Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Carlisle Pt. Two

 Notes: Time to finish up this riveting conversation and get this show on the road! Gravity wave...space lane...whatever.

PS, it's raining in Colorado today--like, a LOT of rain--and now I really want hot chocolate. Gonna have to go get me some of that as soon as I get this posted. 

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Carlisle Pt. Two

***

Interlude: Carlisle Pt. 2

 

 

Photo by Giancarlo Duarte

 

 She wanted to lash out at him. What do you know about his pain, or mine? But that would be another misstep, she was sure of it. Carlisle stared coldly for a moment before saying, “I need fresh clothes.”

“In the drawer behind you.” A seam appeared in the wall that Carlisle was certain hadn’t been there before, and she found sleep clothes with built-in undergarments and socks inside. They were long-sleeved, and the cloth adjusted to fit her as she slid into it, then—a wave of warmth rippled over her body, and she stared down at the clothes with incomprehension. How—

“It warms or cools based on species assessment and ambient temperatures if you’re more than a few percentage points off normal,” Desfontaines told her. “You can turn that functionality off if you don’t care for it.”

“No,” Carlisle said hoarsely. “No, I…it’s fine.” It was more than fine, it was the first time she’d felt warm in days, maybe weeks. Maybe longer. She wasn’t going to thank this arrogant son of a bitch for it, though.

“Good. Want anything else? Water? Food?”

Both sounded good, now that she felt more assured that he wasn’t going to throw her into a storage compartment or something. “Yes.”

Desfontaines got up and moved over to the small mess area, sliding a door back to reveal a plethora of boxes and cans. He dispensed hot water from a tap in the wall into a mug, then added two scoopfuls of powder to it. Every move he made was economical, and unnaturally quiet too. Carlisle didn’t quite know why, until she realized he was standing right beside Kieron.

He’s trying not to wake him. Well. Say what you would about this asshole—and she could say a lot—but at least he was dedicated to her—to Kieron.

He grabbed something else out of the cabinet, then came back and handed both items to her. One was a meal bar, which was fine but not as fancy as she’d expect for a man who was supposed to be responsible for most of an entire planet’s net worth. The other… “Oh,” she whispered after she tasted it. Chocolate. How long had it been since she’d tasted chocolate? She drank more deeply, then again, finally tipping the mug back so that the last few drops rolled into her mouth and across her tongue.

“Kieron’s a die-hard coffee fan, but he likes hot chocolate every now and then,” Desfontaines said from where he’d sat himself down again. “More?”

Carlisle evaluated the state of her stomach and shook her head. “Not yet.” She hadn’t had much to eat or drink over the past few days, and the last thing she wanted was to make herself sick in front of this man.

“All right.” He nodded, then stretched his lengthy legs out in front of himself and crossed his joined hands over his middle. It was a languorous pose, but the intensity in his eyes showed it for a lie. “Now that you’re all fixed up, I want to talk to you about what’s going to happen next.”

Carlisle’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Already thinking about where you’ll get the best bounty for me?”

“On the contrary. No one wants you,” he replied, and damn but if that didn’t hurt a little. “No one out there remembers Hadrian’s Colony,” he went on, perfectly matter-of-fact. “No one cares about your little power games and the price you paid for them. No one gives a shit about the General and how hard he tried to be a god. The only person left who gave a shit about finding out what happened back here in the first place is lying on the floor over there.”

“Why did you let him come?” It wasn’t the question she’d intended to ask, but slipped out despite herself. “If you love him so much, why let him do this to himself?”

Was that pity in his eyes? “You don’t understand how love works very well, do you?”

“Fuck you,” she spat. “You don’t—”

“Keep your fucking voice down.”

Carlisle’s mouth snapped shut. They both sat in silence for a moment as Kieron shifted on the cot, finally settling again after a few seconds.

“I want to make something very clear to you,” Desfontaines said once he was content that Kieron was asleep again. “Kieron Carr is a good person in a way you’re not capable of being. I don’t say that to offend you,” and it didn’t offend her at all, actually, “but because it’s the truth. He looked at you and saw someone worth saving, someone worth risking his life for. I enabled that because he needed me to, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m not here to help facilitate a better relationship between the two of you. I prefer there to be no future relationship between the two of you, but I’m not naïve enough to think I can put him off now.

“So. My proposition to you is this. Once we’re done with this planet, I equip you with a ship and a stipend. You go do whatever it is you want to do—explore new places, look up your old flame, hire yourself out as a mercenary, I don’t care. Go learn how to live like a human again, but do it somewhere far away from Kieron, because you’ve hurt him enough.” His words cut like knives, shredding her but also freeing her from the weight of expectations she knew she couldn’t live up to.

“You’re not a mother, even though he’d like you to be,” he went on, looking her straight in the eyes. “And that’s fine, you shouldn’t take on a role that you’re not prepared for. It wouldn’t be healthy for either of you to try and fail right now. I’ve got him, all right? I’m not perfect, but I love Kieron. I’m going to marry him. I’m going to live the rest of my undoubtedly amazing life with him, and I’m going to make sure he has everything he needs to be healthy and happy, and that doesn’t include you right now. It can’t.” Then he smiled, just a little. “It’s okay. I’ll make sure you don’t hurt him.”

Carlisle slumped back against the wall, a matching smile coming to her lips. “Thank you,” she murmured, then looked down at her empty mug. “Can I have another hot chocolate now?”

“Absolutely.”

 

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

 Notes: Oooh, fire in the sky! So pretty!

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

***

Chapter Twenty-Three, Part Two

 

 Photo by Mohamed Fsili

“You…” Kieron’s voice died off as he lost his ability to articulate exactly what he was feeling. He could hear the others arguing, Catie squawking and Elanus shouting and Lizzie replying defensively, but he couldn’t say anything because he could see a light in the sky. It was growing larger, and soon enough he could make out individual fireballs splitting off from it, some of them fizzling out but most of them staying close. He felt Carlisle shiver, and lifted her into a more comfortable position in his arms as he watched the fire get closer and closer.

“Kieron, you’ve got to get farther back!”

“It’s all right,” he said as he watched the door to the compound suddenly flare open. He could see the silhouette of people inside of it, saw them taking their first steps outside. The falling fire dimmed that light, and then as the first person stepped through the door, shouting, gun lifted—

The fire struck.

Kieron had never worked as a mercenary. He hadn’t participated in aerial bombardments, he hadn’t been part of strike teams taking out orbital stations, he hadn’t seen a lot of combat. But he was absolutely sure that, without a doubt, this was the most precisely targeted assault that had ever been levied against a stationary facility from space. It hit the center of the base, a few splashes of fuel erupting up and out, but none traveling more than fifty yards before sputtering out.

The fireball dug its way into the weapons cache, which of course Lizzie knew the location of since Bobby had done all that recon work, and consumed the explosives there, incorporating them into its sound and fury without allowing them to randomize the damage. The fire and heat coruscated outward in shades of orange, yellow, and white, coming to a pinnacle just beyond the edge of the compound itself. A second later the fire contracted, burning itself out and focusing the last of its energy on the center once more.

Everyone who came into contact with it died. Everyone, every single person in the base who’d been watching and tormenting and taunting them, was dead now. Tactically dead, strategically nuked from space, to use an ancient Earth term.

And Kieron and Carlisle were fine. He could barely even feel the heat of the fire through the storm that still raged around them.

“Impressive,” Carlisle said, her voice like smoke. “You have—” she coughed. “Good friends.”

“That was my daughter’s doing,” Kieron said, his voice distant even to himself. That was Lizzie, all Lizzie. She must have run the numbers on his survival and found the odds she liked the best, and then—

She’d acted. Without hesitation, without a second thought, and it had saved his life.

And if she’d calculated wrong, she would have killed him.

Kieron shivered, not out of fear for himself but from fear for Lizzie. If things hadn’t gone this way…if she’d ended up being the reason he died instead of the reason he was saved…she would never have forgiven herself. Lizzie was quiet, far quieter than her sister, but she was no less intense in her emotions.

“Kee?” Lizzie’s voice, tentative and soft, cut through the fog in his mind.

“Baby,” he said immediately. “I’m here. I’m all right. You did it.”

“I saw your life sign, but you weren’t saying anything for a while.”

“I was just…” Stunned. Impressed. Afraid. “Surprised, sweetheart.”

“As long as you’re surprised and communicating,” Elanus snapped over the com. “Catie’s on the way around to you, we’ll pick you up in two-point-three minutes. Any damage?”

“No. Not to me,” Kieron amended as he looked at his mother. “But Carlisle is pretty worse for wear.”

“Catie will fix her up in no time.”

The rest of the crew on Lizzie’s line were being awfully silent. “Status report, Ryu,” Kieron said.

“Nothing to report,” he said, sounding just the slightest bit spooked. “We had the payload ready, but I didn’t even know Lizzie had released it until she told you about it. Lizzie…we agreed we’d talk about it before you deployed.”

“I’m sorry! You would have told me not to do it, though, and I didn’t have time to explain my math to you!”

“Your math had a fifty-seven perrrcent chance of being wrrrong!” Catie snapped. “You could have killlled Kieron!”

“I would never kill Kieron! My math was perfect, look at how it all worked out!”

“I’m talking about your varrriables, not your primes!”

“I’ll show you variables!” There was sudden silence on the coms, and Kieron put a hand over his mouth to silence his sudden snort as he realized that his girls were having a math fight. A math fight over the odds of his surviving Lizzie’s intervention. God, he wished he could get Elanus alone right now to talk about this, and preferably share a drink or ten about it.

“Kieron.”

“Mm?” he said to Carlisle.

“I think you’re going into shock.”

“Mm.” He probably was, slumping back onto the ground and maneuvering Carlisle so she was on top of him instead of soaking up the cold directly. Not that the rain wasn’t freezing, but it was better than lying in a puddle.

“Don’t get comfortable,” she said, irritation warring with something else he couldn’t put a name to in her voice. “You don’t have time for this.”

“It’s shock,” he slurred, “not really…controllable.”

“Everything is controllable to a certain extent. Look at what your kid just pulled off.” Her tone of voice made it clear that she was more impressed than judgmental.

“Mm. Kids are hard.”

Carlisle was quiet for a moment, then surprised him with a laugh. “They are,” she agreed. “They’re the hardest thing in the world. Small wonder I did so little when it came to raising you, when you intimidated me so badly.”

“Mm.”

“Kieron, stay awake.”

“I’m awake,” he said.

“Don’t close your eyes.”

“They’re…open. S’just dark out here.” He was tired. More tired than he should be, after such a clean extraction. Carlisle was in far worse shape than he was; there was no reason for him to be this tired while she was wide awake.

“One minute to you,” Elanus said. “Stay awake, Kieron.”

God damn it, he was awake! It was just hard to stay that way, but he’d do it. If Lizzie could predict how to save his life before setting a base on fire, he could do this much.

She could have killed him, but she hadn’t. They were so lucky. Or she was just that good, just that intelligent. It was frightening, to have a kid so intelligent—a kid who was optimized for combat scenarios. How many people would want her, if they knew what she could do? War-based AIs were incredibly expensive tech, notoriously unreliable despite all their models and training, and here was Lizzie predicting payload, survival rates, and compensating for human reactions.

So smart, his girl. Almost too smart for her own good.

“Stay awake, Kieron.”

He hummed.

“I mean it!” Pain erupted in his left arm, but it was a small discomfort when he was already so cold and wet.

“Kee?”

That was Lizzie. He needed to talk to her, to let her know he was all right. He tried to speak, but couldn’t do it. He was too…too…

“Kee?”

 

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.