Date Point: 3Y 8M 1D AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Everybody had been arrested.
But even with that taken into account, the day had much improved since they’d been busy crashing into a planet. It had been clear from the start that nobody was entirely certain what to do with a handful of aliens, a pair of Russian special forces guys – one of whom was covered in vomit and the other being catatonic – and an Australian who flatly refused to give his name, but it had eventuated that they had decided to take them back to the colony and ask some very pressing questions.
Captain Owen Powell busied himself at his desk, a flat-pack assembly that was built for sturdiness and easy transport over style, and largely ignored Adrian in a way that would make regular men uncomfortable. He had the bearing of a man who’d spent a life in the military, and who was currently tasked with dealing with a whole pile of shit he didn’t have any plans for. There were five other soldiers armed with compact assault rifles in the office with them, each of them ready for some sudden outburst of violence.
Powell looked up as Adrian began to felt bored, staring at him with an intense level of scrutiny normally reserved for really unpleasant, really complicated things. Adrian figured that kind of description probably fit him incredibly well at this point, and he sniggered slightly at not being the one dealing with all the bullshit for once.
“It’s not fookin’ funny!” Powell snapped, a fierce glare locking with Adrian’s eyes. “Do you have any idea what kind of problems you’ve caused just by being here? If you are who I think you are, you’re doin’ a shite job of being dead!”
Adrian stopped laughing, returning the Captain’s hard look. “And if I am who you think I am, you should have a long fucking think before making it known. Where’s Jennifer Delaney?”
“You don’t get to ask the questions,” Powell told him. “You answer them.”
Adrian decided he didn’t much like this man; Powell reminded him of so many other officers with a fifty foot pole jammed straight up their arses, so fucking difficult when they were threatened. Adrian had played by those rules once, but the man who’d worked so hard to obey his orders was as dead as Powell had supposed. He raised a questioning eyebrow. “You bastards just shot down my ship-“
“Captain Kaminski tells me it was a pirate vessel, and that you only boarded it once he’d taken control of it,” Powell interrupted. “In fact, he’s told me a lot of interesting things about you.”
Adrian shrugged, preferring to ignore what level of knowledge was being implied. “So I’m the one who stole it most recently. I’m still the guy who crash landed a starship on a planet and walked away, and that’s not even close to the most fucking terrifying thing I’ve done this week.”
“Not fookin’ impressed, mate.”
Adrian leant forward and raised his voice, ignoring the five guns that all snapped to aim directly at him, and the way Powell’s hand dropped his holstered side-arm. “I’ve just been on a merry jaunt through fucking hell and all I want is the answer to One. Goddamned. Question!“
There was a long and quiet moment of dreadful tension, then Adrian took a controlled breath and leaned back. “Please?”
Powell relented, letting go of his own gun. His soldiers likewise relaxed. “Quid pro quo, then. You answer my questions and I’ll answer what I can of yours. Something tells me neither of us is going to like the answers.”
“No fucking kidding?” Adrian asked. “Well, I haven’t liked much for as long as I can remember, so why the fuck should I start now? Where’s Jennifer Delaney?”
“First your name,” Powell persisted. “You are Adrian-“
Adrian interrupted, jerking a thumb towards the soldiers. “You better trust these fuckers here implicitly if you’re going to finish that sentence. Or maybe we can just assume that whatever you were going to say is right?”
Powell stared at him for a moment. “….Saunders.” he finished, deliberately. “As for Miss Delaney, you just missed her. We shipped her out when we detected your mob comin’ in.”
Adrian stared at Powell for a moment, completely dumbfounded by the answer; he had been so close, so very close… and yet again he had lost her. Like a levy breaking, he burst out into broken laughter, convulsing with guffaws that mingled with sobs. “Of course… of course she did! Gone home I bet? No reason to wait for a dead man!”
Powell muttered something along the lines of “Jesus fookin’ Christ…” and he wasn’t the only one. They weren’t looking at him with simple anger or determination anymore; now it was mixed with a sort of horrified fascination.
But it wasn’t all bad; something in him that had been pushing on to complete the mission had realised it succeeded, and now it let go. Jen was safe, she was going home, and the Russians and the crew were getting medical treatment. This wasn’t the kind of colony where Adrian thought he could get help with the Cruezzir, but he wasn’t completely out of luck. The situation had improved, even if he’d never see Jen again.
He took a deep, steadying breath. Maybe that could be good enough, a weight of responsibility had certainly lifted from him.
“Kaminski wasn’t fookin’ kidding,” Powell assessed, staring as Adrian slowly regained control of himself. “Is the rest true? The infra-red? The… muscles?”
Adrian nodded as he ran a rough hand through his beard and across his head. “Yep,” he said, voice still trembling, “but I wouldn’t fucking recommend it. How are the Russians doing? Quid pro quo, remember?”
“Kaminski is recovered from his illness,” Powell told him. “We have no idea what’s wrong with Markovic outside of ‘Pixie Dust’. Something to do with the alien fire suppressant?”
“Apparently it sends you totally fucking mental before you go catatonic,” Adrian confirmed. “At least that’s what I’ve gathered from it. I’d stay away from that shit if I were you.”
“You’re a wanted man on Earth, you know,” Powell told him, almost conversationally. “If you are who I think you are, we’re supposed to imprison you and keep you until they can come pick you up.”
Adrian sensed a ‘but’ coming on, and he was not disappointed, a place like this didn’t look like it had much ability to imprison anything.
“But,” Powell continued, “I can smell the kind of shit you’re in, and I’m not going to put this colony and my mission at risk over a dropout who’s legally fookin’ dead. D’you know how long that paperwork takes? I don’t have the fookin’ time nor the inclination, so long as you promise to get the fook out of my hair and never come back. Spread the word there’s nowt but ruins on Cimbrean and I might even be persuaded to see if there’s owt useful you can be doin’ instead of stealin’ pirate ships and chasing after a girl who’s got her shit together way better than you do.”
They stared at each other for a few moments, then Adrian unclenched his fists, sighed and nodded. “Looks like you’ve still got some broken down old ships. I can probably put a working one together given a bit of time, a week… two at most, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Good,” said Powell. “We’ll give you food, clothes and shelter… and a fookin’ shave if you want it, but you need to get out of here before you become a problem. And for the moment, Captain, you are going to give me a full debriefing.”
Adrian relented, and upon the introduction of a recording device he launched, fully willing, into the story that started with his abduction from the Australian bush and most recently arrived at crashing a pirate ship into a planet.
Powell was less than ready to believe the story as soon as Adrian reached the first of the crazier parts of his tale.
“The fookin’ dinosaurs built a spaceship,” Powell said, and there was no mistaking the disbelief the words carried. Clearly Jen had not been entirely forthcoming while she was in the man’s presence.
“Yep,” Adrian replied firmly, well aware of how crazy it all sounded – and he was fairly sure that crazy was his trademark by this point – but unwilling to let Powell go for a second without seeing the conviction of the truth.
The Captain remained unconvinced. “I asked for a fookin’ briefing, not a flight of fancy.”
“Space dragons,” Adrian began, wearily listing the crazy bullshit he could think of off the top of his head. “Fucking… X-Files grey aliens, blue giraffes, raccoon people, and yep… the dinosaurs built a fucking spaceship! Not my fault the universe is totally fucking mental.”
He sniffed, remembering the size and power of the Zhadersil and just how fucking awesome it had felt sitting in that command chair. “Fucking good spaceship, too.”
After that he was allowed to continue his monologue, speaking at length about the messed up shit he’d had to deal with: Dinosaur terminators on extension leads; jumping into a stasis chamber to escape a burst of deadly radiation; his issues with having a body covered entirely with blue fur; the explosive incidents on Cavaras; the various experiences of riding missiles and cybered up space dragons, and just how much he fucking hated black holes and alien fire suppressant.
Powell finally interrupted him with a question about the Hierarchy. “Okay,” he demanded, that’s the third fookin’ time you’ve mentioned this ‘Hierarchy’. Who in the hell are they meant to be?”
Adrian cocked his head a little to the side, feeling a little embarrassed saying it, but knowing it was the closest allegory that was going to get the point across. “Long and short of it? They’re the Space Illuminati.”
“For * fook’s* sake!” Powell shouted, leaping to his feat and spinning away towards the corner with his head in hand. His next words were more muted. “I have no idea why I don’t just assume you’re taking the piss.”
Adrian could do little but shrug helplessly. “I know a few things… they’re beyond cutting-edge. They’ve got a fucking army. And they love robots. Oh, and they can copy their brains away.”
“ Greaaaat.” Powell muttered, turning back to face Adrian as he ever so slightly shook his head in dismay. “Bloody ‘ell, Why in God’s name do I believe you, Saunders?”
Adrian didn’t have any kind of fucking idea there, and he expressed it with a shrug that conveyed as much. “Don’t fucking ask me,” he said. “I hardly believe all this shit. But you do have a crashed Hierarchy ship sitting offshore.”
“Not like I can do owt with it.” Powell grumbled as he sat down again, revealing that perhaps these men weren’t anywhere near ready for the galaxy sized serving of bullshit they’d just dropped themselves into.
“You can’t,” Adrian remarked with a shrug.
Powell, who’d been distracted by his own thoughts, turned his attention back to Adrian. “Can’t… what now?”
“You can’t do anything with it. I probably can.” Adrian repeated. At least he felt confident that he could, he had plenty of experience at breaking things in an increasingly precise manner, so how much harder could putting them back together possibly be?
Powell returned a hard stare. “My lads and the SEALs could dive that wreck, no problem, but we wouldn’t know the warp engine from the shitter. You sayin’ you would?”
“I rebuilt a dinosaur spaceship and killed a fleet of fucking arseholes with it.” Adrian said, recalling what now seemed like the ‘good old days’ when life had contained actual victories. “I’m not saying it’s recoverable but if it is…”
“…If it is, you might actually turn out to not be a complete fookin’ liability after all.” Powell acknowledged, scratching at his facial hair absently.
Whether Adrian was a liability here or not didn’t particularly concern him, but he knew the sound of options opening up and the touch of a grin returned to his lips. “I was going to take some hard fucking revenge on these fuckers anyway,” he revealed, “so… you know, it’s no problem.”
“…Fine,” Powell relented. “You get to dive that wreck. You find any intel we can use and turn it over, and I might even drop the whole “never come back” thing. Now, I’m still kickin’ you off this planet because I need trouble like you a long way from my mission, but if you can prove you’re not a complete cock-up and turn up owt that’s useful – and rip out and destroy anything that might lead this Hierarchy here… Well, there’s the deal.”
“Honestly I doubt it even has what I want.” Adrian confessed, recalling Hrbrd’s story about the sheer quantity of firepower that had been levelled at the Hierarchy vessel. “But I’ll be sure to look. What about after I’ve left? You got a phone number?”
“Next best thing.” Powell said. “You know Star Trek?”
Adrian did, although not through his own interest; his step father had forced his own interests upon him and avoiding ‘family time’ had yielded unpleasant consequences. “Yeah. My old man had an obsession.”
“Good,” Powell approved, “then you should remember this. There’s an… agent we use. He handles courier work, messages and odd jobs for us. He’s got an interstellar datanet dropbox, if you have a message for us, send it there and he’ll pass it on. The address is November-Charlie-Charlie one-seven-zero-one. Got that?”
Fucking USS Enterprise. Of course it was, but it would make remembering the damned thing a doddle. “Got it.”
“You know how to stay secure online?”
In truth Adrian had no fucking idea, on how to stay secure or how to use or even connect to the datanet, but that was not his ‘thing’. No, that sort of thing was where Askit came into the picture and stole the whole damned show. “I have a guy who can crack cyber security like an egg.”
“You trust him?” Powell pressed.
That was a difficult question, after all how far could you really trust a narcissistic hedonist of a Corti with a penchant for emptying bank accounts? “We’ve seen a lot of shit together, so you know how it is,” Adrian replied, guessing that would have to do. “I know he’s not Hierarchy.”
It didn’t seem like it would do for Powell, and the man showed that he must have been paying attention during Adrian’s lengthy tale. “You don’t mean this ‘Askit’ bloke, do you? I thought you said he was Corti?”
“He is,” Adrian acknowledged, seeing no point in deception on this of all topics. “And I’ve almost never wanted to kill him.”
That fact alone made Askit the best of all Corti Adrian had ever met; even the regal Hrbrd had been eminently more punchable than the wise-cracking hacker.
“…Whatever.” Powell sighed. “I guess trustin’ you with this means trusting whoever you trust in turn. Just don’t send in the clear, and use a codename. “Kirk”, “Enterprise” and “Federation” are already taken. Got that?”
Codenames was it? Well, he sure as fuck wasn’t going with the Star Trek theme. He needed something more… cynical, and for once his step father’s obsession with all things sci-fi. He couldn’t think of anything but a goddamned puppet being less capable of making his own life choices, so that was another choice that made itself. “Reckon I might go with Captain Scarlet. Looks like I’m breaking the theme.”
Powell didn’t seem to give two shades of a shit. “If playing the fookin’ special snowflake is what floats your cock, sure. Whatever. Got anything more to add before I let you bugger off and start building your pet starship?”
“Just one thing,” Adrian said, shifting forward towards the edge of his seat. “I’m about to start waging my own personal fucking war on an enemy I can’t even imagine. If you’ve got a wish list for souvenirs just let me know.”
“Anything that proves they exist and aren’t just your imagination.” Powell said, extending his fingers to count off the things he could think of. “Bleeding-edge technology. Alien hard drives, journals, logbooks, computers, that kind of thing. A working cloaking device, or at least one that’s not too badly broken. Maps, encryption keys… intel, basically.”
Half of that shit didn’t make any sense, not when they were surrounded by scraps of technology in the broken down ships the pirates had left behind. “You need a cloaking device?” he asked. “You’ve got a half dozen wrecked Hunter ships lying all over the place.”
“Bloody lovely.” Powell agreed. “Now if you can point out which bit of the fookin’ things is the cloaking device, I might consider it a tick in the ‘not a complete waste of space’ column.”
These guys were in over their fucking heads, coming to a fucking alien planet by choice without anybody who knew anything about what they were fucking doing, and Adrian scowled at the tone of dismissal Powell used on him. “Your confidence is fucking overwhelming. I’ll put it on the list of shit I have to do.”
“Saunders,” Powell warned, looking him in the eye, “as far as I’m concerned, the one thing that makes you worth the oxygen you’re breathing is that you’re the only bastard on this planet right now who knows a spaceship’s arse from its elbow. Remember that, aye?”
There wasn’t a chance he’d forget it; Adrian grinned. “I’ll remember.”
“Right,” Powell said, nodding up towards the door in dismissal. “Fook off.”
Adrian did so gladly.
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 3D AV
Cimbrean was beautiful, regardless of the quantity of debris that now littered its fields and sea, or the battlefield that blighted the area where the colony grew. It was enough that Adrian could feel its warm sun and breathe its clean air, and that he had been able to get good food, decent sleep, some goddamned peace and quiet for the first time since Cavaras – fortunately without the blue hair – and of course a shave.
A glorious, wonderful shave.
He’d had them take it all off, wild beard and wild hair tumbled away before the might of the electric razors, and it felt spectacular. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to feel clean, and that in itself seemed to restore some measure of sanity to a life that had been spinning wildly out of control.
“You’ve got no fucking idea how good this feels,” he told the two stoic, largely humourless soldiers who’d been assigned to him. They didn’t say much, looking to be the sort of men who let violence do the talking, but they were apparently surnamed Richard and Michael. Powell may have released him into the colony, but he hadn’t done it with the intention of letting him do as he pleased, and the guards were to remind him of the limits to his interaction with the colonists.
Adrian had found it more convenient – and considerably humorous – to mentally label the men as Cliff and Gorge respectively, bringing new character to men who looked like at least one of their parents had been a natural landmark. Doing that was probably a little mad, but when compared to other things he’d done lately it seemed positively normal.
The colony itself was built atop the ruins of the palace and the surrounding area, an area which had been and remained entirely flattened by orbital bombardment. There’d been little regrowth since his last visit, unless you counted the buildings that were springing up, but the broken down starships had been left in place and went largely untouched. Most were destroyed beyond use, but one Hunter vessel had merely been badly damaged with a large hole in its side and FTL and reactor shot to hell in a literal sense. It had nonetheless show, with just a cursory examination, functional kinetics, cloaking, communications and weapons systems, and so it was the ship that he chose as his own.
Four days of hard work had been required just getting the hull sealed up and fully airtight, and another two had been spent mending the ruined subsystems of the damaged areas. Another three had seen him bringing in functional parts from more damaged vessels to serve as redundancy and additional infrastructure. That thought of thing might have been considered paranoid in circles that didn’t nearly end up a gooey-centred snack for a hungry singularity, but there was no fucking way he was going to go through that kind of bullshit again.
Nearly every moment had been filled with activity, or at least with considered thought regarding his activities, and he had the technical work was soothing in its own way. It had been easy to get lost in the work, to simply be the engineer, the technician, the man with a love for pulling things apart and trying to put them back together, and when he was lost in that he wouldn’t go thinking about Jen.
Jesus Christ, he was glad she was safe, but he missed her like fucking crazy; missed her to the point that she filled his day-dreams with her softness and her laugh and her beautiful face. She’d apparently been fine after six months without him fucking up her life, but she’d had the idea that he was dead, and soon she’d be back on Earth, back to her family with lots of hugs and hot dinners from here until Sunday, whenever that was.
But that was what was best for her, and he’d decided to quit being a selfish prick for a change and focus on what was to come; Folctha – a colony name that proved Jen couldn’t do anything normally – had to remain a secret, Zripob needed an arse-kicking, and the Hierarchy needed the kind of fucking lesson you only get once.
Some of those would be easier than others.
He was taking breakfast on the ninth day when Powell met with him again. Adrian was eating inside of his ship, turning a work bench into a dining table and enjoying his own company since the two human landmarks weren’t worth much. Powell hadn’t allowed him to mingle with the colonists, not that Adrian could blame him for that, and this had seemed preferable to simply taking his meal a set distance away from everybody else.
Powell took one look around the inside of the ship and glared at Adrian. “Day nine, and this thing is a complete fookin’ mess!”
Adrian swallowed his food, some sort of delicious branflakes, but didn’t bother to rise as might be polite or respectful; as far as he was concerned this was his fucking home, and he’d behave with whatever manners he pleased. “It’s a whole shitload better than it was when I started,” he said, although it didn’t look it from the unused junk that was laying everywhere. “And you’ll remember I said a week or two. I haven’t broken any promises yet.”
“I’m told you’re still relyin’ on our generators to power this piece of shite,” Powell informed him, clearly unhappy at the masses of cables, conduits, panels and tools that littered the everything. “Will this fookin’ thing even get into space?”
“Not with generators,” Adrian admitted, not deigning to mention that the FTL drive remained non-existent. He much preferred biting into a piece of fruit and chomping away happily, amazed at how much better real food was to those fucking nutrition balls, no matter how much sauce you might apply. “Don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind.”
Powell’s glare didn’t get any softer, if anything it grew more pointed. “You fookin’ well better, mate, because I’ve got people asking who the arsehole working on the ship is. It’s not lost on everybody that you’ve turned up alongside a bunch of prisoners, and you’re the only one walking around happy as can be. They’re wondering why that is!”
Adrian focused on finished the piece of the fruit with relish before he continued. “Well,” he said, “I’m planning on testing the kinetics tomorrow, and if all goes to plan I’m headed out to sea the day after. These boys of yours like water?”
“They go where you go, so long as it’s on this planet,” Powell reminded him, repeating what he’d been told when the two gentlemen had first joined him. “That includes out to sea.”
“They’ll need some wet gear,” Adrian informed them all at once, greatly amused at the chance to unnerve the two meaty slabs of men. They might be Special Boat Service, but Adrian would bet them London to a brick that they’d never gone diving in an alien starship before. “You might be able to get by just using some vacuum suits. The Russians had some they might use.”
“I’ll see it’s done,” Powell replied curtly. “That all?”
Adrian was about to say it was when he suddenly remembered the box of components and haphazard notes he’d set aside for the next time he met with the Captain. He slid it out of storage and across the floor to Powell. “I got you a present,” Adrian said. “Now you can be like Kevin Bacon.”
Powell peered at the box with the same lack of comprehension Adrian was beginning to associate with everyone who dealt with him. “What the fook has Kevin Bacon got to do with fookin’ anything?”
Adrian sighed, wondering if anyone but him remembered that particular movie. “Hollow man,” he said. “That’s the cloaking system I promised you.”
+++++
New Askitoria, the Outer Cluster
Zripob knew something was wrong the moment he approached the asteroid base. There was no familiar hail from the the base, nor was there any response to his own. When he docked he could see that the place had been wholesale abandoned for no obvious reason.
He disembarked with some trepidation, anti-tank gun in hand; just because there was no sign of violence didn’t mean there hadn’t been any. He made his way with caution to the palace, where he was sure Chir would have made his ‘great last stand’ if such a thing had indeed been made.
The doors opened before him, and the way was granted into the audience chamber where he had first met King Carl. The throne had been left there empty, too heavy to lift but full of meaning; the people of the base had vowed never to call a man king again.
But it wasn’t empty today. Today there sat an unimpressive Corti with an equally unimpressed expression. “You are not Adrian Saunders.”
Zripob let slip a croak of anger. “What has happened here!? Where is Chir!?”
“Gone,” the Corti said simply. “Everybody is gone, as they should have been. I suppose that you might be useful, though.”
“Who are you?” Zripob demanded, although he already knew the little Corti must be some friend or enemy of Adrian Saunders. “Wait… I remember you from Cavaras!”
“It’s nice to be remembered,” the Corti replied as Zripob struggled to remember the name.
Askoo? No… Askin? Askit!
“Askit,” Zripob said flatly. “Your name is Askit. You worked with Adrian.”
“Work,” Askit corrected, smiling slightly. “Although I’d like to know what you’ve done with him.”
“He’s probably still on Cimbrean,” Zripob guessed, honestly not caring where the human was so long as he wasn’t messing up Zripob’s life. That the person he was now in conversation with was a close acquaintance of Adrian Saunders and was now the sole inhabitant of the base that had recently house his entire pirating operation was just more evidence that the human’s influence was spreading. “He took my ship.”
“Seems unlikely, Zripob,” Askit noted.
Zripob raised his gun and pointed it at the Corti. “It doesn’t really matter what you think.”
“Are you familiar with the concept of the dead man’s switch?” Askit asked him, pointedly staring at the anti-tank gun without flinching. “The concept was introduced to me by Adrian. Basically you set it up so that if you die, the people who killed you also die. I have a dead man’s switch, Zripob.”
“You are bluffing,” Zripob guessed, although he had no way to be sure. “You’re carrying no weapons!”
“Upon my death, this base will expel all atmosphere and negate all gravity,” Askit explained in detail, leaning forward with the infuriating confidence of somebody who’d won before the game had even begun. “Weapons systems will target all starships currently in dock. Even with a vacuum suit you’d get to float around and suffocate slowly.”
Now Zripob lowered his gun. He didn’t have any doubt that the Corti was deadly serious, because if he was already dead then he had absolutely nothing to lose from using the tactic. “Then I shall go and-“
Askit cut him off, leaning forward and speaking with a cold, confident voice. “You won’t be going anywhere, Six-Skulls Zripob. Not while I still have use for you. Right now you belong to me.”
“I am not your slave!” Zripob croaked angrily. That was something he would never become again, regardless of the personal cost.
“Maybe not,” Askit conceded, “but you’re not going anywhere either. I have just sent word to Grznk’s masters that Hrbrd is here and raising an army against the Hierarchy.”
Zripob stared at him, rendered mute for a few moments by the thought of what would be coming. He swallowed his fear and wet the mouth that had run dry. “You’re just as crazy as him…”
“Perhaps, I am,” Askit admitted with a weak smile. “But nonetheless, allow me to welcome you, Zripob. Welcome to the war.”
+++++
Record 573-Black-02 +Recovered from C11-Orange-712-Yellow-6+
“Maikie,” the father said as the camera turned on to reveal the hair covered female who was his wife. She nursed Ahred in her lap, holding his hand and singing softly to him. From the state of him he was either dead, or soon would be. “Maikie… I found his present.”
Everywhere around them there was ruin and flame, and the distance held wailing screams of terror and pain. Here it was relatively silent, but there was nothing calm about it.
Maikie choked out a sobbing laugh, continuing to look down at Ahred’s limp form. “What’s he going to do with that, Cavven?”
There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Cavven replied flatly. “I just found it.”
End Record
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 5D AV
Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Adrian’s plans went smoothly for the first time in a long time, probably due in large part to the lack of anybody actively trying to kill him, and he was hovering on generator power by the next day. The day afterwards he, Cliff and Gorge took a special trip out to the bay where two alien ships polluted the water.
The Hodgepodge had sunk further, now about ninety-percent immersed in water and therefore completely submerged in the parts they needed to get to. Adrian looked over to the men and saw them staring at the size of the wreckage, their faces impassive but their eyes filled with wonder.
Adrian pat the inside of the ship as they made their final approach to the most accessible area. “Alright, girl… now we’re going to see some real cool shit.”
It only took a slight change for the kinetics to stop keeping them above the water and drive them down into it, and despite the initial alarm the two soldiers had shown – which Adrian had quietly laughed at – they were soon relaxing and looking at the rest of the wreckage through the blueish marine light.
“But this is a spaceship,” Gorge remarked. “Not a fuckin’ submarine.”
“Spot probably can’t go deep as a sub,” Adrian told them, “but she can probably get us where we need to go.”
Gorge looked at him with undisguised concern. “Probably?”
“‘ang on a moment,” said Cliff, “did you just call this fookin’ thing ‘Spot‘?”
Adrian shrugged, returning to the task of guiding the vessel where needed to go. “Just looks sort of like a fucking huge dog head… in a certain light.”
That light was infrared, so this was his little joke; worth it even if everyone kept thinking he was mad, and they could keep thinking like that for all he cared, because he knew the time on this planet was doing him good. Just like he knew he was going to stretch it out as close to the full two weeks as he could manage.
“Opening the airlock outer door,” he said, so as to give plenty of warning to the two gun-toting meat-heads, and was glad to see the results. “Kinetic bubble holding.”
He turned to the two soldiers now, facing them with a too-wide grin. “I’d put my fucking helmet on now if I were you. I’m about to open the airlock inner door, and I’m not what you might call entirely confident we won’t all drown.”
They hesitated, and then did as he said. He waited for them to finish and continued with the rest of the process. The inner door opened and the bubble held.
“Gentlemen,” he said, rising from his seat and striding over to the barrier separating them from the ocean. He swept a finger through the wall of water and held it up wet. “I give you the sea!”
The two soldiers shared a glance, and it was Cliff who first spoke. “You’re fookin’ mad if you reckon we’re going out there in these!”
Gorge made his contribution to their objection next. “This is a fuckin’ space suit, mate. See a lot of fuckin’ space out dere? How d’you think we’re supposed to swim in dese?”
Adrian cocked his head and waggled his eyebrows. “Oh I wasn’t going to swim.”
They looked confused until he unpacked the three stripped down kinetic lifters he’d taken apart; then they just looked unimpressed.
That changed when he activated his, letting it pull his body forward, and jumped out the airlock. He drifted away into the water under the power of the alien device, laughing to himself at the sound of them swearing over the radio.
They rejoined him at the first opening to the Hodgepodge, the pair giving him a few of their strongest blows as they arrived. Even under the water they managed to knock the wind from him, but while there was pain it seemed paltry compared to what he’d recently endured.
“Next time you do somethin’ like that it’s a knife,” Gorge warned angrily. “What’s so fuckin’ useful down ‘ere that you needed to come back?”
“Starship reactor,” Adrian replied, rubbing his side tenderly. “It was still live after we landed.”
Cliff scowled. “Then why are all the fookin’ lights out?”
“I blew them up last time I was here,” Adrian admitted with a casual shrug.
The two soldiers stared at him, and Cliff shook his head with disgust. “You’re just about the worst fookin’ thing a man could put on a spaceship…”
Adrian shrugged again and set off towards the engineering room. It was much as he remembered it, and he barked out a happy laugh as he saw that the reactor lights were still lit, creating little spheres of red and blue around the tiny glowing dots.
“How’re we supposed to move this fookin’ thing!?” Cliff demanded as he realised what Adrian was looking at. “It’s the size of a fookin’ lorry!”
Adrian shut the reactor down, tapping his fingers on the controls as the lights slowly died. “We don’t need the containment unit… I’ve already got like five of the fucking things.”
He ejected the first quantum stack and held it out in front of them. It was about a two foot long cylinder of a lightweight white material, and about five inches in diameter; in its inactive state it still generated enough power to raise an outpouring of bubbles, the separation of oxygen and hydrogen from the surrounding water.
He hefted passed it over to Gorge and held it out until the man reluctantly took it. “Hang onto that for me, mate. I’ve got another four to pull out.”
“How come you need all these fookin’ things when your ship is a bloody tiny thing compared to this?” Cliff asked, taking his in hand.
Adrian extracted the third, passing it over. “Because unlike the aliens, I believe in having some fucking redundancy. Four redundancies in this case.”
“Wait, you only need one of these?” Cliff asked, looking more closely at the column of quantum technology. “Won’t this be putting too much power through everything?”
Impressive that the thuggish soldier knew that much, but it served as a good reminder not to underestimate these men. “Yeah, but I already took care of that. Five times the power, five times the glory.”
He drew the last of the stacks out, setting them aside while he started on opening the FTL enclosure. It was still sealed up, but this time he had a knife and no inclination to keep it all working. He had it out and slipped into a pocket within half a minute, picked up his quantum stacks and took hold of the kinetic thruster.
“Now,” he said, flashing a grin at the two grizzled men. “Let’s get back. We’ve still got two stops to go.”
“Where else are we fookin’ going?” Cliff asked in complaint. “We’re not supposed to be your fookin’ packmules, you know?”
“Art of war, mate,” Adrian told him. “It’s time for me to get to know my enemy. We’re going over to the Hierarchy ship.”
+++++
The addition of five quantum stacks gave Spot the kind of spark she needed to power all systems to full and then some. It was easily enough to make a test flight all the way out to check the Celzi escape pod to discover that its FTL drive had been looted but its Alliance navigational databanks remained fully intact, and then back to sweep the wreckage of the Allebenellin heavy troop ship.
That vessel was smaller than the Hodgepodge by a country mile, having had the better part of a year to sit around it had almost entirely sunk beneath the waves. From a distance it was all but invisible; directly over the wreckage it was possible to see the full extent of the damage through the crystalline waters.
It didn’t look good, but the near complete destruction of the hull meant that gaining access was about as hard as getting into the water. On land the ship would be nearly untraversable, but submerged as it was there would be no issues with worrying whether the broken floor would take their weight.
“What’s this fuckin’ thing then?” Gorge asked, squinting as he peered through the water at the dark shape below.
“Space Illuminati starship,” Adrian answered, shrugging when the two men frowned at him. “Not making it up.”
“No shite?” Cliff muttered, staring at the shattered vessel. “Looks like it’s been blown to fookin’ ‘ell!”
Thank you, Sherlock, Adrian thought sardonically. Solved the fucking case once again!
He flashed his winning grin at the burly man. “Not all of it, I hope, because otherwise this will be a waste of my fucking time.”
He dived in, leaving the two soldiers to watch his progress from above the water, back where they couldn’t do any more damage to the fragile remains. Spot certainly wasn’t going anywhere while he was in the water, being fully keyed to require his presence for any kind of piloting action.
The blasted corpse of the alien ship made for fast progress at least. What had been engineering was basically a large, empty space with a missing reactor and kinetic drive. What it did have was the advanced FTL drive he’d learned about on Cavaras.
“Holy fuck,” he muttered as he took it from its casing as though it were a holy object. It was smaller than the regular drive, but sleeker and had the appearance of being ultra high-tech device he’d heard stories about.
He’d forgotten that his radio was on because the next thing he heard was Gorge’s voice. “Report?”
Adrian stared at the sacred drive, knowing how useful this kind of technology could be to Earth but at the same time not wanting to give it up. He slipped it into his bag, deciding that in this instance the rest of the human race could go fuck itself; he’d find another later on and Powell could have that. “Just had a fish come out of fucking nowhere,” he lied, giving the pair of idiots something else to laugh about. “Startled me.”
The disdainful grumbling on their side let him know they bought his story. There were other things worth looking for on this ship, namely an intact computer core and he was pleased to discover that it hadn’t been entirely destroyed.
Though its survival must have been a close thing, because the rest of the room, less well protected, was in various states of being a mangled mess or not being there at all.
Then there was the thing that he did not expect; six smaller cores in a vertical rack beside the fist sized primary system.
“What the fuck are these?” he wondered under his breath. The unit as a whole was self contained and self powered, not a redundancy and not a subsystem linking to anything on the ship. He grabbed them all, figuring that even if he couldn’t open them on the standalone console in Spot, then Askit could solve the mystery at a later time.
He returned to Spot with his loot, hauling himself aboard as the pair of soldiers parted for him. “Anythin’ int’restin’?” Gorge asked, gesturing to the full bag.
“Probably,” Adrian said as he removed his helmet. “Let’s find out.”
They followed him over to the standalone console, the remains of a computer core harvested from the intact half of a blown apart freighter. He hadn’t connected it to the main system, having intended it for the exact kind of data theft he was doing now.
“This is the computer core from the ship,” he explained. “Basically it’s a computer you plug into the ship and-“
They only looked bored so he stopped talking and started working. The core showed signs of being functional, but as expected it was also encrypted, making it one for the Corti hacker. He switched it with the first of the smaller cores and found a very basic operating system.
“What the fuck is this?” he wondered again, this time loud enough to attract the interest of the two goons. “It loads… and then file not found…”
He frowned and switched it with the next one, and the next one after that. Only the fourth he tried must have had the required file, because it loaded without throwing an error at all. “Loads with no interface,” he observed. “Probably a data backup, but who the fuck knows of what?”
The tiny speaker housed in the console broke into life, speaking his name.
“Adrian?” it asked, its voice so familiar that Adrian felt the blood drain away from his face.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered hoarsely. “Trix?”
+++++