Frank could see a green circle with his name hovering in the air nearby. Trisha had already found one for her and Vikram. He stepped over to his and it began moving once he was within a couple of steps of it.
He stood still and it stopped as well. “I guess we just follow them.” He shrugged and started walking.
They passed into an arched tunnel in the cavern wall and it led them out into a space that dwarfed the debarkation room.
It was a large underground canyon roughly three hundred meters in height with fifteen levels of walkway along each side. Several walkways on each level allowed convenient access from one side to the other.
The open space running down the middle of the canyon was at least fifteen meters wide where the debarkation room emptied into the ‘shelter’.
“It’s more like a city than an emergency hideout,” Frank muttered in awe. The press of the crowd behind him helped him realize that he’d stopped walking.
Their icons led them to one of the upper levels where Frank, Trisha, Vikram and Terry all found themselves standing in a three-bedroom apartment set back into the rock of the mountain.
It was surprisingly comfortable, for an emergency shelter, and Vikram was the first to voice that opinion.
“Nanites,” Terry said. “We can make as many or as few of the things as we want, so there’s no limit on what we can do for a shelter like this.”
“This must be a standard imperial pattern,” Trisha said, running a hand along a wall. It was finished in a relief pattern of hexagonal groups, some large hexagons flowed into patches of smaller ones. “It’s nice enough but it just feels…”
“Alien?” Frank suggested.
She nodded. “How do we prepare…” She nodded again and turned to walk into an open room with no apparent counter-space.
“What is…” Frank grunted. “A kitchen, as an imperial citizen would know it.”
“These mattresses are weird!” Vikram bounded out of a door shaped like an elongated hexagon. “They look like they grew in some ocean somewhere. Kind of stiff.”
“How do they use the…” Frank grimaced. “Hole in the floor?”
“Takes some getting used to,” Trisha said. “It’s not uncommon back home.”
“I suppose I can give it a shot,” Frank groused.
“Yeah,” Terry guffawed. “Literally!”
“Ayyoh!” Trisha exclaimed, silencing the young man.
“You know,” Terry said, rubbing the back of his neck. “We could probably get a nanite cohort to put in a toilet. We just need the design specs.”
“I’ll make sure we add that to the agenda at the next council meeting,” Frank said, still trying not to laugh.
“Why is the shelter built like this?” Vikram asked. “Wouldn’t it be stronger if it was a sphere?
“Ah,” he nodded as the answer percolated up from his stored patterns. “If we’re forced to live down here for a year or more, the chance of mass-murder and civil unrest is reduced if our habitat has a more natural feel.
“If you walk out of the apartment and can see the entire place, you feel like a prisoner. If some of it is out of sight, around the corner, the subconscious need for exploration is less urgent.”
He waggled his shoulders. “It’s a love-hate thing, as far as this implanted knowledge goes. I feel like I have a ghost inside my head.”
“Not that we haven’t all had a run-in with a real one, lately,” Terry said quietly. “Wonder if she can reach us, all the way down here?”
“Maybe this place is…” Trisha screwed up her face. “Safe seems almost insulting, doesn’t it? Like we’re hiding behind the curtains while a friendly neighbor is knocking on the door.”
“It might be time for us to do the knocking,” Frank said. “When we were planning this drill, we were also floating the idea of a small expedition back to where we found Vikram. That sound your boots made – there’s something metallic under there.”
“She’s there,” Vikram said firmly. “I should be with you when you go back. I know that look,” he added before his mother could forbid it. “I really think it’s important.
“Whatever’s there, we have to learn how to live with it...”
Departure from the Norm
Babilim Station
Adelina sat up in her bed, not quite sure if she’d just been shouting in her dream or in real life as well. She wiped her hand across her forehead and it came away covered with sweat. Thinnest nightshirt I have and I’m still sweating.
She could hear an engine winding down, out on the road. Must have flown over the house and woken me up.
She got out of bed and padded downstairs to find out why her sister was buzzing the house in the middle of the night.
She was halfway to the front door when it opened and three men came in. The third man through the door had an arrogant smile that she didn’t care for.
“My lady,” he said, not quite sneering but damned close to it. He let his eyes drift down from Adelina’s face.
“What the hells do you want?” she demanded, crossing her arms.
“Mom?” Gabriella’s voice drifted down from upstairs.
Adelina’s blood ran cold.
“There’s a problem, my lady,” the man said, looking up at the stairs as Gabriella descended, barefoot in her pajama shorts and t-shirt.
She didn’t care for the look on his face, especially now that it was turned on her daughter. “What problem?” she demanded, wishing she had a weapon.
Gabriella squawked as one of the men grabbed her at the bottom of the stairs. She struggled, drawing chuckles from the three intruders.
“The problem, my lady,” the sneering jerk said as Adelina started toward her daughter, “is that we only need one of you.”
She could see her daughter’s eyes grow wide in terror. There was a sound behind her…
Gabriella screamed in horror. She watched her mother’s now-faceless body fall to the floor and when it hit the flagstones, Gabriella was jolted into motion. Without giving it a lot of thought, she twisted her wrist, breaking her right hand free from her captor.
She swiveled out toward the counter, snatching up a paring knife her mother had brought with her from Earth. With an incoherent bellow of rage, she swung back toward her captor who was wearing his armored EVA suit.
He rolled his eyes at her impotent gesture. She could see his expression because his helmet wasn’t deployed. His disdain cost him. If he’d registered the young woman as a threat, his suit would have noticed his heightened alarm and closed up his helmet.
She stabbed him at the base of the neck, sticking the knife in at a forty-five degree angle and rotating it before pulling it back out. She didn’t feel the slightest revulsion at stabbing someone for the first time.
Her victim had let go of her other wrist now that he had bigger problems. She turned for the man who’d just shot her mother, ignoring the other man who was standing between them and slightly to the right, mouth hanging open in shock.
She snarled, leaping over her mother’s twitching legs and aimed her knife in a wild arc at the killer’s neck. His helmet flowed shut a second too soon for her and then she felt something hammer into the back of her head…
The Captivity
Shuttle, Babilim Station
Gabriella moaned. Her head felt like it had a hive of bees in it and her shoulders ached.
Then her shoulders felt like fire as her body jerked to the left. Her eyes opened and she realized this wasn’t going to turn out to be a bad dream.
She was hanging by her wrists, suspended from the overhead framework of a shuttle. The man who’d killed her mother was in front of her, arguing with the man she’d stabbed in the neck. He was lying on a bench, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood.
She forgot about the pain in her head and shoulders. All she could think about was killing the man who’d killed her mom.
But he was busy deciding to kill someone else.
“It’s to
o much damage for medical nanites,” the stabbed man said with a bubbly gasp. “I need a full med-bay!”
The murderer nodded. He stood and stepped back, activating a holo menu. The bench as well as the decking it sat on simply dissolved beneath the man, letting in a roar of air.
With a startled, blood-frothed yelp, the injured man dropped through the opening and was snatched away in the slipstream. The bench and decking restored itself temporarily numbing the ears of the remaining occupants.
After a flare shock, Gabriella remembered the rage she’d felt when driving a knife into the man’s neck. He had it coming, she thought, but why don’t I feel anything?
She felt cold inside and it worried her. One of the assholes responsible for mom’s death is killed and I feel nothing? She felt a constriction in her chest as she watched the murderer. He’d killed her mother and now he’d just killed one of his own men.
It wouldn’t take much for him to end her life.
“What are you looking at, bitch?” he snarled. He stepped up to her and grabbed her by the throat. “You just cost me one of my best people!”
The utter injustice of his anger was impossible to deal with. Killed one of his people? He just shot Mom and he’s angry at me?
He kept his hand on her throat but he stepped back, looking down at her body. “Maybe I should…”
“Kolm!” a voice shouted from the cockpit. “Leave her alone and get up here!”
“Bitch killed Para,” Kolm snarled. “She needs to…”
“Shut it,” the pilot snarled. “You killed Para, or Para killed Para, due to his being an idiot. You get your ass away from her now or I’ll have no further need of you! Seizing or killing a noble is one thing; offering an indignity is quite another!”
“A noble?” Kolm sneered, looking at her contemptuously. “She’s only a noble ’cause she shares genes with that upstart that’s humping Gleb and he’s only…”
He stopped at the telltale click-whine of a sidearm coming off safety. He turned to see the pilot standing in the doorway to the cockpit.
“Reasons… don’t… mattter,” the pilot said slowly and deliberately. “Your feelings don’t matter. We became a fief, so we needed a lord. That’s Gleb. He’s wed to Luna. She’s our lady.”
He nodded at their prisoner. “And you just made this young woman the second in line to their throne. Take your hands off her.”
“Who do you think’s in charge here?” Kolm yelled.
“I don’t need to think about it,” the pilot said evenly. “I know who’s in charge.”
Kolm stared at him for several seconds. He took his hand away and spat on the deck by the pilot’s feet in sullen anger.
“Go take the controls,” the pilot said. “Let me know when you pick up the prox-beacon on the Edged Star.”
He lowered his weapon and Kolm stalked forward, muttering curses. Kolm flopped into the pilot’s seat and deactivated the auto-fly.
The pilot turned back to Gabriella. He used a holo-menu to release her wrists from the ceiling, though they were still cuffed together.
She fell to the floor, humiliated by this show of weakness but she’d been hit on the head and trussed up like a side of beef for the gods only knew how long. Not that long, she realized. Or that guy would have bled to death.
She shuddered with disgust as she felt a hand touch her leg but then another slid behind her shoulders and she realized her captor was just picking her up off the decking. He sat her on the port-side bench, her cuffs linking to the seat between her legs so she couldn’t get up and wreak any mayhem.
He sat opposite her, deactivating his weapon and holstering it. “This is nothing personal,” he told her in a voice devoid of any emotion. “We’re just following orders.”
“Whose orders?” she spat. “Your orders come from Gleb and Luna. I doubt they’d have approved of your ‘orders’.”
“We don’t work for them.” He leaned back, crossing his arms. “Don’t worry about it. Chances are, you’ll be handed back as part of some deal and everybody’s happy.”
“Happy?” she exclaimed. “You killed my mother you vat-grown piece of shit! That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t get forgiven.
“There’s no place in the galaxy you can go to avoid the consequences. My aunt didn’t step out of a chamber like you did, you stupid bastard! She grew up with her sister, the woman she’s known since she was born, the woman you just killed in front of me!”
The man’s dispassionate expression faded, replaced with a look of uncertainty.
“Your best bet,” she snarled, “is to take that pistol, kill that prick in the cockpit and then blow your own brains out. My aunt will get her hands on you.
“She’s gonna pull your eyes and fingernails out, one by one, and then hang you with your own guts.”
“Shut her up, Len, or I will,” Kolm said but his voice was shaky.
“You’re going to be first,” she yelled at Kolm. “You’re going to die in the slowest possible way I can think of!”
“Gods, Len, smack her in the mouth!” Kolm urged.
“Just shut up and fly,” Len ordered angrily.
“Shit! There’s the beacon.” The shuttle banked. “Damn near hit the damn ship!”
A wash of light came back through the shuttle as the passed into a hangar-bay.
“Len to bridge,” the man across from Gabriella nearly shouted. “Engage the path drive and get us out of here!”
Kusha?
North Highlands, near Unity
Terry moved through the forest, checking on his HUD for Vikram’s position. Still not moving?
If the teen had been heading for the place where they’d found him lying on the ground, the entire family would have been racing to retrieve him. Since he was nowhere near that place, Frank had asked Terry to go find him.
Terry looked past the HUD and his blood ran cold. He’d wandered out into a clearing right in front of a feathered tiger.
The terrifying beast was lying on it’s chest, front paws splayed out and its huge maw hanging open. Terry stared at it, his own mouth hanging open in shock.
His hand, seeming to remember before his brain, drifted toward the potent firearm at his hip.
“It’s dead,” Vikram said quietly.
Terry’s hand clenched on thin air, at least a hand’s-breadth away from the pistol-grip. He crouched in alarm, both fists up in front of him.
“Holy shit, Vik! Can you not?”
“Sorry.”
“I was already on the edge of a brown-pants moment there.”
“And me telling you it’s dead was somehow more scary?” Vikram asked absently, still staring at the scene in front of them.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you were so close…”
“Cause if My mom heard you suddenly shooting at that dead thing, She’d be having a moment of her own.”
“What killed it, anyway?” Terry edged closer.
“Careful,” Vikram warned. “Look at the ground around him.”
Terry looked, seeing more than just the deadly looking creature. How did I miss all those glowing blue bulbs? “What are those? Spores?”
“They have spines,” Vikram pointed. “See? A few of them are sticking into the tiger’s belly.”
Terry used his HUD to get a closer look. “The wound is bigger than the spine. There’s some kind of acid present, along with a compound similar to the sap of those ‘nap-trees’.”
“This world loves putting people to sleep, doesn’t it?” Vikram glanced at Terry. “I think we’re looking at a phase in the life-cycle of those ‘glow whales’ we first saw at the party.”
The large, blue-glowing creatures that had floated over Unity during the celebration had been seen again, from time to time, and always at night. Nobody knew what drew them down from the mountains.
“They dissolve into spores?” Terry nodded. “That could explain why they come down out of the mountains. No large animals up there to feed those things.”<
br />
“To feed the larvae,” Vikram said. “They’re being injected through those spines. The acid must be for pre-digestion, to make feeding easier for the larvae.”
“That… is… really… nasty!” Terry shuddered.
“And they got a bonus,” Vikram added. “Looks like he’d caught one of those root-eaters and now it’s full of larvae as well.”
“Huh!” Terry shook his head. “Wouldn’t be the first large predator who lives on small animals. Now that we can look at one of these guys up close, you can see it has a hard beak and it looks like it’s been roughed up by nosing around in dirt.”
“And those claws...” Vikram pointed. “They’re scary as hell but they’re flat, for digging.”
“Can’t wait for Kent to hear about this,” Terry said, grinning. “He’s been shooting these feather tigers and the seedlings he’s planting are getting eaten almost as fast as he puts them in the ground.”
“So…” Vikram rose to his feet. “You’re making sure I wasn’t sneaking off to look for Kusha?”
“No, we knew you were over this way,” Terry told him. “We can see each other’s location, remember?”
Vikram nodded. “She’s been quiet…”
Terry sighed, looking toward the… place. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or not.”
He looked back at Vikram. “Anyway, we need to get moving. Frank’s supposed to meet with Mr Kawle and Mal. We need to head back to town.”
Not My Job
Unity, Ragnarok
Frank felt strange, walking across the square in his armor, but he’d been late getting back from the highlands. Rather than keep folks waiting, he decided to come straight over.
Sushil and Mal were already at a table and Mal waved at the third coffee that sat in front of Frank’s empty chair. Frank sat, oddly glad that he didn’t have to sully the coffee-shop experience by walking in with armor on.
Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal. Page 19