateau was actually a terrible place for a base. The terrain was unstable, the canyons were narrow, and—

“What in the hell is that?” A creature like he’d never seen before was trundling along one of the ridges, its body made from what looked like interconnected, antique shields and its head like a farming combine. It was moving away from them with intent, and Elanus shouted before he consciously registered what he was seeing. “Fire on it, Catie!”

She loosed one of her slender javelin rounds, and it penetrated the creature’s tough hide and sent it careening down the cliff, but Elanus didn’t care. He was already on his feet, ignoring the ache in his leg from the still-healing bone as he moved toward the hatch. “Catie—”

The door opened before he could say anything else, and Catie maneuvered dangerously close to the ledge so that Elanus could reach out and gather the mirage in front of him into his arms.

It was Kieron. Bloody, bruised, looking like he was inches away from death and staggering along the top of a fucking plateau in the middle of nowhere, fuck, what had happened to him? A thousand questions welled up behind Elanus’s teeth, but all he could say was, “Kieron? Blobby? Baby, are you okay?” He pulled back from his hold on his fiancé just far enough to look into his battered face. “Kieron, Kieron, sweetheart, tell me what I can do. Talk to me, tell me anything, please.”

Kieron looked at him, really finally looked, and the fear in his expression melted into the starkest combination of anguish and relief that Elanus had ever seen. He wailed, rough and mindless, wrapped his arms around Elanus’s waist, and dropped like a stone.

Elanus caught him, held him fast, and tucked him gently against his chest. It felt like his heart had come to life again, like he could take a full breath after far too long being squeezed silent. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s going to be okay, I’m here. We’re here, we’ve got you.” Catie was moving, chattering to him and Kieron and Blobby as she found them somewhere more defensible to settle in, but all Elanus could hear was Kieron’s breaths, wet and pained against his chest, and so very, very precious.

He had Kieron and Blobby back again. Everything else could wait.