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

 Notes: Oh my goodness, are we almost done? I think we're almost done! Wow! This one's been a bit of a wild ride, huh? One more week to wrap it up and then...I don't know what happens next! Obviously we've got to resolve things on Trakta, but I'm still working out the details of how. I might write a shortie fic in between to cleanse my mental palate. We'll see!

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

***

 

Chapter Twenty-Four, Part One

 

Photo by Geronimo Giqueaux 

 

It was easy to be quiet, in the aftermath.

There was nothing for Kieron to do. No heavy lifting, no investigation, no preparation. Lizzie nailed the drop with all the propulsion equipment that Catie was going to need to get back into space, and it was mostly preassembled. The last bits were tricky enough that only Elanus could see them through, so that left the rest of them with a lot of time on their hands.

Bobby didn’t speak audibly, just tapped when he wanted to say something. Elanus had already offered to outfit him with a voice system, but Bobby had declined for now. “But don’t you want to be able to talk to people who don’t understand Morse code?” Elanus had asked, and Bobby had simply replied, [No thank you.] And that was that, for now at least. And Carlisle…

She didn’t speak much to anyone. She hardly made eye contact with Kieron—which was strange, because she made plenty of eye contact with Elanus. They were antagonistic, but in a teasing way, able to engage in an almost lighthearted fashion that was simply impossible with Kieron. He wanted to be offended, wanted to have the energy to rage and demand answers, to wonder what it had all been for if she was just going to ignore him now, and yet…he didn’t. He didn’t have that energy. He felt detached, almost entirely dissociated from his body. Floaty, and distant, and still.

Elanus had noted it, because of course he had. “You need better medical care than we can give you in the middle of nowhere,” he muttered as he laid a hand on Keiron’s forehead in an embarrassing act of checking his temperature.

“Sorry, Daddeeee,” Catie said sadly. “I did the best thaaat I could.”

“I know you did, baby, you did great.”

“You did great,” Kieron echoed, because it was true and because it was all he could think to say in the moment. He wished he could do more, but he just felt…empty. Hollow.

Coming here had changed nothing for him. Nothing. He didn’t have any deeper understanding of himself or his past actions. He hadn’t been gifted with any new memories of the time between when he started at Cloverleaf Station and when he woke up in Elanus’s house on Gania, Regened right out of his own mind. He had all the feelings he’d had before—more, even, shame and anger on top of the love like some sickening cauldron that bubbled inside of him, threatening to spill over and fill the emptiness with its toxicity. All he’d done here was make himself worse.

And save his mother, but she didn’t even want to be saved, so…

Bobby tapped out something from where he sat in Kieron’s lap. [Breathe, Papa.]

Kieron tapped back, “I’m breathing.”

[Breathe better.] So Kieron made an effort, and Bobby hummed and settled in once more, and that was all Kieron spoke for the whole day, and that was all right.

With the limited capacity he had for emotion right now, he was rather surprised that his family was taking his silence so well. Not that Elanus and Catie couldn’t carry a conversation for days just the two of them, and they did a good job of drawing Lizzie and Xilinn and even Ryu into everything from technical discussions to simple chatting, but they didn’t push him to speak. No one did, and Kieron was all right with that. He knew it couldn’t last, but there was something nice about not having to work to put anyone else at ease right now.

The countdown to getting off Hadrian’s Colony changed, it seemed, on a daily basis. As soon as the chassis was in place, they had to make sure the fuel cells weren’t compromised; as soon as the fuel cells were verified, they had to recheck the chassis; as soon as Catie was secure, they had to find the best break in the weather to attempt it. That was the hardest part, and it took a week of concerted effort on both Catie and Lizzie’s parts to independently choose the same window for takeoff.

And they had five minutes to make the most of it. “—because the layer of frozen methane shifted unexpectedly by several thousand meters, Elanus, and—”

“I believe you, baby, I believe you,” Elanus said as he rapidly moved about the cabin, prepping the living space for launch as fast as he could. There were only two chairs and there was no question who was sitting in them, but he’d already fabricated a harness that could clip to the wall and floor for Carlisle. She sat in the makeshift seat without complaint, her expression steady. Kieron watched Elanus buckle her in, then distractedly did the same for himself.

“Shoulder straps.”

“Hmm?” He looked up at Elanus, who was gazing at him with an obscure blend of patience and pain on his face.

“Shoulder straps, darling. You forgot them.”

“Oh.” So he had. He started over, not objecting when Elanus double-checked his work before sitting down himself. Bobby extended a set of legs over Kieron’s ankles and settled in down low, and then it was time to go.

The chassis that Lizzie had deployed for her sister was a bulky circular thing, a bit like a belt, that integrated into Catie’s midline structure and fuel system. It was essentially a donut-shaped rocket capable of generating immense lift, not so great for steering or fine control. Catie was going to be using all her personal resources to keep them on course while using the rocket to power them through the storm, which…the rain seemed thick to Kieron, lashing at her viewscreen and occasionally pelting it with pieces of grass that the wind had whipped up.

“Running eeengine check.” A series of numbers flew by on the control panel, percentages that meant little to Kieron but were clearly relevant considering how Elanus pored over them.

“Looks good, sweetheart, how’s the telemetry?”

“Gooood, Daddeee.”

“Still solid, Elanus,” Lizzie said. “But you’ve got to go in the next thirty-two seconds if you’re going to hit the window.”

“Copy that, baby. Catie, let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, Daddeeee.”

The rumble that accompanied her engine coming online was genuinely startling. Catie was usually as soft as a whisper compared to other ships, but the chassis propelled her noise level up by a thousand percent. Kieron actually had to cover his ears, the roar became so loud. He couldn’t feel the heat of the fire she was spewing, but he knew the ground beneath them had to be scorched. After a ten-second buildup, Catie launched into the air so hard Kieron felt like his lungs had been punctured. He was driven down into his seat, G-forces too heavy to resist, and stared blankly at the ceiling.

It had to be worse for Elanus, but he was still looking at numbers and talking to Catie. Shouting, more like, but he had to if he was going to be heard over the noise. “You’ve got this, baby, hit the line, hit the line…we’re off by a kilometer. West, baby, we’re off by two kilometers…shift us, baby, shift us or we’re going to hit the ice!”

“I’m tryyyying, Daddeee! The power is—” There was a ka-chunk, and a piece of ice broke apart over her viewscreen. “Ow!”

“Cut power to the right side!”

No arguments—Catie cut power, and the ship began to spin wildly, hurtling across the high sky instead of up.

“Restart in three, two—now!”

The chassis engine flared to life immediately, stilling their spin so fast that Kieron’s stomach could barely hold itself together. Carlisle couldn’t; he heard her retch, but there was nothing he could do to help. They began to ascend again, and this time…

“We’re in liiine, Daddee!”

“Good girl, you’ve got this, we’re close to breakout. Hold it steady, sweetheart, hold it steady…almost there.” Catie rumbled and roared, the force of the chassis so intense Kieron wondered that his girl was able to keep herself together under so much force. If she ran into trouble in the upper atmosphere, there was nothing anyone would be able to do.

She’s fine. Catie knows herself, she knows what she can do. Elanus is helping her. Straining, Kieron reached his closest hand out to the control panel and laid it near one of her sensors. He couldn’t speak, but he could still communicate. I’m here too, baby, you’ve got this.

It took a moment for Kieron to realize the noise had stopped, his ears were ringing so hard. Catie cut the extra engines, and the whine died down to nothing as he realized her viewscreen had gone black. And there, in the distance, was another very familiar ship.

The viewscreen came to life, and they got visuals for the first time since reconnecting with Lizzie and her crew.

“You made it!” Xilinn exclaimed, squeezing her son so hard that the boy tried to wriggle away even as he laughed. “Oh ancestors, oh thank you, you’re all right.”

Ryu, beside her, was less expressive but still gave them a grin. “It’s good to be out of there, huh?”

“You have no idea,” Elanus said, beaming at the others.

Kieron blinked and stared, taking them all in, and then the view switched to exterior. Lizzie’s skin was tinted pink, and Catie began to giggle.

“Don’t make fun of me,” Lizzie chided her sister, then—“Kee.”

Kieron finally found the strength to raise his head. “Hey, Lizzie,” he murmured, feeling lighter than he had since he woke up. “It’s good to see you again.”

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

 Notes: We're back, baby! And things are getting DANGEROUS in here!

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

***

Chapter Twenty-Three, Part One

 

Photo by Meagan Carsience

“You need…to go, right now.”

“Hold still.” Kieron finally wrangled the neuralink projector into place across his mother’s forehead, only for her to smack at it with her hand a second later. “Stop it.”

“You stop it,” she snapped, then groaned as her stomach cramped again. Kieron took advantage of the moment to hoist her into his arms. “Lizzie, are we hooked up?”

“Yes, Kee.” His girl came through on the com loud and clear…or quietly and discreetly, whatever, it worked. “The cloaking algorithm to link the fabric and the projector is live, and the Swarm isn’t significantly interfering with the visual effect. You should be well concealed both digitally and physically as long as you don’t run into anything.”

“Thanks, baby.”

“Not…a baby,” Carlisle said with a weak glare.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kieron snapped right back. “Now shut up and let me get you out of here.”

“Kee, should I enact my part of the protocols?”

“No, not yet,” he said. “Stand by, but don’t enact.” He had no idea how long it was going to take him to drag Carlisle out of here, after all. He already knew his mother—or not his mother, whatever—was going to fight him on this, but she also understood enough about operational security to restrict her complaints to Morse.

[I want you to leave me and go.]

Kieron ignored her as he began to retrace his steps. It wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped—everyone was heading for the command center to listen in on Trapper’s conversation with Elanus, and Carlisle was a muscular woman, heavier than he’d expected. He’d manage, though.

There was nothing else to do.

[Stupid to do this. Foolish. Idiot.]

Kieron gritted his teeth and kept going.

[You did it before.]

Yeah, he had, and he’d regretted it.

The sound of boots against the floor had him ducking in tight against the wall. Half a dozen people ran by, one of them actually brushing up against the two of them, but they were so intent on where they were going that by the time they looked back to wonder why they’d stumbled, the cloak was firmly in place. They ran on, and Kieron followed carefully. He was supposed to take the next right, but there were more and more people congregating in that area, and he wasn’t maneuverable enough to make it down the hall without another accident.

[Next left.]

“That leads to sanitation,” he murmured.

[Backdoor.]

“It’s not on the schematics.”

[Why would it be?]

“Secretive fuckers.” Kieron reoriented, though, heading down a hallway that had all the narrow, flickery feeling of some of the horror movies he’d watched with Zak back in secondary school.

[You have no idea.]

“Why do you have a secret backdoor?” Kieron asked almost subvocally.

[Closest exit to the comfort rooms.]

Oh. Fuck, all right then. No wonder the people who worked them felt the need for a private escape, not that it could be permanent under the General. But now the General wasn’t in charge, so… “Is the comfort room still operating?”

[Don’t know.]

It didn’t matter, he told himself. There was no time to do anything about it; even if there had been, nobody here other than Carlisle had shown him they deserved a rescue. He still felt like shit about it, but was able to keep them moving forward, step by step. He was going a little faster than he ought to be, but his mother wasn’t light and Elanus couldn’t talk forever. When the finally made the turn where the door was supposed to be, Kieron was relieved. Just a little more, and…

“Where is it?”

[Hidden door. Biometric lock.]

“Can you unlock it?”

She grunted and pulled away from him abruptly, falling to the ground before he could catch her. Kieron began to bend down, when—

“There you are, you bitch.”

Kieron turned just in time to see the tip of a plasma rifle light up. It was almost as long as the woman holding it—Alissa, her bright blue hair shorn short, rings beneath her eyes and scratches on her neck and arms. “Gotcha,” she said, and fired.

Kieron’s body erupted with a buzzing sound, and all of a sudden a shield appeared in front of him, gleaming bright and holden and reflecting the impact of the shot back the way it came—right into Alissa, who was blown down the hallway in literal pieces. A second later her plasma rifle experienced a secondary overload and exploded, and Kieron crouched down and gave as much cover to Carlisle as he could as the Swarm did its best to compensate against the backwash. He still wound up feeling singed, and at least one of his eardrums had burst, but it could have been worse. The pieces of the Swarm fell to his feet, entirely exhausted.

“Kee! Are you okay? Kee?”

Kieron would have replied, but his com was suddenly full of his fiancé crowing on the group frequency. “It worked!” Was he talking about his Swarm, or Kieron’s?

“You weren’t sure it was going to work?” Kieron rasped out as he got to his feet. Carlisle looked up at him blearily—shit, now she had a concussion on top of all the other damage? Biometric, biometric…he gave up on subtlety and hoisted her into his arms, then began to methodically press her hand to the wall in an effort to trigger the hidden door. No, no, no…

“Worry about yourself, baby! Or do I need to be worried about you too?”

“We’re fine, I just need to—”

“Alissa!” That was Doubles, rounding the corner and screaming as he found a recognizable piece of his lover. “Alissa!” He looked down the charred corridor and saw them, and rage transformed his face from grieving to vengeful.

“Oh, shit,” Kieron said. He raised his gun but Doubles was already firing, and this one was an old-fashioned shrap-thrower that his gear was able to catch most of, but most wasn’t all and Carlisle didn’t have any gear and that piece took most of the tip of the smallest finger on his right hand, fuck that hurt, and—

The door slid open behind him, and Carlisle dragged them through it and out into the chilly air a moment later. The door shut—just barely, and Kieron could hear the projectiles impacting it from the other side.

They were outside the compound, but the mercenaries knew their location…which was on the opposite side as Elanus and Catie. “Bobby, get out of the compound,” Kieron snapped into the com. It was raining but not heavily enough to hide them. “We’ve got to run for it,” he said as he turned to Carlisle, “or they’re going to—”

Carlisle had collapsed onto the ground. She was out, utterly and completely. Kieron would have to carry her, but now he didn’t have the camo shield and he didn’t have the Swarm. He’d be completely exposed. Damn it, he didn’t want to do this, but… “We’re in trouble,” he said into the com. The door was starting to glow—they were attacking it from the inside. Soon they’d be through. Maybe a minute, maybe less. “Carlisle is down and I won’t be able to make enough space to hide before they find me.”

“I can get Catie to come around and—”

“No, do not send Catie in here!”

“It’s all I can do!” Elanus shouted.

“It’s all right, Kee,” Lizzie said. “I’ve got this.”

“Baby, there’s not enough time for the protocol.”

“There is, though,” she said calmly. “Because I fired three minutes ago.”

 

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

***

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.