by Ginger Booth
Fidget collected the cameras. Her mink toes featured retractable thumbs, and side pockets lurked beneath her fur. In a moment, she was off, pausing now and then in her bounding zig-zag progress to scout for filming positions.
Sass warned, “I don’t know that Fidget can monitor the videos like Floki did.”
Kaol shrugged unconcern. “If she can’t, she’ll ask Floki how.”
The captain took a good look at him. His bald scalp grew red, and he unconsciously turtled his shoulders to his ears to reduce the strengthening rain dripping down his muscle-bound neck. The temperature was dropping, though still merely a mild autumn afternoon. “It’s cold here for you. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged off the comment. “Food maybe. Offer a picnic.” He squinted at the sky. “Fidget, please hurry.”
Sass stiffened in alarm as she heard a snorting challenge of complaint. That sound was familiar. She couldn’t quite place it, but the unmistakable smell came soon after, with striking power right through the face shield. Lest she miss the skunk odor, Fidget streaked back and leapt into her arms.
“I smell bad!”
Sass chuckled at her. “You really do!” The rain started pouring harder. She turned and used her grav generator to leap down the bluff. Kaol followed her as they ran through the cloudburst, heedless of staying quiet now. The rain beat too heavily for the locals to hear them, anyway, and anyone with sense was taking shelter. As did they.
Mercifully, the biotainment bath in the airlock proved effective against skunk. Though once Kaol started sneezing, he couldn’t stop. When the inner airlock door opened, she put an arm around him to lead him into med bay. Where Liam took one look at him, and offered a pill and a glass of water.
“Antihistamine. The science team already had theirs. What’s that smell?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Sass claimed. Maybe a whiff of skunk remained.
Liam picked up the mink for a sniff and recoiled, immediately setting her back on the floor. “Report to the chief for cleaning, mink.” He let it go with a raised eyebrow at the captain’s own aroma.
Sass grinned. “I’ll change uniform, shall I?”
But Clay interrupted in her ear. “Sass, we’ve got company.”
“They’re harmless.”
“Not the forest folk. A military flyer, some kind of patrol. They called ahead, demanding we stay put.”
“On my way.”
She was grateful to visit the woods of home, and meet one of the shy folk. But now her cautious initial surveillance was over. Time for the real first contact.
She bounded up to the catwalk and ducked into the dining room for its big screen. Her cook Corky blanched and held her nose, sweeping Sass away with a hand gesture. Right. Maybe the overdose of skunk knocked her nose offline. The captain detoured to her cabin instead, to use Clay’s desk. Sorry Clay.
She swept her lover’s tidy research windows off the desktop display and brought up her comms interface. She identified the signal the first mate referred to, and signaled them back. Answering a hail was far easier than catching someone else’s attention. She put her grade-A armor smile on tight as someone answered, also on video, with a massive scowl. She limited her reaction to a surprised blink and kept her warm demeanor intact.
She addressed a man whose face appeared arrested halfway through a werewolf transformation to four-footed form. Fortunately he wore a rebreather which masked his muzzle and teeth.
“Hello! My name is Captain Sassafras –”
“Dome! Identify!” The wolf man’s uniform and manner appeared sharp and official, in contrast to his fur.
“I am not from a dome,” Sass replied carefully. “My ship is from the Aloha star system, with the Colony Corps. Although I was born in the ruins of New York City, in the year 2090.”
The wolf snorted. “Joker.” The screen blanked.
And the ship rocked with the first laser. Sass instantly accessed another screen of controls, but Darren beat her to it, raising the ESD shields. “Clay, angels!”
“They didn’t strike me so.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Any real pilot knew the lingo. “Up, Clay! Give me a thousand meters. I don’t want the people below hurt!”
“Oh, good. You found someone to save. That didn’t take long.”
“Stow the sarcasm. Evasive maneuvers. I’ll join you in the bridge.”
“Why didn’t you join me in the first place?”
She didn’t bother answering, as she slammed out the cabin door and jogged around the corner into the bridge.
His face screwed up in disbelief. “Is that skunk?”
“Pretend you can’t smell me. That’s an order.”
Judging from his face, he couldn’t obey. Tough. They’d reached altitude. She spun the ship to face the patrol, a sleek silvery thing her sensors had trouble locking onto, about the size of Clay’s top-of-the-line four-seater on Mahina. Nice.
With the ESD field up now, and the inertial dampeners online, she could no longer feel hits directly, so she checked. They’d fired four times. “Darren? Sass. Their hits aren’t hurting us, are they?”
“No, we can take this all day. We are burning fuel, though.”
“Understood.” She hailed the original signal again. “Excuse me. As you may have noticed, shooting at me doesn’t do any good. Ready to talk?” She beamed her highest-wattage smile at the wolf man.
“Who the hell are you?!” he demanded. “And no more of that gibberish!”
“I’m afraid the gibberish is the truth. I am Captain Sassafras Collier. My ship is Thrive One. We come from the reconstituted Colony Corps in the Aloha System. My world was settled from Upstate, 95 years ago. Not far from here. I was among those settlers. This ship model is a Jupiter Orbital 3 – check it in your database. Your laser beams have no effect. Nor will projectiles. This ship is built to navigate through asteroid fields.”
“And you’re a hundred years old,” he scoffed.
She gave her nose a flirty wrinkle. “What’s your name?”
His fur bristled with his shoulders. “Dome Killingfield, Lieutenant Three-Eight.”
What a name. Sass’s cheeks began to ache. “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant Three-Eight.”
“Are you also immune to nuclear warheads?”
Sass pursed her lips, dropping any effort to appear pleasant. “There are innocent people below. You would not damage my ship. You would damage these woods, and those people.”
“What, stragglers?” He huffed a laugh. “We do not concern ourselves with vermin. What do you want?”
“Thank you, I’d like to speak to your leader. Of…Killingsworth?”
“Killingfield. Hold.” The good lieutenant’s muzzle was replaced by a stylized logo of a dome with a foreground symbol of a scythe harvesting humans, slicing them in half. Charming.
Clay suggested, “Maybe this isn’t the best dome.”
“Should we fly around until we find one with a flower logo?” Sass traded a look with him, and batted her eyelashes.
“You didn’t need to offer the ship specs.”
“Thrive exceeded those specs decades ago. If we bolt here, where else would we go?”
But Three-Eight returned to the screen before they could develop alternatives. “You will proceed to Killingfield. Follow my ship. Park at these coordinates.” He flashed them onto the screen briefly. “Once you arrive, hail me, and we will establish comms with the Dictator. Three-Eight out.”
Sass stared at the blank screen and rewound the conversation to retrieve the coordinates. These included several extra digits, but otherwise seemed to match GPS coordinates from her time. “Gut check.”
“My gut says you reek. Go shower in the hold.”
“I’ve already visited the cabin,” she muttered, fingers already setting the auto-pilot to follow the werewolf.
“Seriously, Clay. Do we make a break for it? They know who we are now. The closest domes are nothing special. That’s why I picked this stretch of woods
. I vote we start at the bottom of the food chain. Work our way up. I’m sure Killingfield is charming. Just like home.” She pictured the old tent cities where the desperate waited to die.
He snuffed appreciation. “You got that right.”
15
All told, deaths due to natural causes were a drop in the bucket compared to 6 billion.
“They’re insisting we land,” Clay complained through the bathroom door.
Sass left him in charge of leisurely complying with parking instructions from Killingfield, while she took an opportunity to de-stink herself. Darren found a concoction of detergent, baking soda, and peroxide that nullified the reek and left Fidget sparkly white.
“Don’t land,” she insisted. “Tell them we’ll explode if we land, and break their dome. I need to soak a couple more minutes.”
“And our stateroom? Smells awful.”
“Give the environmental filters a couple hours. Clay, get back to the bridge.”
He reached in and deposited her comm tab on the sink. She’d tossed it on the bed before dumping her clothes in the bottom of the shower. “Answer your hails.”
“Sorry.” She squeezed suds through her hair again, wondering if it too would bleach from the peroxide. Not that she minded – she looked good in white hair. At her age, she’d certainly earned it.
She heard her lover depart the cabin, and took a deep breath, dropping her arms to hang at her sides. This was it, the moment she’d waited for, the big reunion with Earth. Did she have sufficient hosting gifts? Or did she spearhead an alien invasion? She imagined her hosts were just as curious for the answer as she was.
We are friendly, she reminded herself. Yes, we are capable of defending ourselves, but we aren’t a threat. We are your lost children returned. A sentimental message.
Problem was, the authorities in Upstate of old were not the sentimental kind. Their job was to keep surviving populations under heel, cowed and obedient. And if anyone complained, to eradicate them quickly lest civil disobedience snowball. And Lieutenant Three-Eight seemed aligned with that bad old agenda.
Aside from the wolf fur.
She sluiced off her foam, nose reporting it did its job. The shower smelled fresh and clean. She ducked her head around to check the mirror. Her wet hair looked possibly lighter, corn silk instead of dirty blond, and her eyebrows as well. Her pale skin and Northern European features weren’t mainstream among the faces Fidget displayed. But that was true in the tent cities, and Mahina as well. Skin tones had blended over centuries of mingling. She rucked up the hair experimentally, then combed it flat and added a quick slash of lipstick. Good enough, and her features tended to corroborate her claim of being a throwback.
Yes, I tell them that. About me. But she wouldn’t mention that Clay was also Earth-born. Of the two of them, he had the better chance of understanding their systems, breaking in and learning something. She had only her wits and a smile. She grimaced at her reflection and hurried into the cabin.
Clay laid out what he wanted her to wear, the same outfit she’d selected for her first meeting on Sanctuary, their reunion with the descendants of the first Colony Corps. She nodded resolutely and donned the clothes, Mahina mushroom long-sleeved T-shirt, high quality in a drape-y fabric, over neat jeans and regolith boots.
I will find the people ready to hear my message. And I will smile my way through everyone else who stands in my way. Somehow.
She strode forth to rejoin Clay in the bridge. He caught her hand as she slipped between the seats, and pressed it firmly. She returned his grasp with interest, and dropped a kiss on his forehead before she sat in the pilot’s chair.
“The Assistant Dictator expects your call,” Clay clued her in. “You smell great.”
She chuckled. “Thank you. And do we know what the Assistant Dictator does for a living?”
She studied the view. They hovered 100 meters above another barren field, this one artificially flat and kept treeless by force of mowers. A quick 360 through the external cameras suggested this spot as the namesake killing field. Batteries of guns aimed down from the dome ramparts. Tortured forest stood back the length of an old football field to provide clear lines of fire. From this height she could see over the walls into the glassed roof of a structure shaped more like a race car than a geometric dome, no doubt to offer less resistance to the storms. Massed crops in kelly green obstructed her view of the interior.
If the good folk of Killingfield looked out a window, she didn’t spot it.
“Any final words of wisdom?”
“Ask for a history lesson,” Clay suggested.
“I like it. We’re clueless academics, worthy of an eye-roll.” She shot Clay a grin, and opened a channel. “This is Captain Sassafras Collier, Thrive One, out of Mahina. Calling to speak to the Assistant Director of Killingfield. Dictator, excuse me. Over.”
Her confident smile twitched as this worthy came on screen. He wore bulging blank metallic eyes, on a flat band that wrapped around head and missing ears. His skull was bald above the band. His thin lips looked normal enough until he opened his mouth to speak. More of the same metal decorated, or replaced, his teeth. “I am Riu, Assistant Dictator. State your dome and business.” A helpful ticker band across the bottom of her screen clarified the spelling.
“I don’t have a dome. We’re from the colony world of Mahina. We were settled from Upstate a century ago. We’ve returned to Earth to learn what happened to you. And to share what became of us after the Colony Corps took us away. An academic mission.”
“We have no interest in this agenda.”
Sass wondered if he was capable of facial expressions with his face bound. “Would you be willing to share historical records –”
“I would not.”
“Would perhaps some of your historians and scientists be willing to engage with us? We come in peace. We seek only knowledge. We were one people once.”
His metallic orbs stared blankly. “Accessing,” he added after a few heartbeats, as though annoyed.
“Accessing –?” Sass inquired delicately.
Yes, Riu could scowl. The metal band flexed only slightly, but grim lines around his mouth betrayed his displeasure, including pewter teeth below a curled lip. “Your communications protocols are archaic!”
“Yes, we’d love to upgrade. If you could provide specifications?”
Riu vanished from her screen, to be replaced by a new figure, a young woman with enormous doe eyes. She too sported a metal band running back from her temples, in lieu of ears, but short black hair above lay in a tidy criss-cross thatch. Ivett, PhD, advised the bottom display. Her backdrop featured mauve cloth-textured wall mere inches behind her head, where Riu’s was blank grey, likely computer-generated.
Ivett smiled, with perfect pearly whites. “Welcome to Killingfield! I am so eager to speak with you! This is a momentous day, visitors from another world! How exciting.”
That last came out wrong, on a despairing note, and her shifting eyes seemed to acknowledge it. “Captain Sass Collier, may I invite you and your crew to visit the Academy?”
Sass leaned forward, smiling warmly. “Perhaps myself and my lead scientist? We would adore a tour.” Her insincere words came out wrong as well, a little too thick on the purr. “My botanist’s name is Eli Rasmussen. We are both so eager to see your agriculture! Oh, and if you could possibly clue us in on how to access your communications network. I’m afraid we inconvenienced Dictator Riu.”
Ivett blanched slightly, but restored her smile. “Of course. We wouldn’t want to inconvenience the Dictator.” Those words dripped warning, probably intentional.
“I understand,” Sass assured her. “We’re available as soon as possible. I’m so excited!”
“Yes, this is so exciting! You should come right now!”
The two women blinked at each other.
“And the door?” Sass inquired. “Where do we…?”
“Oh.” Ivett’s gaze grew slightly distracted, then sh
e nodded. “Follow to the east. Our soldiers will greet you. Just two people?”
“Or four?” Sass suggested. Darren would love to get a look inside, and understand what he was seeing. For her part, Sass would feel ever so much better with Kaol at her back.
“Four would be fine. I look forward to greeting you!” Ivett wrinkled her tiny nose into a pixie smile and blanked out.
“It’s a trap,” Clay suggested blandly.
“Of course.” She rose and kissed his lips this time. “Wish me luck.”
“Sure you don’t want to go alone?”
She shrugged. “I won’t make it an order. I’ll warn them we might be taken hostage. And you’re ready to fly away?”
Her lover shook his head and pursed his lips at her. “You know I won’t.”
She caressed his cheek and left it at that.
Sass fancied she still heard Fidget mewling complaint as she strolled down the steep ramp. Clay lowered the ship to drop the ramp, still carefully keeping the containers a scant handspan off the shorn flat field.
“How are your new nanites, Kaol?” Nanites were on her mind. Liam provided her companions with gel tabs of that noxious chemical they encountered on Sanctuary. It killed the nano-scale medical machines which tirelessly cleaned toxins and repaired cells to restore genetic perfection.
Sass didn’t get a pill. Their best guess was that the nanite-killer would kill her. In any event, her nanites had defied every attempt of Mahina Actual to reverse-engineer them. So she wasn’t too worried about Earth getting a sample.
The burly Denali raised hairless brows. “I don’t feel any different.”
She tapped him on the shoulder, reassured. “You were healthy indeed if you don’t feel a change.”
“I’ll start aging in minutes,” Darren groused. “I never want to go through that again.”
Sass bopped his shoulder, too. “It won’t interfere with your brain’s happy juice this time. Just crash the nanites. Which we shall now stop talking about.”
For they neared the wall towering above them, a foreboding grey rich in lichen, dripping slimy dark algae and a wayward climbing ivy. This structure had been here a while. “I’m guess over fifty years old. Looks like centuries.”