Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe pirate queen and colonial governor. Currently emerging into a pain filled state of consciousness and wishing she knew how she got there.
Oh, and she was famished.
The room she was in did not carry with it a sense of health care. But it did carry a sense of being a windowless basement, and somebody had seen fit to store some medical equipment down here, which must have turned out to be useful considering the state of her.
She began to test her body to determine where it hurt, and then she decided to stop doing that and to instead determine where it did not. That list seemed shorter.
And by God she was famished.
“Hello?” she called out weakly. “I’m awake and confused. And hungry!”
Really hungry.
Adrian entered, looking worse for wear but with enough stubble to suggest that she hadn’t just got here.
“You’re awake,” he said, surprised. “I should go get the doc.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” She informed him firmly. Having only just found him again, she wasn’t about to simply let him walk out the door again.
“You want answers?” He asked, although it seemed more rhetorical than a genuine question. “I can’t blame you-“
“No!” she interrupted. “Well, yes. But first of all I need to eat!”
He seemed pleased by that for some reason, but Jen was more focused on the big bag of food tablets he was holding. Those things had never looked as good as they did right then, and she tore into them like a ravenous beast until she was sated.
He sat and watched her the whole time, silent and thoughtful. It was only after she’d finished eating that it began to make her feel self-concious.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, a touch more sharply than she had intended.
“Just glad you’re alive,” he said with a slight smile. “I owe you a lot of apologies.”
“You can start any time you like,” she said dryly. “It’s not as though I have anything else going on right now.”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” he said unhappily.
“Well,” she said, “starting from the beginning: you’re sorry that you abused my trust and strangled me unconscious; you’re sorry for abandoning me, while I was unconscious, on a strange alien world; you’re sorry for running away instead of apologising at that time; you’re sorry for letting us all think you were dead; you’re sorry for coming back to rescue me and still pretending you were dead; you’re sorry for stealing my landing craft; and finally you’re sorry for making me rescue you.”
“That’s a lot of things to be sorry for,” he said unhappily. “But I am sorry. Can I be forgiven?”
She frowned, troubled by the idea. For some reason the concept had never occurred to her as part of what was going to happen when they finally met again. “I don’t know. Maybe. When I came here I wasn’t sure whether I was going to shoot you or not.”
“And now?” he asked.
“Still undecided,” she replied firmly. Even if she did forgive him, she wasn’t going to let herself be taken advantage of again. If Adrian wanted anything to do with her, he’d have to learn to respect her.
“Understood,” he said. “That new boy was Irish as well, then? Amazing that two Irish people can find each other in a galaxy this big.”
He was trying to act nonchalant, but Jen had made an art of studying him and she could see that he was worried. She tried to control the flush in her cheeks over her realisation of what that meant. “Ah, no…” she said. “We’re not like that. He only recently turned up with a message from Earth.”
“From Earth?” Adrian asked in surprise. “How is that possible?”
“It’s a long story,” she explained, “but it basically boils down to stealing them some wormhole beacons so they can get out. But what I want to know is how we ended up… wherever here is.”
“You were hurt by a missile attack,” he said, “we took you to get help from this doctor Margarita knew.”
“Margarita?” Jen asked. That was definitely a human name, but surely Adrian couldn’t have taken up with some other woman if he was clearly still interested in Jen?
“She’s our mission handler,” Adrian explained. “We’ve been trying to bring an end to this war by undermining the people in power who want it to keep going.”
“Then can I assume that all that mess we’ve just gone through was thanks to you as well?” she asked with a sigh.
“It seems that way,” he said, and then he became more awkward. “There is… one more thing I have to apologise for.”
She looked up at him, eyebrow raised and a sense of dread in her gut. It was going to be hard to top what he’d already done to her, but she didn’t doubt that he could do it. She wondered why she kept coming back.
“What is it?” she asked.
“While you were unconscious,” he said deliberately in a way that gave Jen chills, “I turned you into a superhuman.”
She blinked. “Oh.”
+++++
Cimbrean
Hrbrd had been monitoring feed from Cavaras ever since they’d left, and had been getting absolutely nowhere from doing so. The entire event, all of the explosions and chaos, was blamed on a catastrophic attack made by a group of human fighters.
There was no other story from the media, there was no other story at all. Hrbrd himself was missing and presumed dead, suspected of being involved with the human fighters, and the Allebenellin troopers were being hailed as heroes who’d laid down their lives to protect the city.
And people were buying it.
Hrbrd was angry, he was frustrated, and he was overcome by a sense of complete futility. The Heirarchy was an invented conspiracy that held that a group of individuals had their hands in every krltis. It was they that ran the Directorate, pulling the strings of the Directors themselves, as well as the corporations that influenced them. They were the gods who lived in the shadows, holding all of the power and with none of the normal limitations. How did you even begin to try and fight something that most people didn’t believe existed?
It wasn’t as if he had anything left to him. They’d taken all he had, his money and his property, and now his good name. They were systematically erasing him and all of his arguments from the public discourse, and they could not be doing a better job of it.
At least he had the luxury of being able to live in a private palace, and all he had to do was assist in the administration of its inhabitants. Hrbrd had never thought he’d need to turn to piracy for survival, but it hadn’t been the sort of concept that would ever have occurred.
Darragh chose that moment to come and bother him again. Really there was nothing wrong with the human, other than the fact that he seemed a little out of place in all this. But so did Hrbrd, so he wasn’t sure why he didn’t like the human’s company; with Adrian he had at least understood why, since that human had been abrasive and reckless.
Maybe Hrbrd just didn’t like humans.
“Can I help you, Darragh?” he asked. “If you’re here to check whether I’ve seen anything about Jennifer or Adrian, I’m afraid you’re in for disappointment.”
The human sighed in said disappointment. This was becoming a routine, and Hrbrd didn’t see why he persisted. There wasn’t going to be any news about those other two coming out of government controlled media. Especially not now that news had been leaked that the human fighters had been behind all of the recent attacks.
Hrbrd’s work had been undone, along with everything else he had achieved, and if those two humans were still alive and free, there was every chance that it wouldn’t be for very long. The setback to Hrbrd’s plans had been complete, and there was little to no chance he’d ever be in a position to make changes again.
Not within the Directorate in any case. Upon learning something of Earth’s intentions, however, he began to see the opportunity for alternative advancement opportunities.
“Nothing about Earth, either?” Darragh asked.
“Nothing about Earth, Darragh,” Hrbrd confirmed. “I will let you know when something turns up.”
Darragh nodded, but this was not the first time he’d accepted the suggestion and it wouldn’t be the last. The truth was, since Chir, Zripob and Trycrur had taken over leadership responsibilities, Darragh hadn’t had all that much to do, and they didn’t seem to have the time to fix that. Someone was going to have to, sooner or later, but Hrbrd was adamant that it would not be him. What would he teach the boy, anyway? How to screw up on a truly colossal scale?
“Go find something else to do, Darragh,” he told the aimless boy, and sent him on his way. Then he turned his attention back to the live feeds that were rolling in. There was still nothing.
+++++
Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
“How is she?” Margarita asked as Adrian returned from the basement that constituted a medical room that was underground in both a literal and metaphorical nature.
“Awake,” he said wearily, although he sounded far from unhappy. “I did a lot of apologising, and then I dropped some big news on her. She’s going to need a while to process it.”
Margarita didn’t pry; years of running shady operations had taught her that a strong sense of curiosity was not a desirable trait, and as far as she was concerned it was none of her business unless Adrian or Jennifer made it that way.
“How are we coming with finding a ride out of here?” Adrian asked as he collapsed onto the old, comfortable lounge. He’d hardly slept at all in the five days they’d spent here, and it was only surprising that he wasn’t completely dead on his feet. There was a considerable lack of energy about him, however, and that had at least emptied his speech of its various profanities.
“We’re not,” she replied flatly. “The Directorate have issued an order to seal off Cavaras until further notice. Without quantum entanglement communicators, I don’t have a way to contact anyone off-world to help, and we don’t have anyone on-world who’d be willing.”
“So we just need a quantum entanglement communicator?” Adrian asked, although it was fairly obvious he had no idea what one was. Margarita herself had only the vaguest of notions regarding how such things worked, so she wasn’t about to go explaining it even if he asked.
“Too expensive to buy,” she said, “too difficult to steal. It would be easier to simply steal a ship.”
“So first point of order: steal a ship?” he asked. “We’ve stolen bigger things before.”
“But not under this level of scrutiny, I would imagine,” she replied. “They are not messing around with this, they are absolutely hunting us down and unless they find us or believe us gone, they’re not giving up any time soon.”
That plainly bothered him. Margarita had noted from as soon as she’d met this man that he was somehow simultaneously terrible at hiding his emotions and actually expressing them properly.
“So we just sit and wait?” he asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she replied. “Askit and Gdugnir are out there now, looking for alternative means of getting off-world.”
“My ears are burning!” Askit said, entering just in time to hear himself being talked about. “Or whatever it is you humans say.”
“Do you even have ears?” Adrian asked.
“Ah, if only I didn’t,” Askit lamented, “so that I wouldn’t have to hear stupid questions like that! I might not have those ridiculously floppy bits of skin that you take such pride in, but I have one thing that you do not!”
“And what would that be?” Margarita asked, unable to avoid a slightly amused smile at the exchange. The Corti computer technician was one of the few who had taken to revelling in his emotions, although he still detached whenever he was feeling something negative. Enjoying your emotions was generally looked down upon by other Corti, who saw it along the same lines as drug abuse, but the thing about Askit was that he didn’t seem to give two shits what other Corti thought.
And right now Askit smiled as only a Corti could, albeit this was presumably a smile of triumph. “I’ve got a spaceship!”
+++++
“So when you said you have a spaceship,” Adrian said after the Corti computer tech explained himself, “what you actually meant to say was that you don’t have a spaceship?”
“Technically correct,” Askit admitted. “What I do have is everything we need to get one. So that’s nearly as good.”
“So long as your plan doesn’t involve me having to run in and kill everyone in our way,” Adrian said. “We usually reserve that for Plan B.”
“Well… we’ll shift that to Plan B, then,” Askit replied. “First of all, though, we’re going to have to infiltrate the orbital service vessels.”
“You’re intending that we go up to the orbital station?” Margarita asked. “That has a very heavy military presence.”
“It’s also the original station from when Cavaras was first colonised,” Askit replied. “Gdugnir was doing some talking to the guys who just came back down from it, seems the wormhole drive is still kept in a fully functional state.”
“You want to steal a whole fucking space station?” Adrian asked, raising his eyebrow doubtfully. “That is… a very adventurous proposal.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Askit replied. “I was thinking of you when I came up with the idea.”
“When can we do this?” Margarita asked. “Jennifer is still recovering.”
“There’s not really a limitation there,” Askit continued. “There are orbital service runs every few days.”
“Then we can pick our time,” Adrian said. “Can you start getting things organised? It might be easier if we can somehow get employed to do the service run.”
Askit’s eyes widened in surprise and amusement. “I hadn’t even considered the possibility of getting paid to do the service run. Adrian, you’ve delighted me with your brilliant addition to my already masterful plan!”
Margarita held up a hand to get attention from the overly enthusiastic pair. “Wait a moment,” she said, “that still puts us on a hostile Corti space station.”
“Yes, but I expect they’ll have other things on their minds when we drop next to a Celzi beacon,” Askit replied. “A delightful rendezvous, no doubt. The perfect distraction for us to get out of there on the same orbital service vessel.”
“Let me get this straight,” Margarita said. “You’re intending to use a two thousand year old Corti space station to get to a Celzi planet big enough to get its own beacon, and escape while they kill each other?”
“Absolutely,” Askit said, extremely pleased with himself.
“And you don’t think that you’re forgetting something important?” Margarita asked. “Such as needing to have the beacon codes for the destination?”
“And that, my dear diminutive human,” Askit said with indescribable glee, “is what I stole from the Directorate approximately (two hours) ago.”