Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Lizzie

 Notes: I just had to visit with my girl. Couldn't keep away. Back to regular programming next week!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Lizzie

***

Interlude: Lizzie

 

Lizzie ran the odds. She observed the results, changed variables, re-ran the statistics, looked at what she was left with, and then…

If she could have cried, she would have. She was given to understand that many species found crying cathartic, and it seemed like she could use some catharsis now. As it was, she had a bunch of numbers that might not even mean anything, too many emotions for her to put a name to, and a deep sense of loneliness and loss that made her think crying was really the only way out.

It really didn’t surprise her when the lights began to flicker. She ought to pull out of her room’s electrical grid, but it was satisfying—if only slightly—to see something responding to her distress. It wasn’t like she had any other recourse. All she had was herself and this terrible knowledge, no Kee and where was Elanus and Catie wasn’t talking to her and she always talked when Lizzie reached out, Catie was never silent and it was awful, awful, awful knowing why she wasn’t now, and—

“Lizzie?”

She went still, every algorithm freezing for a moment as Ryu walked into the hangar. Shoot, she should have locked the door, or at least made sure it was closed so he couldn’t see her freaking out in here. But now he was stepping over to her, his eyes roving her hull like he was searching for some sort of damage, which was strange and very human behavior because obviously she was fine.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.” Oof, that didn’t come out in the right register. Ryu raised an eyebrow at her and tilted his head in a way Lizzie knew meant “pull the other one,” whatever the other one was supposed to be.

“You aren’t. I got an alert for power disruptions in the house’s grid. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it wasn’t an unknown coder trying to hack their way in—it was you.”

Double shoot. Lizzie knew, technically, that Ryu was in charge of the house while Elanus and Kieron were away. Xilinn couldn’t be because she wasn’t a citizen, and Pol was too young, and Lizzie was just a well-built ship as far as most people were concerned. But functionally, she took care of herself and the house. It was easy. Ryu wasn’t even supposed to need to look at things like power consumption levels and blips…

Except Elanus had programmed access to the house’s coding into Ryu’s implant, and abnormalities set of a literal alarm in his brain.

Triple shoot. She’d forgotten that, too. She wasn’t supposed to forget things.

“Lizzie.” Ryu didn’t have Kieron’s soothing voice or calming presence, but there was something comfortingly take-charge about him. It occurred to her for the first time that Ryu…was an adult. He was the adult, and she could tell him things, share things with him, and ask him for advice rather than having to figure out everything on her own. He might even have something useful to say. Probably not, but…

“Talk to me, or I’m running the antivirus software.”

No, she couldn’t let him do that right now! That would put her to sleep for hours! Kieron needed a solution right now!

“I was contacted by Kieron.”

Ryu’s stern expression brightened a bit. “Oh, good! It’s been a while since they reached out, I was beginning to think something was wrong with them.”

“Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.” Tersely, Lizzie recounted her conversation with Kieron and the clues he’d given her to indicate that things had gone horribly awry on Hadrian’s Colony. Telling the whole story made Lizzie feel even worse. “I should be there with them,” she said at the end of it. “I should have asked Kee if I could go.”

“You did,” Ryu pointed out, one hand stroking his chin as he stared at Lizzie’s hull in thought. “He told you that he preferred for you to stay here and help manage the house and Elanus’s affairs, and you’ve done just that. You’ve done a very good job of it, too.”

“But if I’d gone with them, none of this would have happened!” Lizzie finally let some of her emotions reverberate through her voice. Ryu winced and covered both his ears. Maybe not that much reverberation. “I could have been on hand to help them! I could have saved Catie and saved Elanus and saved Kee!”

“You have absolutely no way of knowing that,” Ryu said sharply. “In fact, odds are good that you’d be wrapped up in the problems they’re having now if you’d gone along. You were looking into the weather patterns, right?”

“Yes.”

“Because they got trapped on the surface thanks to not knowing they were about to be hit with an entire season of storms.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts. That lack of knowledge wasn’t your fault, and neither was the lack of decent preparation that got them stuck.”

Lizzie fizzled a bit. Was he insinuating something bad about her fathers? It wasn’t okay to talk badly about her fathers! “No one knew.”

“Exactly.” Ryu’s voice had gone soft. “No one, not even Kieron who covers every angle, not even Elanus who’s genuinely brilliant, knew that things were going to go this wrong. Catie certainly didn’t, but you don’t blame Catie for being there and not responding quickly enough to save both of them, do you?”

Of course she didn’t! “No!”

“Then there’s no reason for you to accept the blame for yourself either,” Ryu said, and…but…if she’d only…if—

“No. Stop it. It’s not your fault. You’re smart, but not even you can see the future.”

“All right.” Lizzie could accept that…just barely. “But what should I do now? Kieron was in trouble, and he told me that the people he’s with think I’m in orbit above the planet right now, but even if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to land on the surface for another—” She ran the numbers again on the climate reports she’d been able to glean from ancient cruiser data, Catie’s own recordings before she went dark, and the faint sensors she could detect from the surface. “Three standard months.” Anything could happen to her family in that amount of time. What was she going to do, what was she going to do, what was she going to—

“Okay. Lights, Lizzie, lights, let’s get them to…yeah, there we go.” Ryu patted her hull. “Don’t worry. Let’s ask Xilinn to bring Pol home a little early from school, and we’ll all talk about what comes next.” He smiled. “You don’t have to figure it out by yourself.”

Lizzie had never been so happy to be less than perfectly competent before in her life.

Lord of Unkindness Ch. 21

 Notes: Time for a personal reckoning. Sorry, Ciro, I don't make the rules (well, I do, but...)

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 21

***

Chapter Twenty-One

 

Angelo leaves the next morning after a night spent clinging to each other, and Ciro can tell that it takes everything Angelo has not to lecture him about being careful or staying inside or remembering to eat while he’s gone. Like Ciro hasn’t been successfully living on his own for months now…although, fine, “successfully” might be overselling it, but he hadn’t starved and there was a roof over his head. A dank, dirty, mildewed roof, but…

Come to think of it, Angelo was doing a better job leaving Ciro without oversight than Ciro himself would probably be able to reciprocate under the circumstances. He lets his lover know he appreciates him with a long kiss and a longer hug. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Maybe tonight, if I can convince her to pack quickly.”

“Don’t push Annette when it comes to packing,” Ciro advises. “She likes everything to be just so.” Or at least, she had. They’d once spent an entire afternoon together in her room, unsupervised. Ciro had thought they might get into making out, but instead Annette had showed him her system for packing a suitcase while making sure no cats weaseled their way into it. She was meticulous that way, like her familiars were—every curl twirled just right, whiskers washed until they were pristine.

Angelo smiles. “I’ll be good, I promise.”

You always are. Ciro can’t quite bring himself to say it, but he gives Angelo another hug, then shoos him toward the door. He leaves with a long backward glance, and Ciro watches out the window in the front as he gets into his sedan, then vanishes down the dirt road. Ciro is alone, just himself, his magic, and the power in this place for company.

It’s as good a time as any to see if he can figure some of this stuff out on his own, so he doesn’t frustrate the hell out of his ex-fiancee when she gets here.

Ciro makes a cup of tea—a strong black tea, but it’s got to be more calming than coffee, right?—and sits down on the rag rug in front of the couch. The music is back, chiming and plinking and generally blending into the ambiance of the place so well that Ciro might not even notice it if he wasn’t consciously trying to hear it. It’s way more calming than the tea, and he sets the cup aside and focuses on his own magic. His familiar helpfully flies down to the floor and settles in front of him, ruffling its feathers a bit as it gets ready for a nice preen.

Magical theory has never been Ciro’s strong suit. It didn’t have to be; he was powerful enough to make the things he wanted to happen without having to get too deep into the science of it all. It was one of the few places where he could actually tell his father took pride in him; Victor didn’t care to be challenged by his son in any way, but he appreciated that Ciro could do many magical tasks almost as well as he’d been able to at the same age. His father hadn’t brought him into the business side of things at all. Ciro had been made for two reasons: Victor needed an heir, and he wanted a loyal soldier who was capable of getting things done.

And now he has neither. Ciro smirks silently as he imagines how frustrated his father must be having to give Nephele delicate tasks like long-term surveillance and hacking. She’s a swarmer, a stormer, a hurricane made flesh. She’s never been good at the detailed work…which is probably why it was Magnus who found Ciro in the end. And then found his end as well, with a bird through the brain. Ciro wonders, with a pang of unwelcome guilt, if his uncle survived.

Focus, damn it. Actually, this is as good a place to consider magical theory as any. Ciro knows his familiars are physical expressions of his magic, beings who are capable of acting on their own in ways that are suited to their physical forms, but also capable of being used for raw power. Dissolving one of his familiars gives him a well of that raw power to draw on and turn into a spell of intention. That’s where things get tricky—Ciro has to be able to visualize exactly what he wants the power to do in order for it to make anything happen. Otherwise it simply reforms into a familiar.

It took a long time for him to learn how to wield it without the comforting form of a familiar as a conduit, and he still prefers to use magic one feather at a time, so to speak. But he can use that raw magic, once it’s there.

Good. Fine. So what happens when he can’t draw it directly from a familiar? What happens when he needs to fins another way to access it? Ideally, he’d do some experimenting right now, but Ciro’s down to one familiar. Just one. He’s not going to risk calling any more of the flock here, he’s not—he just can’t do it. It would put everything at risk. But he also doesn’t want to risk the single familiar he does have. So that leaves him with…shit, doing a bunch of nothing because he’s a coward sounds about right.

Ciro’s about to tip over into vicious self-recrimination when a distraction comes in the form of a knock on the door. He jostles the teacup as he reflexively leans forward, hunkering down just in case someone is looking in through the front window. No one should be, of course, and even if they do he’s pretty sure they won’t see this oasis of calm, but—

“Boss! Hey, boss, are you in there?”

Holy shit, that’s Maria. What’s she doing here?

“Boss! C’mon, Angelo, I need to talk to you!”

Ciro’s on his feet and crossing the floor on autopilot. It’s only once his hand is an inch away from the doorknob that he stops and actually considers what he’s about to do.

Angelo told him not to open this door. He mentioned it several times, in fact. Emphatically. Not for anyone, because no one else had any business being here. He didn’t call out Maria by name, and if anyone made sense as a visitor it was her, but again…Angelo hadn’t said she was an exception to the rule. Also, Angelo has a phone, so why has she driven all the way out here?

“Dude, come on, open up!”

He probably forgot to charge the battery. It was a reasonable explanation, one that Ciro could check if he wanted to when Angelo came back. In the meantime, though…despite the desperation in the young woman’s voice, despite how he truly wanted to open the door to her and see if he could help her, Ciro backs away instead.

“Angelo! I need your help!”

He goes to the bedroom and quietly closes the door behind him as soon as his familiar has flown inside.

“Angelo, please!” Her cry for help is muted now, but not muted enough. Ciro gets into bed and pulls the covers over his head like a child, and his raven perches on the backboard and caws gently, almost a croon, in time with the music. The music becomes louder, chiming and drumming and gentle strings enough to drown out the last remnants of Maria’s cry for help, and Ciro does the last thing he expected to do while Angelo was gone.

He falls asleep.

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Ten, Part Two

 Notes: Feeling each other out, no fucks given style ;)

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

***

Chapter Ten, Part Two

 

It was physically painful to fly away from the creche. Kieron knew that his reaction was unreasonable; Elanus and Catie were nowhere near here anymore. If he was lucky, they’d made it halfway across the continent and found a place to hide that was hours away and untraceable. Even if their hiding spot wasn’t so great, Catie had the most advanced synthskin on her hull that Elanus was capable of creating. She could block radar, match any native camouflage, even create a mirage-like coating that would blur her into the surrounding area to both physical and mechanical observers. She was as safe as she could be…as long as everything was working okay. As long as she wasn’t too hurt. She had redundant systems built in to ensure that nothing was ever unsupported. Even her communications array could fairly easily be rerouted through her central processor and amplified with her sensors. She’d never done that before, as far as Kieron knew, but there was no reason she couldn’t. Elanus would be able to guide her.

Unless he was too hurt to focus. Unless Catie was too concerned for him to remember her own stats. Unless the worst had happened and Catie had multiple systems failures and Elanus was unconscious and unable to work on her hardware, and of course Kieron had run off with the bot who would have been able to intercede and make things easier for them, and—

“We’ll be there in about an hour.”

Kieron raised his head to look at Carlisle. She and Trapper were the only ones left up front with him; Doubles and Alissa had gone off to their cabin as soon as they were off the ground. Trapper had slapped a pair of headphones on and was resolutely ignoring both of them as he manually flew their ancient ship toward home base, and Kieron had honestly expected Carlisle to do the same.

“All right,” he said.

“What, no more questions?”

Kieron shook his head.

“That surprises me.” She leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms. “I thought you were more curious than that.”

“I’m not a spy,” Kieron said with a sigh. “I’m not interested in you or your people. I don’t care about the terrain we’re flying over, or the average speed we’re maintaining, or who’s waiting to hold guns on me when we land. For the last time, I want nothing to do with you and your people. All I want is to reunite with my family and get out of here.”

“Mmhmm. Your family.” Her single eye narrowed a bit. “What’s your homeworld?”

“Gania.”

She shook her head. “You’re too short to be a native.”

“I didn’t say I was a native, I said it’s my homeworld.”

“Where were you born, then?”

Great. It was time to establish a backstory. Kieron pulled himself out of his funk and went through his mental map of his past. The best lies were mostly truth, after all. “I was born in space. My parents were miners, mostly working the Fringe. My father died when I was very young, left my mother and I a ship and not a lot else. She got work on a research station near the Cloverleaf anomaly.”

“Cloverleaf?” Carlisle tilted her head. “That’s a long way from Gania.”

“Yep.” He popped the “p” at the end of the word and took a bit of perverse pleasure in how it seemed to annoy her.

“Are you going to make me drag every word out of you?”

“You don’t make it easy to share,” Kieron replied. He let his own curiosity out for a moment. “After all, I know nothing about you.” Carlisle paused, then shrugged her acknowledgement. “Why don’t we make this more interesting?” Kieron pressed. “An answer for an answer, until one of us calls it quits.”

“I don’t have to do anything for you,” Carlisle said.

It was Kieron’s turn to shrug. “True. You’re in control. You could kill me at any time. I get it. But.” He patted his bag, where Blobby was humming away, warm and comforting in his battery form. “I could do the same, especially while we’re in the air. The way I see it, we can pass the time ignoring each other, threatening each other, or being civil and informative with each other. Your call.”

Carlisle considered the options for a moment, then pushed off the wall and came to sit across from Kieron at the table. She folded her arms on the scarred surface and said, “What was your mother’s name?”

“Xilinn.” She was the best mother Kieron could think of, the one he’d wished he could have. It was a truth in a way, and he could see Carlisle knew it. “Why did you make Hadrian’s Colony your base?”

“It was better than the alternative. Why did your daughter call you Kee?”

Damn, she’d noticed the discrepancy. “It’s a mangled way of pronouncing my name,” he said. “Za-ka-ri became Kee to her when she was just a baby.”

“Why is your daughter calling you by your name?”

“Ah ah, my turn,” Kieron said. “How many people do you lead?”

“Twenty.” That was a lie, he could tell. Maybe she led twenty herself when she was in charge of a job, but he was sure there were far more than that wherever they were going.

He went back to her last question before she could ask another. “Lizzie was adopted. It didn’t feel right to be ‘Dad’ when she’d had one already. How did you lose your eye?”

Carlisle wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so prurient.”

“You know almost nothing about me,” Kieron pointed out. “And knowing someone else’s weaknesses is important when it comes to building trust.”

“You think this makes me weak?” A glint in her remaining eye told him exactly what she thought of that. “I’m looking forward to proving you wrong.”

“We can fight it out when we’re on solid ground again, if you like.” She’d probably kick his ass, Kieron reflected. He kept quiet, though, and after a moment she replied.

“Ricochet. I wasn’t wearing a helmet and I should have been. When is the last time you were scared for your life?”

“You mean other than an hour ago with your guys?”

“Please.” She waved a hand. “You weren’t afraid then. Not seriously.” She stared at him in expectation, and Kieron…

He was too tired to dissemble. “When you fired on my partner and my daughter,” he said, and let the bare, shivering truth of that out into the world for her to see. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been a parent”—you never were to me—“but watching the people I love go under fire was enough to make my heart stop. You need to know this.” He leaned across the table toward her. “You need to understand. Any effort you make to go after them, to use them to control me or to pick them up and try to ransom them, or even just to grab them and torture them for a while.”

“We don’t do that.”

“Sure you don’t,” Kieron said, and Carlisle recoiled from the sheer level of disgust in his voice. “There’s no trail of bodies littering the ground behind you, nope. No children left orphaned, no parents left childless, no lives ruined. Not from a good soldier like you. But you need to understand, I’m incentivized right now to protect myself and be a model prisoner because I have the hope that I’m going to see my family again soon, free and happy. If you take that away from me?” He shook his head. “You’ll see what happens when I no longer care about my life.”

Carlisle, to Kieron’s mild surprise, smiled. “Spoken like a true parent.” She didn’t say anything else, just got out a deck of cards from one of the drawers in the wall and began to shuffle. When she dealt him in to a hand of poker, Kieron let her.

The time still crawled, but at least he had Blobby and a companionable silence to make it better.