Aidele turned, arms still crossed, and walked to the window to stare out at the great trench. In the distance, she could see the summits of two of the nearest mons cities. She heard Durante pull off the wet towel and start dressing. After a few moments, he cleared his throat.
“Okay. I’m decent. I suppose.”
Aidele turned back and smiled. “Well now! Don’t you look all prim and proper? How do they fit?”
“It’s… a little snug, but I think I can manage.”
“Are you sure? Can you walk with no problems?”
Durante walked around the room in tight circles, then performed a few squats, finally standing and lifting his knees to his chest. He nodded.
“Yeah. They’ll work.”
“Great. Then our next objective is to do a complete search of every inch of the premises. Every nook and cranny. Every room and removable panel. It’s a gravitic warp core. So, it can’t be small, I wouldn’t think. But still, there could be clues to its existence in the most unlikely of places.”
Durante scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. “You don’t think it’ll be small? You know, I’ll wager you’re right. What if it were inside something?”
“If it’s supposed to function as an engine, if he brought it to prototype, chances are it’s powering something fairly good sized.”
“The mere fact he built your guns, miniaturized railguns at that, is evidence enough that he brought it to prototype. It would be too important.” He chuckled. “While you were finishing up your bath, and after I brought you the towels, I went exploring to remind myself of where everything is. Well, there’s this very lowest level that in all the years I apprenticed here I never went into.”
“Really? You spent years here and weren’t familiar with every floor?”
He rubbed the back of his head with a hand. “Well, heh, I was busy with my own projects. Besides, the professor always used to say he just used it for storage so I paid it no mind. Anyhow, I went down there and… it’s a garage.”
“A… garage? This high up the Crags? Whatever for?” She gave him a quizzical look.
“Couldn’t tell you. But you want to talk about finding something, I just went and found some… thing.”
“What is it?”
“It’s better if I just show you. Come on. Follow me.”
“Fine. Lead the way and show me your thing.”
He stopped and stared at her as he quirked a brow, a broad smile playing across his face. Aidele blushed and pursed her lips.
“Jus’… git movin’! Jackass.”
Durante laughed and exited the room. He reached down to grab his laundry and Aidele put a hand on his shoulder.
“You know what, just leave it. I’ll grab a bag and some gloves, scoop it all up, and find an incinerator. In fact, I’ll do the same to my own clothes.”
Durante stood back up. “But… I already threw them into the washer.”
“I appreciate the thought. However, the mere thought of that stench…” she shuddered. “Gives me all sorts o’chills.”
Durante shook his head and kept walking. “As you wish.”
“Damn straight.”
DURANTE AND AIDELE stood in the middle of the garage staring at an object covered with a black tarp. Like most of the rooms of the Crags Labs complex, the room was circular. Rising up from behind them, and over the windowed office built beneath it, the stairwell spiraled up and through the ceiling to the labs complex proper. The walls rounding around past the office looked concrete though Aidele knew they weren’t. Outside of the stairwell (rather, rampwell, since the walkway was minus stairs and was simply a ramp running up and down), there appeared to be only one other exit: a large sixteen-by-sixteen-foot door to their right that was reminiscent of a docking bay’s entryway. Beyond the exits, there were few other things of note in the room. There was the office across from them. Yellow light had come on inside there when they had come down showing a computer monitor, a desk, and what looked like a rolling chair. The wall behind it was free of any sort of painting, poster, or literature. The door to the inside, just to the right of the window showing the interior looked suspiciously like an airlock door. It was thick and reinforced, with an ‘X’ like design of raised metal on its exterior, and a small head sized round window towards its top.
This wasn’t just a garage… Aidele glanced up. The head of the stairwell she saw could be closed off by an emergency shutter. And she knew then this ‘garage’ could be sealed off and depressurized. This was a secondary dock.
She glanced around as Durante reached to grab the tarp. All around the walls, outside of the office, were metal shelving units full of tools and junk. Boxes were sporadically stacked haphazardly all around. Yet the center of the room, where they stood, was fairly open and clutter free.
“Ready for this?” he grinned.
She raised a brow. “Are you throwing me a surprise party? Just show me already.” Then rolling her eyes trying not to smile, said, “The suspense is killing me.”
“Ha… Ha…” he shook his head and pulled the tarp away.
Her eyes went wide as she struggled not to trip over her own feet stepping back startled. “Wh, what the hell? That’s… that’s a… I…”
“Isn’t it cool!?” Durante stepped back and let the tarp fall to the ground. “I would never have imagined finding a waverider in the labs!”
Aidele started walking around it in slow astonishment. The vehicle itself was otherworldly. Waveriders were recreational vehicles on Earth, she knew, that primarily were ridden on ocean water. Just fun, jet-ski like devices. But, normally, they had sleek, smooth hulls with a variety of curved designs with narrow noses and flat underbellies. The rider would place their feet on a footpad, while the throttle on the handlebars controlled speed and movement. And to the rear would be a flat platform for a co-rider to get back onto the vehicle by, should they have fallen into the water.
Yet, this vehicle looked like the skeletal remnants of a waverider. Hyper stylized, of course, but considerably sleeker than standard. Its nose looked like the skull of some long snouted animal. Only where the jagged tip of the nasal bone would be, it was rounded and smooth. The two pieces of this nosecone half encased what she could have sworn was some sort of cannon, only there was no bore, just a tip that was domed like a bullethead. Looking closer, she could see that the skull flaps (for she could think of no better description of the strange plating jutting out and around half of this long cylinder) were not connected to the cannon styled structure itself, but rather set directly into the thick forward section of what clearly was a control panel.
This several foot-thick control panel was set diagonally away from the nose. At its summit, where the panel smoothly rounded up, flattened out, and flowed down to the other side, was a large set of chrome handlebars. The rubberish grips on the ends of the bars looked to be twistable. At the center of the handlebars, was a domed structure that covered the bars where they met. At the base of the control panel were a series of pedals that seemed to be hanging in the air, connected only by a series of fingerlike rods behind them that ran straight into the panel. Behind and sloping below the pedals and coming to an end maybe half-a-foot past them, was what looked to be a shallow foot rest.
In the center of this vehicle, coming out from just beneath the handlebars, was the rider section. Here, a bulbous section of the control console, sunk down towards the pilot seat which looked set low but not so low a rider would have to crane their neck over the handlebars to see, or find their knees to their chest. The seat leaned back into a headrest that was padded. That padding being a deep red. Just behind the driver’s seat, set a passenger chair. It wasn’t quite as low as the driver’s, but low enough for the passenger to sit comfortably in their own reclining position and still see over the top of the driver’s head. The padding there was deep red as well. The footrest was built into a frame that flowed down and slightly forward and under the driver’s seat.
This began the final secti
on of the slender waverider. The frame rose up and behind the passenger seat forming a shallow cubby just below that seat on both sides. The exterior, meanwhile, rounded out and backwards as it flushed out forming a cone shape that was rounded at its tip, with a top section coming off the passenger seat’s head becoming almost its own rounded half-cone that sunk into the rest of the vehicle’s rear. With the exception of the seats and the handlebars, all of the waverider was jet black.
She looked beneath the vehicle and saw that there were two sets of struts, one under the control console and one under the passenger seat, holding the whole vehicle up on top of a large black base. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was wider and longer than the vehicle with a top and bottom that was completely flat while the rest of the thing was oval. Like an egg missing two of its sides.
All of this she took in within a matter of seconds. Then she shot Durante a look.
“What the hell’s a waverider doing here?”
Durante shrugged. “I mean, there’re lakes out in the Deltas, right? Maybe they liked to get away from it all every now and again. Take a vacation.”
“Right, they’d go’n leave me,” Aidele narrowed her eyes. “Stop horseshittin’ me, Durante. Ya brought me down here cuz ya said it had somethin’ ta do with the gravitic core. What the flying fuck’s a waverider got ta do with it?”
Durante chuckled and raised his hands. “Alright. Alright. I know I’ve pissed you off when you lapse into Wastelander speak.” Before she could retort, he said, “How does a waverider run?”
“Huhn? Ah swear by the Spirits, if’n ya don’t start—”
“Aidele,” Durante offered a soft tone as she looked back at him. He crossed his arms. “Please.”
Aidele took a deep breath and stepped back. “Not sure ah… Mmmm… I,” she glanced at him, face screwed up and he smiled at her, “want to get into a lesson in technology right now, but, sure, okay. A waverider races across the surface of a body of water by using gravitational thrust. It utilizes a similar principle to gravimagnetic lifts. Only the lift in question with a waverider uses water as a Jetstream to propel the unit across the surface of the water after the vehicle lifts up a few feet. The gravitational generators pull the water up into its bowels in streams and thrusts it out through the rear cylinder.” She shook her head and looked at him frowning. “But, Durante, that’s only because of natural gravitational—”
Her hands flew to her mouth as she gasped and stumbled back a few steps. Her eyes moistened as Durante nodded.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“By the Spirits, Durante,” her hands hovered in front of her face. “He, he, my father… I thought he’d designed it for capital ships. Cruisers, maybe. But you’re telling me that he miniaturized a gravitic core and shoved it into a waverider?”
Durante inhaled deeply before speaking, “I mean, why not? As I mentioned upstairs, he managed to miniaturize technology that only a dreadnought theoretically can handle and built it into your guns. It stands to reason he used a similar trick here.”
“But the energy requirements!”
“Again, your guns.” He shook his head walking around the craft himself. “Oh no, I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right, I think. The gravitic core isn’t powering the waverider itself, but rather something else. And I believe you know what that something else is since we were discussing it earlier.”
“Are you talking about the plasma shielding? Wouldn’t that only be feasible on a vessel the size of a destroyer? I can’t believe he’d be able to violate the laws of physics to make that possible!”
“I’m not so sure he did violate them. So far, everything he’s accomplished adheres to the theoretical principles in play. I’ll need to continue reading your father’s journal to be absolutely certain. In the meantime, we need to verify the core is actually in there. Which means actually powering it on using its true source of power.” He walked over to the far wall and it was then she noticed a cord running from the black oval stand all the way towards where Durante headed. He picked up the end of the cord and plugged it into the wall. Her gaze went to the black thing and saw a band of red light pulsing around the center section as it traced the circumference. It was like an Ouroboros chasing its own tail. “Charging station. When it turns a solid blue, whatever it’s charging has reached full charge. Not sure how long it’s been since this waverider was charged, but this should give us at least something to work with.”
She watched Durante hurry back to the vehicle and run his hands over the bulbous part of the frame beneath the handlebars.
“Huhn.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked moving closer.
“Normally, a powered up waverider just turns on when you touch the interface column. However,” he ran his hands all across it then mounted the pilot’s seat, “maybe sitting on it… hmmm… no… not working.”
Aidele watched him trying to figure out how to turn it on. Thoughts were racing through her head and she felt the shock and an overwhelming sensation flow over her. An uncomfortable truth was starting to emerge and she was sure she wasn’t liking the conclusion coming to the surface.
The journal, my guns… and now…
“It was all for her, wasn’t it?” Aidele’s eyes focused on some unseen distance even though she was looking right at Durante. “My mother…”
Durante paused and looked up at her. “I… I think so. This was probably built for her too. And I’m pretty sure you know why.”
She spoke and sounded far away to herself, “Because, she was… a Red Star Sheriff…”
“Aidele,” Durante frowned, “Are you sure that you don’t know what exactly a Red Star Sheriff is?”
Aidele focused on him at last and slowly shook her head. “I… have no idea. Grandfather accused me of acting like one before I went on my quest for revenge. He never elaborated and I was too focused on other things.”
“Do you get solnet out here?”
Aidele skewed her lips. “We’re not savages, Durante. Yes, we get solnet. We even have—had—a holoprojector on the ranch. Imagine that?”
Durante sighed. “You know full goddamn well I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
She sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just… overwhelmed. It’s too much. I’m not a gawddamned physicist! Let alone a theoretical one! But… there’s got to be a solnet console in the labs somewhere. Wait, you apprenticed here. You never used it?”
He looked slightly sheepish. “All of my correspondence came through my personal interface unit. That was on an enclosed network.”
“There are offices here, right?”
“Yeah. Down the main corridor.”
She shook her head. “Alright. Backburner. Not important just yet. First, let’s figure out how to power this damn thing on.”
“There has to be an exterior form of interaction. We should do a full search of the labs. Maybe there’s a manual somewhere.”
“There was one for my revolvers. So, it’s likely.”
“Great! We’ve got something to look for. Why don’t you search down here? I’ll head back up and start on the residential tower. We’ll meet back in the kitchen in a few hours, see how the search is going.”
“Okay.” She watched Durante dismount and start for the rampwell. “Durante?” He stopped and looked back to her. “Is there anything else I should keep an eye out for?”
He thought for a second then raised a brow and nodded. “I suppose just keep a look out for anything unusual. Something not easily explained. Might not be anything, but any clue will help.”
“Right. See you in a while.”
He smiled and headed upwards at a run. Aidele looked around the room, now alone and feeling sick to her stomach.
So, you two were up to something after all. A… Red Star Sheriff. Mom, what does that mean? What did you do? Did it have anything to do with Lynch? Is that why you were fighting? And the Union wanting dad’s journal… Can you imagine what they could
do with this technology? Forget the starships, what about ground assault vehicles? Panic welled up inside her. They couldn’t leave until they found out for sure if this was the gravitic core or not. She prayed heavily that Durante was mistaken (that she was too, for that matter). But deep down she knew that they had found exactly what they’d come for. And time was running out.
She made for the office across from her. The search had begun.
CHAPTER TWELVE: CAME A CALLIN’
THE RED PLANET hung in the black void like some ruddy pearl lost in the ether. There were those who found the planet beautiful. Sam Berricks just found it boring. That there had ever been an attempt to colonize the world astounded him. Yet, over the centuries, more and more had come to this deathtrap seeking new lives, or fortunes, or a safe haven from whatever persecution they were fleeing at the time. Even so, he had to admit they’d grown clever over time. Learning to survive such hostile conditions could not have been easy or simple. Using gravitational plating underneath the domed domains had been a stroke of genius, he had to give them that credit. Whittling out the Mons ranges slowly, cutting away at the natural formations in the Wastelands, laying the gravitational foundation and building over it to recreate Earth’s natural gravity well… Hell, that was just impressive. And they had a good thing going too when it came to the terraforming projects known as the ‘Genesis Endeavor’. A project meant to slowly terraform all of Mars, but had since fallen by the wayside due to lost political will.
Now, the world was failing. Its government weak and inefficient. Ripe for the taking. And Sam didn’t want it, despite President Lee’s explanation on why he was sent. It was a worthless ball of dirt, full of wasted potential. A symbol of abject failure. Sure, it produced some resources. Its connection to the outer colonies of the Continuum couldn’t be dismissed.
However, there were other trade networks available. Less convenient, but they existed. True, the Martian trade networks made it easier to acquire those resources faster. Yet, even with all of that, it was no Earth. The only garden world in Sol (Well, Nibiru. But he hardly counted that dark moon a ‘Garden World’). He knew that no other worlds had been discovered outside of Sol that were anywhere near being viable for colonization. They had Earth and what lives they could carve out on the other planets and moons (a few even out in the Pheyton Asteroid Range). But he’d take Earth over any of them any day.
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