Trinity: Atom & Go

by Zach Winderl

  “I assumed it was a ship, or a town, or maybe even a landmark.” Atom fixed Cheung with a curious look. “The story we are chasing is written deep enough in the annals that a name could be an entire han at this point. If Shepherd is relevant, then it must still exist, so a single person wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “You don’t have time for indecision,” Cheung said, folding his hands on his book.

  “Two minutes,” Kozue whispered in Atom’s ear.

  “Would you be kind enough to tell me who, or what, Shepherd is?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” exasperation crept into Atom’s voice.

  “Why should I tell you? Why not wait for the imperials? If they are pursuing Shepherd as well, then I would assume they are doing so at the behest of the emperor himself.”

  Atom relaxed. “Have you looked outside?”

  As if to make his point, a grenade detonated somewhere down the stairwell. Atom glanced to the door, half expecting troopers to pour through and gun them all down.

  “If the imperials were following the will of the emperor, there would be no need for the bloodshed,” Atom continued, centering his attention on the sallow man. “They aren’t here in any official capacity. This isn’t the first system Toks Marshall has walked over to get what she wants. And this is not the first blood she has shed looking for this information.”

  Cheung continued to study Atom and asked, “Then, do I truly have a choice?”

  “There’s always a choice. You could pass the information or not. You could choose who to give it to. You could choose to live or die. There are always choices.

  “Although, I don’t believe the imps have your name at the present time, so there’s no reason to believe they are specifically coming here to ask you for anything. I’m guessing a patrol fell in on our trail and followed us to the building. They are most likely checking up on a group breaking the lock-down.”

  “One minute, Atom,” Kozue counted down in his ear. “Hither and Shi have retreated to this floor.”

  “The time has come for you to make that decision,” Atom pressed. “I want to leave before they realize I’ve been talking to you. I would like to not thrust you into my problems.”

  Cheung nodded. “Fair enough.” He squeezed his hands together, trying to hide the tremor running along his gnarled fingers. “The only Shepherd that comes to mind is one my grampa spoke of. She was his captain. According to the old family stories, she saved his life when their ship went down.”

  “Captain Shepherd,” Atom said to himself, leaning back from the table in realization. “I don’t suppose she’s still alive?”

  With a shake of his head, Cheung frowned at Atom.

  “Do you know what ship she captained?”

  Cheung grew thoughtful as the seconds ticked by. “I don’t recall. Strange, he told stories all the time about his days in the navy, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning his ship. He must have, but I can’t think of it.”

  “Kozue, can you access that information?” Atom looked away from Cheung.

  “Negative, I don’t have any record of a Captain Shepherd that could be tied to these quadrants.” She paused. “Thirty seconds.”

  “What’s the connection?” Atom thumped his fist on his leg and glanced at Lilly.

  “Does she have a grave or a memorial anywhere around her?” the baug asked.

  Cheung perked. “She is buried in the same wall as my grampa.” The words gushed from the aged man as his energy escalated. “There might be something there. The burial walls aren’t far from here. I could take you.”

  “That might be the safest course,” Lilly said. “That way we don’t run the risk of Toks getting her teeth on him. We’d probably be doing him a favor.”

  “I’ll show you,” Cheung said with a nervous gulp.

  “Atom, you must go now,” Kozue insisted. “They are pressing the stairs.”

  “It’s time to go.” Atom rose to his feet and pulled his rail-pistol. He extended his other hand to Cheung. “We’ll do our best to keep you out of harm’s way, but I can’t predict what these imps are going to do.”

  Cheung half clambered to his feet before taking Atom’s hand and grunting the rest of the way upright. “Can any of us know what the imps are thinking?” he asked.

  “Not now,” Atom replied with a grin. “They’re off course with this.”

  The gunfire grew louder.

  Stepping around Lilly and Byron, Atom moved to the door and cautioned a look out into the hallway. Behind him, the other three crowded after, moving with hesitancy, as if expecting the hallway to explode in a shower of destruction.

  Atom held up a hand to halt them.

  He waved them aside and retrieved the pram. Cracking open the cover, Atom smiled down at Margo as she lay curled in her blanket. The girl blinked herself awake and stretched.

  Turning back to the hall, Atom watched as Hither and Shi appeared at the landing. As the Valkyrie pair backed up the steps, Hither reached over the balustrade to fire off several blind shots.

  Shi drifted to the cover of the hallway corner. Atom could not see her target, but someone must have crossed into her field. Moving without hesitation, she snapped off a single shot. From the depths of the stairwell a cry and clatter of armor echoed. Shi’s face remained passive as she slipped back into cover and checked the load on her pistols.

  Across the stairwell, Hither caught sight of Atom and slipped away from the action enough to use her hands to indicate four soldiers remained on the stairwell.

  The hall lights glared with antiseptic anger, driving back the fading dusk at Atom’s feet. With the combination of imperial lockdown and the echoes of gunfire, the floor sat silent. Atom knew that life hid in each room, but no evidence came forth.

  “What’s the plan?” Lilly whispered in his ear.

  Atom looked up and down the hallway. “I’m going to check in with Hither and Shi. I want you and Byron to head to the stairwell at the end of the hall. It’s highly unlikely that they left that exit uncovered, but I don’t want you to engage. Maybe send Cody down to scout how many are covering our retreat.

  “And,” he said to Cheung. “I want you to stay here. Stay covered. There’s no need to expose yourself. If we don’t come back, just hunker down in your room and pretend we just used your room for cover.”

  “I can do that,” the old man said with a nervous gulp.

  Atom nodded once and moved down the hall. He advanced with a steady step and cocked his rail-pistol as he approached Hither. Pushing the pram ahead of him, he struck an odd picture. Hither turned as he approached and waved at Margo who had awaked enough to sit with sleepy eyes and watch the world flow by.

  Byron and Lilly crept to the far stairwell and as he halted behind Hither, Atom watched them slip through the door.

  Atom left the pram beside Hither and stepped out to search the stairwell for movement.

  “Have they been coming straight up?” he asked, after a moment observing the still stairs. “If they’re following protocol they should be sweeping each floor to verify that we haven’t diverted.”

  “We’ve been picking them off.” Shi stood with her back pressed to the wall on the far side of the stairwell, her arms dangling loose at her sides. “If they was to follow proto, they’d have dropped to the ground by now to wait fer reinforcements.”

  Atom leaned out over the railing, searching the depths. “You sure there are only four?”

  “Unless there are more waiting down in the lobby,” Hither said

  Atom pondered. He stepped back from the stairs and drifted over to the pram. “Could be a pinning force.” He smiled down at Margo as he played with her hair. “We need to move before they can really pin us down. Whether that’s straight down the gullet or slipping down the side, I’m not sure.”

  “Atom,” Byron commed from the far end of the hall. “Sent Cody down an’ we en’t seein’ nobody. En’t sayin’ nuffin’ ‘bout a body waitin’ at ground, but
we en’t hearin’ nuffin ‘ere.”

  “Hold there,” Atom replied. “We’re coming to you.”

  Atom motioned for Hither to follow. “Shi, twenty paces.”

  The gunslinger flashed a feral grin as she glanced down the stairs.

  Atom and Hither moved. Pushing the pram before him he walked like a man on a Sunday stroll. As they approached Cheung’s room, the bald man poked his head out the door.

  “Care to go for a walk, grandpa?” Atom asked with a pleasant calm.

  Cheung glanced behind them and then fell into step and asked, “Are you sure it’s safe?’

  “Is anything in the Black truly safe?”

  “I guess not.” Cheung frowned.

  When they reached the far end of the hallway, Atom led them through the door. On the far side, Byron crouched in the corner, peering intently down through the metal railing. He started at the clank of the heavy door, but relaxed at the sight of his crewmates.

  “Where’s Lilly?” Atom asked.

  “She’s bleedin’ nutso, Cap,” Byron said as he stood and leaned over to stare down the stairs. “She said she don’t full on trust Cod,y so she decided to poke ahead an’ make sure the way’s clear.”

  The others crowded onto the landing. As the door swung shut, Shi let out a barrage of pistol fire and sprinted to join them.

  “Then we best go join her,” Atom snapped.

  The group descended the three flights, moving with a balance of caution and speed. At every switchback, Atom expected to find Lilly hunkered down, but the stairwell remained empty.

  As they reached the ground floor and ventured outside, Atom began to worry.

  “Cap, I took two more down up top,” Shi said as she joined the others standing in a small group around a single trooper lying facedown on the pavement. “Jammed the lock mech on the door, but I reckin that’ll only buy us a few seconds headstart.”

  “Looks like they might be spread a little too thin,” Hither said as she nudged the solitary soldier with a toe.

  Atom nodded. “Two left behind. Shi keep eyes up the stairs and let me know if they are following. Byron, where’d Cody get off to? I need to know where Lilly is headed,” he grumbled and stared down the embankment to the street below.

  In a buzz of wings, the mechanized dragon flitted from the stairwell and lifted straight up.

  “Atom,” Kozue said on the general com. “I checked up the stairs and it appears the last of your pursuers have fallen back. I am searching for Lilly as we speak, but am not seeing her.”

  Byron stood squinting into the evening sky, trying to locate his charge.

  “Reckin we count our luck,” Shi said as she joined the others on the paved walk.

  “We can’t wait,” Atom snapped. “We need to be off the radar before reinforcements decide to show—”

  “Afraid I’ve got some bad news,” Daisy said, cutting across the coms “The Hellkite just overrode our controls and took to the sky. Nobody has entered the Ticket, so I’m assuming it was Ash who did the overriding. I don’t know where she’s headed or how she plans to avoid imp detection, but all of the sudden, I can’t track her.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Atom said as he looked to Cheung for direction, and then pushed down the grassy slope in the indicated direction. “Bring the Ticket online and be ready for anything.”

  “Firm,” Daisy replied.

  ***

  Cheung led them to the grave wall without incident.

  Atom expected to find Lilly waiting for them, but when they reached their destination, the graveyard sat empty and silent. Built more like a labyrinth than a traditional burial ground, the dead rested in vertical tombs. Their grave markers lined the walls like flagstones with memorials carved in the surface.

  Atom cast one glance around the twilit street before plunging into the regimented maze of fifteen-foot walls of the dead.

  Once protected from outside observation by the walls, Cheung lit a lantern from an empty guard shack and took the lead. Holding the lantern high and trailing one hand along a wall, he shuffled along. He squinted at the names and guide signs posted at the silent intersections.

  Behind Cheung, in a strung out line, the crew of the One Way Ticket wandered in silent reverence.

  Atom followed.

  As he drifted through the realm of death, he turned over the fleeting occurrences of the day: violence at dawn, a trek through the city, witnessing a firefight, tracked by an imperial squad to a twilight home as the sun began to set, and now a trip through a cemetery.

  The day followed the course of a life in itself.

  And where had Lilly gotten off to?

  Had she been captured?

  According to Byron, she had pressed ahead to make sure no imperials blocked their path. She had eliminated their only threat.

  Except she had vanished.

  Deep down, Atom knew Lilly. He knew she looked out for herself and nobody else. For too long, she had slipped through the travel lanes of the Black by herself. Tragedy followed in her wake, and even though he tried to see her with fresh eyes, Atom knew the course her wires followed that forced the entire galaxy into a box of irrelevancy at the expense of her survival.

  They had struck a deal, but at the end of the journey, if she could skate ahead of the competition, Atom knew the chance of her sticking to their deal looked as solid as a ship adrift with a dead power-plant.

  A tiny spark of fury glowed in his chest.

  As quickly as the ember flared to life, Atom tempered it. He had learned long ago to never fully trust a spook. He had also learned early that decisions made on emotional grounds always ended badly.

  “We are here,” Cheung said, holding up the lantern before an old stone.

  The group gathered around him as he halted before the rather simple memorial. Overhead, the last vestiges of the day slipped away, leaving them in a deep purple gloaming.

  Soft lights flickered to life, spaced evenly atop the grave walls.

  Atom dragged his attention to the monolith.

  The memorial occupied one full vertical column. Where other graves stacked one atop the other, five high, this single grave spanned the entire space. In bas relief, a woman stood depicted as a regal warrior with her hand shading her eyes as she glared into the distance.

  Beneath her feet the sculptor had carved an inscription.

  The mother of Stillwater

  Shepherd led us to our promised land

  11,847 souls she saved that fateful day

  Even though she lost her Tribune

  We gained a home

  “What is her Tribune?” Atom asked.

  Cheung ran his hands over the words and said, “I think it was her ship.”

  Atom arched a brow as he knitted pieces of the puzzle in his mind. “Do you happen to know what it means exactly when it says she lost it?” he asked.

  “Well,” Cheung drew the word out. He scratched his bald pate in thought. “It’s in our histories that there was a battle here around a hundred and fifty years ago. If I had to guess, the Tribune was one of the ships lost in the battle.”

  “That doesn’t quite add up.”

  “How so?”

  “If she lost her ship, how did she save all those souls?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Cheung as he studied the memorial. “My grampa just told stories about how he survived the battle and managed to start a new life here. He had lost more tales than he could remember, but he used to tell us kits snippets of the grand armada and how they were trying to escape something. According to him, they wanted to leave, and the imps wanted them back.

  “I don’t rightly know where we were planning on going.” He shifted his gaze to the stars that had just begun to twinkle over their heads. “There’s not much out beyond us. It’s blacker than the black between the galaxies.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want you back,” Hither said softly. “Could be they aimed to destroy you?”

  “I never heard much more than th
e great battle that covered the skies,” Cheung said with a half shrug. “We’re still here, so they couldn’t have destroyed us too much. Now we’re just a planet full of scrap from that battle, but we make most of our money from harboring smugglers, pirates, and scavs. It’s easy to make a ship disappear out here among all the scap we pull off Squam.”

  “The artificial moon?” Atom lifted Margo from the pram and set her down on the ground.

  “The same.”

  “Could the Tribune be there?”

  “Not sure. This is a place people come to disappear. We don’t keep too many records and our history has always been of the oral type.

  “All I can tell, is that I’ve never come across a ship called Tribune in all my years as a scrapper. Granted, the majority of that moon is just fragments of old ships. The microgravity of all that mass has pulled it into a loose clump of shifting metal. To call it a moon is actually kind of misleading. It’s about as stable up there as a sub-spring out on the plains.”

  “Sub-springs?” Atom rubbed his hands together in the evening chill as he worked over the puzzle.

  “Out on the plains you can find watering holes, but more often you’ll find a water source buried under the looser dirt. That’s where you get the sucking sands. Good way to get yourself buried.”

  “Buried,” Atom repeated, his mind wandering away from the conversation.

  “Yeah, if you aren’t careful, that waste will suck you down without so much as an ‘excuse me’.”

  “What if the ship is buried?” Atom’s eyes lit with the new line of thought.

  Cheung frowned in thought. “I doubt even the biggest sub-spring could swallow a whole ship. Maybe a fighter or a small transport, if the sink is big enough, but I doubt there would be enough pull to get an entire ship sub-soil. Maybe down south, in the ocean—”

  Atom cut him off. “Did any ships crash?” he asked along his fresh trail.

  “During the battle?”

  “More like right after.”

  “Sure,” Cheung said as he stared at Atom. “Most of the wrecks that didn’t get swallowed by Squam were pulled down the well. You can’t walk a day through the plains without catching sight of some stripped out wreck.”

  “Have they all been scavenged?”