We left the last resort together walking through the now busy streets of Logan's Stand, the once most prestigious part of Planetfall. It was here that a splinter group of the disillusioned colonists that had stranded here decided to take their fate into their own hands and kick it into submission. The houses here were still standing proudly in the streets. Compact, thick walled buildings none higher than twenty stories, designed in faraway worlds to withstand what ever environment they might end up in. The walls were made of tightly woven alloys reinforced with richly decorated local materials, blending the technology of the settlers with the materials of the new world. Millennia of storms and tempests had attacked these walls leaving their mark, however instead of diminishing these buildings it had just polished them like gem stones brining increasing the beauty of its architecture. Usually this would have been a place where the working rich would be found. On most other worlds this would be the place where you would see them either outside or through big panoramic windows in their workshops and offices showing off their wealth to the world by openly displaying their craft. They would walk along the streets in their high quality functional clothes and sit in their cafés and restaurants talking about their daily toils as if it was the most natural thing in the universe. Exchanging anecdotes of challenges they had to face, comparing the tools of their trades, often dreaming up wild joint ventures that would be incredibly costly but oh so satisfying to put together. The latter would most often just remain a fantasy because even among the affluent who could afford steady work there were limits to how far they could reach.
It was different here on Planetfall though. Logan's Stand was too far away from the new space-port located at the top of the orbital spoke. While down on Dead End's surface the spoke was built on the foundations of the old space-port and flooded by masses of the leisure class looking for a way to maybe find some kind of menial labour. Maybe even some unpaid job. That was the big dream landing a job one had not to pay for, maybe subsidised by a rich patron, that would yield enough money to be able to pay for the next one. Once one had broken in one would become part of that endless cycle of wealth where one job paid for the next. The number of stories about the poor creature of leisure who was taken by a wealthy altruist, invariably clad in many pocketed coveralls and sporting a real leather tool belt gleaming with bespoke tools, to a life of work and adventure.
The rich hated this people . OK. Hate is maybe the wrong word. But there was a very strong distaste for this crowd so they avoided Logan's Stand. There was something about the eagerness in this less fortunate people that was slightly to animal like for the rich to be comfortable with. It had taken myself a while to get used to these people. But as it is so often the case one tends to judge everyone by their most extreme examples. People in the leisure class are simply people. Most of the differences that are there are easily explained away by differences in experience. And once I got past those preconceptions I found a rich world full of its own wonders. Those who are not allowed to work often find a way to make their own work. True they may live in a city where they are constantly looked after, clothed, housed, fed, entertained. However there are ways to work. The space fearing species as different as they are all seem to have a deeply rooted creativity which led to some incredible work. It did not take long for me to feel right at home among them. Another thing that had connected me with Kira almost instantly. She had a deep understanding of this. She did not care about the labels defining work but just the craft itself. She would always look at things with an unclouded view that I always envied her for just seeing what was there.
"I have one question." I said turning back to Pentyl. It had just occurred to me.
"Yes?" she ask her face slowly fading away.
"In the bar you said we, should go to the Sentinel Fortress."
"Yes. So?" she asked her face now a blank surface, her body slowly starting to billow out.
"Why would you come with me? The fortress is over a billion light years from here."
"Because, James, you are my friend." with that she completely gave up her humanoid form, slowly powering down the containment field giving her form. She started expanding into the the air turning into a ever larger redish glowing cloud. "You are not the only one who has lost someone dear to them. And as strange as you organoids are, I can empathise." She was now drifting towards the sky using her containment field to shift her bulk into one direction and then expand from there slowly drifting away. "Besides Kira is my friend too. We will go out there and find her. You'll not be alone."
"She said drifting away." I called after her withdrawing form.
Her favourite face reappeared at the edge of her cloud form. "I'm just going to get a few of my things in order and meet you at the space port you muppet."
"I was being sarcastic."
"I thought as much, but I also not quite trust you not being an idiot right now." She said casting a meaningful look at me. Her face disappeared and her cloud form moved quickly away, leaving me standing looking up into the cobalt blue sky of Dead End. Someone once said that a man feels hope when he looks into the sky. I tried. I failed. I did feel conviction though. So I took my empty heart and walked to the nearest vortex station. I walked right into the next free entanglement cubicle entering the signifiers for my flat into the travel interface. However I changed my mind in the last moment. There was nothing left there that I needed. I had spent tomuch time there since Kira had vanished anyway. Usually I spent at least as much time in my ship at the orbital space port as I spent in Planetfall. In the weeks since Kira had vanished I had ignored my ship though using my little free flat as my base of operations. I told myself that I did so because it was making the search easier. That was of course a load of crap. I could easily spin down from the port to Planetfall without losing more than a few minutes. Besides I had been spending as much time on the orbital rail as on the planet looking for Kira. What I wanted to avoid were the spaces were I had spent the most time with her. Her apartment down here, a wonderfully large space with a sunlight drenched cozy central living space surrounded by her various workshops filled with all her projects in different stages of fruition. And of course the Void Dancer, my ship. Our home away from home. It had always been my real home. When Kira had entered my life she had also entered my ship as time went almost everything inside was changed by her touch in some way. Usually for the better.
I was afraid to go back. I afraid of my reaction. Afraid of again being confronted with what I had lost. It was strange. I had always enjoyed being alone but now there was a certain terror connected to the thought of being away from people. As long as I had company, as long as I was active I could ignore that a part of me was gone. But when there was nothing left to distract me I was left with nothing else than the great hole in my being always close to falling into it and collapsing into myself.
Suddenly I was incredibly thankful that Pentyl had decided to tag along.
I shook my head, tried to clear my mind, concentrating on the Void Dancer in her dock. The interface in front of me started to shimmer projecting a vague image of a large hanger with a sleek ship inside of it. I concentrated on the hazy image in front of me slowly brining it into focus immersing myself into it. The picture became sharp, detailed and finally real. I the vortex station had twisted me into the hanger where my ship was waiting for my return.
The Void Dancer was my greatest in many ways my greatest achievement the thing I was most proud of in my life. The ship was incredibly ancient, one of the first of its class and had passed through dozens of generations of owners. It retained its classic charm. Its long sleek hull still made of composite alloy plates, built for atmospheric and aquatic travel as well as space travel. Modern ships were hardly ever built this way any more. At this time and this place the preferred style were large spherical ships that had smaller vessels inside of them all specialised for different tasks. Sure they were better suited for the various environments but the lacked serious style. The Void Dancer was up to many modern standards but I had taken through great pains to keep it as close to the original state as possible. I had stuffed it with loads of subatomic machinery to make it more space worthy and secure however I had tried to keep the glaringly obvious modifications at a minimum. The biggest changes were the pulsar reactor which filled almost half of the original cargo hold. And most of the cockpit instruments of course. But as far as possible everything was embedded into the ancient style of the ship. Manual controls, mechanical read outs. Leather, wood, brass. Purists might turn up their noses and less enthusiastic people might wonder why I would want to use such an archaic design for my ship. But I liked it. And that was the important but.
Not wanting to wast any time I walked into to the space-traffic control booth to start negotiations with the hangar AI.
"Hey James. I was starting to get a bit worried about you." it greeted me with its omni directional voice that was as always like soft velvet. "I'm really sorry about Kira. I kept all my sensors open as far as my privacy filters allow, but I haven't seen her either."
"Thanks Portos I appreciate your concern." I said smiling. The port authority AI here was one of the warmest most genuinely caring intelligences I had ever known artificial or otherwise. Everyone who sailed into space from here loved the strange old construct which had evolved on its own into its kind form. Portos insisted that it was only logical to be caring of ones charges often wondering why other AIs often followed more cold approaches to interaction.
"I've made you a nice big cup of tea while I am running the standard checks for you." a large white ceramic mug filled with steaming tea twisted into existence on top a the little counter top of the AI booth. "Do you intend to set sail or did you just come to have a little chat?"
I smiled. "I was intending to set sail."
"Oh." said Portos with a slight tinge of disappointment in its voice.
"There really isn't much to talk about anyway. Kira vanished. Faded away in front of my eyes. Do you have any ideas how that could have happened?" I said. The light in the booth dimmed slightly to indicated the the AI was thinking. After a while the lights in the hanger flickered. I hoped that it wasn't because the AI was seriously considering my question. When the light became brighter a moment later Portos said: "I'm very sorry James but I can't find a viable explanation for you."
"It's OK. That's why I am going to take the Void Dancer and go for a little trip. I need to find out what happened to Kira and the answer isn't here. So I need to look in space."
"The Void Dancer is space worthy. All its systems are well within standard operating parameters. The pulsar reactor is working at 96% efficiency and I expect it to run for at the very least 500 billion light years before it needs to go into inspection. Life support and auxiliary systems are all up and running and right now I am filling your stores with a broad selection of vicutals so that you have something to eat during your quest out there."
"Many thanks."
"Don't mention it. To help is my pleasure. Do you want to go over the log-files?"
"There's no need for that Portos. I trust you." I said.
"This has nothing to do with trust young man, but with prudence. Please at least have a look at them. Knowing you you're not just going on a little jump into some neighbouring galaxy." Portos insisted.
"You're right I guess." I said.
"In this cases I am always right." Portos said with a perfectly cold AI voice. It loved to do that to make a point and it never failed the contrast to its usual warm soothing voice was so great that it sent shivers down my spine.
"Where do you intend to go anyway? Do you have any plans? I'd also like to clear the you a stellar lane for you to use. Any idea when you are going to leave?"
"I'm going through the checks and leave pretty much immediately. So I guess I two hours or so? I'm still waiting for a friend but she shouldn't be long,"
"She?" asked Portos.
"Really? Did you just ask that. First of all. She's a friend. Second 'she' is a nebulan."
"I'm sorry, James. Bad habit."
"It's not a problem."
"So where are you going?"
"First stop will be the Sentinel Fortress." I said.
"Oh my."
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Monday, 10 November 2014
Project: Superluminal 002
"Are you being racist right now?" asked Pentyl Crimson her (today Pentyl was a she) expression flowing into an exaggerated curiosity.
"No. I'm not." I said massaging my temples with one hand. It had been a very long day of wandering around Planetfall, Dead End's capital city and the orbital spoke, checking every even vaguely plausible place for traces of Kira. I didn't find anything. Of course. So just to escape the danger of being taken over by despair I gave in to numbness. I called Pentyl, asked her to meet me a the Last Resort bar at the space port. Mostly because I was scared of being alone; officially to check one of my more outlandish theories. "I really want to know if you have heard of anyone who is like Kira or me turning into something like you?"
"I think that does sound racist, James. This whole you versus us thing? The implication that we might creep into your life, changing people to be like us. Also this 'turning into thin air' phrase sounds suspiciously derogatory." the red plasma forming her face moved again in waves now forming an expression that was mostly doubt.
I sighed. Even if they were friends you'd trust your life with, communicating with aliens could be exhausting. "No. I am sure that nebulars turning people into mist isn't a thing people are afraid of. At least not in the galaxies I've been to. Also the 'turning into thin air' expression has been part of my culture since before we reached the stars." when I saw Pentyl's mouth begin to tide open I added "We did not even encounter our first nebular since after the war." Pentyl's face calmed down into a more calm expression. "Look." I tried again. "Kira vanished. In front of my eyes. She simply faded into nothing. I thought I was dreaming that. But she is gone. No one has seen her since that day. All of her things are still there." I sat there for a while not knowing what to say. When I was not looking at Pentyl's face with its gently shifting plasma patterns I was staring into the bar mostly staring at the past.
"I'm sorry James but I have never heard of an organoid turning into one of us. Just like no nebular has ever turned into one of you..."
"You do look humanoid..." I said. Voice flat. I knew that Pentyl was right.
"Does not change the fact that I am a gaseous. I just taken a shape similar to yours. Just like you could eat more and paint your skin to appear more cloudish. It would not change your nature though."
"I... I don't know what to do any more. I..."
"First of all try to relax. You need to stay calm so that you can keep yourself from pushing more emotions into your blood. That will only make you more erratic and miserable. Expand. Don't let what has happen compress you. Tell me what you have done so far. Where you looked who you asked. Then we can see what you have covered and where you need to flow to next. OK?"
"OK." I nodded. So I started rattling off where I had been, who I had spoken to. Pentyl just listened with a little fluid smile on her face. She let me follow wild tangents as I remembered things that tied me and Kira to all this places and people. The concerts we had heard, the food we had discovered, the conversations we had, the friends we made. There was hardly a place left here were I could go that was not saturated with memories of us. Memories of how she made me feel everything we discovered with such an intensity. "And that's when I asked you to me." I finished my tale.
"Hmmm." said Pentyl. Her face dissolved, he body losing most but its most basic humanoid proportions. A sign that Pentyl was in deep thought. She was never happy with store bought human shapes, she always insisted on her own bespoke form, which takes some concentration to maintain. While I waited I looked around the bar again. This time looking mostly at the present. The lights were in the slow process to change to the blue tones that signalled the advancing day cycle. I had not slept for at least 36 hours by now. The clients had also changed. When I had arrived it was mostly the very drunk trying to find the coordination that would get them back home in one piece and the most devoted party-goers who were solemnly celebrating their after hours rituals. Now the place was half filled with the fashionable rich who could afford having a job but liked to do show how connected they remained to the common man by having breakfast in a place like the Last Resort.
"For now it seems to me," Pentyl said her features emerging into sharp focus again, "that you are at least in so far right that Kira has vanished. She did so under most strange circumstances. I'm not an organoid, your ways are still deeply strange to me. However I know you, I know Kira and I know the two of you together. Right now I'd say she did not simply run away. She was probably not kidnapped..."
"Kidnapped?" that thought had not even crossed my mind. "Who would..."
"No one, James. That's why it is very unlikely that that was the case. Expand. She has also not turned into a gaseous form. Not only is that very unlikely but I also believe that I'd notice one of us suddenly appearing. We can go to your flat later just to be sure. So that leaves us with very few options."
"There are options?" I asked.
"There are always options. We need to ask someone who has knowledge that goes beyond our everyday understanding. Someone who might know things that are not common knowledge in our civilisations. It would also be very helpful if the person in question would find our problem interesting in and off itself. Furthermore this individual should be either a friend or acquaintance of one of us or a friend or acquaintance of someone we know or who owes us a favour."
"I do a lot of academics we might ask." I said. While real prospecting work was few and far between I'd been doing this job long enough to have some good friends among some of the best planetary scientists in the universe."
"You are thinking to compressed. True you know some very good scientists. But they aren't really active in the field of dissolving people."
"So who were you thinking of?"
"Someone who has been around longer than any of our species, someone who is bound to have seen many strange things." she said.
"You can't be serious." I said with little conviction. I knew what Pentyl was going to suggest however I did not have any alternative.
"I am serious. We should go and visit the Sentinel Fortress."
"No. I'm not." I said massaging my temples with one hand. It had been a very long day of wandering around Planetfall, Dead End's capital city and the orbital spoke, checking every even vaguely plausible place for traces of Kira. I didn't find anything. Of course. So just to escape the danger of being taken over by despair I gave in to numbness. I called Pentyl, asked her to meet me a the Last Resort bar at the space port. Mostly because I was scared of being alone; officially to check one of my more outlandish theories. "I really want to know if you have heard of anyone who is like Kira or me turning into something like you?"
"I think that does sound racist, James. This whole you versus us thing? The implication that we might creep into your life, changing people to be like us. Also this 'turning into thin air' phrase sounds suspiciously derogatory." the red plasma forming her face moved again in waves now forming an expression that was mostly doubt.
I sighed. Even if they were friends you'd trust your life with, communicating with aliens could be exhausting. "No. I am sure that nebulars turning people into mist isn't a thing people are afraid of. At least not in the galaxies I've been to. Also the 'turning into thin air' expression has been part of my culture since before we reached the stars." when I saw Pentyl's mouth begin to tide open I added "We did not even encounter our first nebular since after the war." Pentyl's face calmed down into a more calm expression. "Look." I tried again. "Kira vanished. In front of my eyes. She simply faded into nothing. I thought I was dreaming that. But she is gone. No one has seen her since that day. All of her things are still there." I sat there for a while not knowing what to say. When I was not looking at Pentyl's face with its gently shifting plasma patterns I was staring into the bar mostly staring at the past.
"I'm sorry James but I have never heard of an organoid turning into one of us. Just like no nebular has ever turned into one of you..."
"You do look humanoid..." I said. Voice flat. I knew that Pentyl was right.
"Does not change the fact that I am a gaseous. I just taken a shape similar to yours. Just like you could eat more and paint your skin to appear more cloudish. It would not change your nature though."
"I... I don't know what to do any more. I..."
"First of all try to relax. You need to stay calm so that you can keep yourself from pushing more emotions into your blood. That will only make you more erratic and miserable. Expand. Don't let what has happen compress you. Tell me what you have done so far. Where you looked who you asked. Then we can see what you have covered and where you need to flow to next. OK?"
"OK." I nodded. So I started rattling off where I had been, who I had spoken to. Pentyl just listened with a little fluid smile on her face. She let me follow wild tangents as I remembered things that tied me and Kira to all this places and people. The concerts we had heard, the food we had discovered, the conversations we had, the friends we made. There was hardly a place left here were I could go that was not saturated with memories of us. Memories of how she made me feel everything we discovered with such an intensity. "And that's when I asked you to me." I finished my tale.
"Hmmm." said Pentyl. Her face dissolved, he body losing most but its most basic humanoid proportions. A sign that Pentyl was in deep thought. She was never happy with store bought human shapes, she always insisted on her own bespoke form, which takes some concentration to maintain. While I waited I looked around the bar again. This time looking mostly at the present. The lights were in the slow process to change to the blue tones that signalled the advancing day cycle. I had not slept for at least 36 hours by now. The clients had also changed. When I had arrived it was mostly the very drunk trying to find the coordination that would get them back home in one piece and the most devoted party-goers who were solemnly celebrating their after hours rituals. Now the place was half filled with the fashionable rich who could afford having a job but liked to do show how connected they remained to the common man by having breakfast in a place like the Last Resort.
"For now it seems to me," Pentyl said her features emerging into sharp focus again, "that you are at least in so far right that Kira has vanished. She did so under most strange circumstances. I'm not an organoid, your ways are still deeply strange to me. However I know you, I know Kira and I know the two of you together. Right now I'd say she did not simply run away. She was probably not kidnapped..."
"Kidnapped?" that thought had not even crossed my mind. "Who would..."
"No one, James. That's why it is very unlikely that that was the case. Expand. She has also not turned into a gaseous form. Not only is that very unlikely but I also believe that I'd notice one of us suddenly appearing. We can go to your flat later just to be sure. So that leaves us with very few options."
"There are options?" I asked.
"There are always options. We need to ask someone who has knowledge that goes beyond our everyday understanding. Someone who might know things that are not common knowledge in our civilisations. It would also be very helpful if the person in question would find our problem interesting in and off itself. Furthermore this individual should be either a friend or acquaintance of one of us or a friend or acquaintance of someone we know or who owes us a favour."
"I do a lot of academics we might ask." I said. While real prospecting work was few and far between I'd been doing this job long enough to have some good friends among some of the best planetary scientists in the universe."
"You are thinking to compressed. True you know some very good scientists. But they aren't really active in the field of dissolving people."
"So who were you thinking of?"
"Someone who has been around longer than any of our species, someone who is bound to have seen many strange things." she said.
"You can't be serious." I said with little conviction. I knew what Pentyl was going to suggest however I did not have any alternative.
"I am serious. We should go and visit the Sentinel Fortress."
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
Project: Superluminal 001
Project Superluminal
I did not realise how dim the universe had become until the day she appeared and illuminated it in front of my eyes. Usually when you get to know people, they kind of fade into you your life. At first they are just some person. You make first contact. Exchange a few words. As you meet them again a couple of times they start to come into focus until you recognize them, not as some stranger but as the complex individual they are.
It was different with her. The first time I met her she was already there. Fully formed a complex and fascinating creature. She strobed into my life. A few flashes here and there were she was, with her eyes as deep as open space and a mind always hungry for the new and exciting and I could not help but be swept along.
The first time I met her was on Dead End in the Saint Saviour system. We both were working at a dead-end job biding our time, waiting for a better tomorrow. She was a wandering polymath that had been lost the publisher she was writing a travelling diary for, while I had been declining third rate prospecting jobs for a bit to long. In a way it was both our fault that we were stuck analysing data for a shitty knowledge mining company. Kira was actually looking for a new field that she could master and had not really been paying much attention to the political comings and goings of the Laallan Federation where her publisher was based. I on the other hand was fed up and to be sincere to proud to take another prospecting job coming well nested in inverted commas where I was supposed to go into a centre of civilisation to make a proper assessment of their status for an interested far away third party. I wanted to do some real prospecting. Plunging into the void of space, discover new planetary systems do some proper exploration, or at the very least visit a silent system to which contact had been lost.
Well had we done so we may have noticed that the Xelthian Empire was going through one of its inevitable militaristic surges, the Laalan Federation was falling rapidly into decadence collapsing out of interstellar travel and the rise of the Shifting Destiny movement. In short the most important routes from Saint Saviour to the rest of the universe led to war zones, vast regions spiralling into deep isolationism or where in the process of social upheaval. For me it meant that I was shit out of luck. No one was interested in prospecting any more. Flying into a more stable zone was also out of the question. It was to far even for my ship for one, besides I had not the slightest idea into which direction to set out to reach one in the first place. To bad that I had no cultural charts made by a prospector about the nearby galaxies...
For Kira things looked more promising. The Shifting Destiny was pushing some wild very progressive ideas forcing a renaissance of art and science in the systems it swept through. However they also froze the economies of the civilisations were they gained power. Nothing to ruinous but if you weren't established somewhere where the Shifting Destiny was happening you had to bring your own wealth with you. She might have made it work by also writing about them however her erstwhile employer had decided that all this talk about foreign galactic powers was simply a waste of time when there were so many much more pressing topics on the local interstellar level. You had to bring your home in order before you should even entertain the thought of considering what the other out there were doing. Bam. Job gone. Like me she was caught by surprise so going into a long sleep was out of the question. Too expensive.
So there we were in a horrible office following ancient traditions of trying very hard to appear like warm humane spaces and failing at it in the most spectacular ways. One thing I had learnt in my long life was that there were certain things that bound all living things together, no matter how strange we might seem to each other at first after a while we would find things we had in common, a base that allowed us to communicate with each other. Never have I seen places more alien than those of shit workplaces, they somehow always managed to miss these common points with tragi-commical certainty.
Kira worked in a different immersion chamber than me, but one day when I had to ask a question about some standard operating procedure I met her. She was the only one there that could answer the question. I always used these moments to socialise, on one hand it helped me my ability to communicate with other sentient beings and it was a method to stay away from my work for a little bit longer. Apart from that when you do actually listen to people you often learn something new or interesting. In this case she told me about her writing gig that had imploded and I told her about my work as a prospector. Somehow I got a bit overenthusiastic and went into some of the more obscure technical details of my work. When I noticed that I had been going on about the peculiarities of gas giant probes it was to late, I had been waffling about technical details that while certainly fascinating would send everyone not from the field away screaming. Either that or into a deep dreamless coma. I stopped talking. Thinking about a way to change the subject to something more conventionally interesting. It was then that I noticed that her mouth made a very slight 'O' shape and here eyes were wide open. She was actually fascinated what I was saying and as surprised about it as me.
I did not see her for a few days after that first encounter. The next time it was her who approached me during one of my breaks. She asked me if I had ever been to a sun sculpture a star that had been carefully remodelled by a helio-shaper into a new form. I told her about a few that I had seen and the strange beauty of decaying sun sculptures that were slowly returning to their normal shape when she started telling me about how she was trying right now to find a helio-shaper to learn the craft herself. This lead to her telling me in increasingly greater detail how you could turn a star into statue and hearing her talk about it was utterly fascinating. When her break was over she gave me a quick smile and disappeared. I left behind slightly shell-shocked. I had not been that fascinated by a topic in a long, long time. A deeply unsettling thought. I had become a prospector because I was always driven by a deep hunger for the new. My curiosity was almost pathological. Yet that short conversation had fascinated me more than anything that I could remember in a long time.
It turned out that this was not a coincidence. Kira would appear every once in a while, or we would meet each other by chance and every time we did so we would have a conversation about some new topic, each time what we would be talking about would become one of the most interesting things in the entire universe. When our minds met they would boost each other opening new facets and perspectives to whichever topic we might be exploring at that moment. It was utterly intoxicating.
In time our meetings would become more and more frequent, until the day when we saw each other every day and without really noticing when it happened had turned into a couple.
I was sitting in a stylish bar with a stunning view over Dead End situated on the planetary spoke that connected Dead End to the orbital rail that ran parallel to the planets course around its sun. The prices here was even more stunning than the sight but today I had decided that it was time to live a bit. At least I was trying too. After many, many years together Kira had left. I had no idea why. And with her she had taken the deep sense of wonder that had come with experiencing the universe with her. Back in the day pooling our skills we had escaped our shit job and Dead End and travelled the universe. Our special talent had never stopped working. What ever we did it was twice as intense, twice as exiting, twice as moving when we did it together than when doing it alone or with someone else. Those years had been intoxicating and now I found myself going unexpectedly cold turkey. I looked at the drink in my hand. It had no answers. Just a mellow taste of vanilla and caramel and enough alcohol to wrap my rising depression in damp numbness.
It had happened a few days ago. I had been still asleep in bed when I had felt her hand softly stroking my hair. I managed to open my eyes a tiny bit and mumble something that I hoped sounded like words. I wish I could remember her face better. I know that she had smiled. I had thought at first that it was a tender smile, but now I thought that it might have been a sad one. Then she faded away. At least that's how it felt like when I drifted back to sleep. When I woke up some time later my apartment felt cold and grey. Kira was gone.
Under other circumstances I would not have been that bothered. Her leaving in the morning was a pretty ordinary occurrence. But the empty feeling that was left behind wasn't. That day I went to our usual haunts looking for her. But no one had seen her that day. That evening I went to her flat but it was also empty. Her home usually a warm, comfy place filled with the playful chaos caused by a mind full of great ideas but led astray by poor impulse control felt dead. Even her presence was gone.
'Where could she have gone?' I asked my drink it just shrugged its ice cubes. What was I supposed to do now? Was I supposed to do anything at all? On one hand she had disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances on the other hand she'd just been gone for a few days. She was the type of person who would leave on a sudden whim to visit a cultural happening she had just hard about. She had never done so without telling me though. Even when telling sometimes meant that I got a trans-galactic broadcast message after a couple of days with her standing in a crowed in the middle of a concert telling me where she was and how brilliant the event was. This time there was just a cold silence.
Kira had vanished into thin air. The most important person in my life had vanished taking with her a significant part of my soul. 'I have no idea how', I told my drink 'but I will find her. Where ever she has gone I will find a way and follow her.'
I did not realise how dim the universe had become until the day she appeared and illuminated it in front of my eyes. Usually when you get to know people, they kind of fade into you your life. At first they are just some person. You make first contact. Exchange a few words. As you meet them again a couple of times they start to come into focus until you recognize them, not as some stranger but as the complex individual they are.
It was different with her. The first time I met her she was already there. Fully formed a complex and fascinating creature. She strobed into my life. A few flashes here and there were she was, with her eyes as deep as open space and a mind always hungry for the new and exciting and I could not help but be swept along.
The first time I met her was on Dead End in the Saint Saviour system. We both were working at a dead-end job biding our time, waiting for a better tomorrow. She was a wandering polymath that had been lost the publisher she was writing a travelling diary for, while I had been declining third rate prospecting jobs for a bit to long. In a way it was both our fault that we were stuck analysing data for a shitty knowledge mining company. Kira was actually looking for a new field that she could master and had not really been paying much attention to the political comings and goings of the Laallan Federation where her publisher was based. I on the other hand was fed up and to be sincere to proud to take another prospecting job coming well nested in inverted commas where I was supposed to go into a centre of civilisation to make a proper assessment of their status for an interested far away third party. I wanted to do some real prospecting. Plunging into the void of space, discover new planetary systems do some proper exploration, or at the very least visit a silent system to which contact had been lost.
Well had we done so we may have noticed that the Xelthian Empire was going through one of its inevitable militaristic surges, the Laalan Federation was falling rapidly into decadence collapsing out of interstellar travel and the rise of the Shifting Destiny movement. In short the most important routes from Saint Saviour to the rest of the universe led to war zones, vast regions spiralling into deep isolationism or where in the process of social upheaval. For me it meant that I was shit out of luck. No one was interested in prospecting any more. Flying into a more stable zone was also out of the question. It was to far even for my ship for one, besides I had not the slightest idea into which direction to set out to reach one in the first place. To bad that I had no cultural charts made by a prospector about the nearby galaxies...
For Kira things looked more promising. The Shifting Destiny was pushing some wild very progressive ideas forcing a renaissance of art and science in the systems it swept through. However they also froze the economies of the civilisations were they gained power. Nothing to ruinous but if you weren't established somewhere where the Shifting Destiny was happening you had to bring your own wealth with you. She might have made it work by also writing about them however her erstwhile employer had decided that all this talk about foreign galactic powers was simply a waste of time when there were so many much more pressing topics on the local interstellar level. You had to bring your home in order before you should even entertain the thought of considering what the other out there were doing. Bam. Job gone. Like me she was caught by surprise so going into a long sleep was out of the question. Too expensive.
So there we were in a horrible office following ancient traditions of trying very hard to appear like warm humane spaces and failing at it in the most spectacular ways. One thing I had learnt in my long life was that there were certain things that bound all living things together, no matter how strange we might seem to each other at first after a while we would find things we had in common, a base that allowed us to communicate with each other. Never have I seen places more alien than those of shit workplaces, they somehow always managed to miss these common points with tragi-commical certainty.
Kira worked in a different immersion chamber than me, but one day when I had to ask a question about some standard operating procedure I met her. She was the only one there that could answer the question. I always used these moments to socialise, on one hand it helped me my ability to communicate with other sentient beings and it was a method to stay away from my work for a little bit longer. Apart from that when you do actually listen to people you often learn something new or interesting. In this case she told me about her writing gig that had imploded and I told her about my work as a prospector. Somehow I got a bit overenthusiastic and went into some of the more obscure technical details of my work. When I noticed that I had been going on about the peculiarities of gas giant probes it was to late, I had been waffling about technical details that while certainly fascinating would send everyone not from the field away screaming. Either that or into a deep dreamless coma. I stopped talking. Thinking about a way to change the subject to something more conventionally interesting. It was then that I noticed that her mouth made a very slight 'O' shape and here eyes were wide open. She was actually fascinated what I was saying and as surprised about it as me.
I did not see her for a few days after that first encounter. The next time it was her who approached me during one of my breaks. She asked me if I had ever been to a sun sculpture a star that had been carefully remodelled by a helio-shaper into a new form. I told her about a few that I had seen and the strange beauty of decaying sun sculptures that were slowly returning to their normal shape when she started telling me about how she was trying right now to find a helio-shaper to learn the craft herself. This lead to her telling me in increasingly greater detail how you could turn a star into statue and hearing her talk about it was utterly fascinating. When her break was over she gave me a quick smile and disappeared. I left behind slightly shell-shocked. I had not been that fascinated by a topic in a long, long time. A deeply unsettling thought. I had become a prospector because I was always driven by a deep hunger for the new. My curiosity was almost pathological. Yet that short conversation had fascinated me more than anything that I could remember in a long time.
It turned out that this was not a coincidence. Kira would appear every once in a while, or we would meet each other by chance and every time we did so we would have a conversation about some new topic, each time what we would be talking about would become one of the most interesting things in the entire universe. When our minds met they would boost each other opening new facets and perspectives to whichever topic we might be exploring at that moment. It was utterly intoxicating.
In time our meetings would become more and more frequent, until the day when we saw each other every day and without really noticing when it happened had turned into a couple.
I was sitting in a stylish bar with a stunning view over Dead End situated on the planetary spoke that connected Dead End to the orbital rail that ran parallel to the planets course around its sun. The prices here was even more stunning than the sight but today I had decided that it was time to live a bit. At least I was trying too. After many, many years together Kira had left. I had no idea why. And with her she had taken the deep sense of wonder that had come with experiencing the universe with her. Back in the day pooling our skills we had escaped our shit job and Dead End and travelled the universe. Our special talent had never stopped working. What ever we did it was twice as intense, twice as exiting, twice as moving when we did it together than when doing it alone or with someone else. Those years had been intoxicating and now I found myself going unexpectedly cold turkey. I looked at the drink in my hand. It had no answers. Just a mellow taste of vanilla and caramel and enough alcohol to wrap my rising depression in damp numbness.
It had happened a few days ago. I had been still asleep in bed when I had felt her hand softly stroking my hair. I managed to open my eyes a tiny bit and mumble something that I hoped sounded like words. I wish I could remember her face better. I know that she had smiled. I had thought at first that it was a tender smile, but now I thought that it might have been a sad one. Then she faded away. At least that's how it felt like when I drifted back to sleep. When I woke up some time later my apartment felt cold and grey. Kira was gone.
Under other circumstances I would not have been that bothered. Her leaving in the morning was a pretty ordinary occurrence. But the empty feeling that was left behind wasn't. That day I went to our usual haunts looking for her. But no one had seen her that day. That evening I went to her flat but it was also empty. Her home usually a warm, comfy place filled with the playful chaos caused by a mind full of great ideas but led astray by poor impulse control felt dead. Even her presence was gone.
'Where could she have gone?' I asked my drink it just shrugged its ice cubes. What was I supposed to do now? Was I supposed to do anything at all? On one hand she had disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances on the other hand she'd just been gone for a few days. She was the type of person who would leave on a sudden whim to visit a cultural happening she had just hard about. She had never done so without telling me though. Even when telling sometimes meant that I got a trans-galactic broadcast message after a couple of days with her standing in a crowed in the middle of a concert telling me where she was and how brilliant the event was. This time there was just a cold silence.
Kira had vanished into thin air. The most important person in my life had vanished taking with her a significant part of my soul. 'I have no idea how', I told my drink 'but I will find her. Where ever she has gone I will find a way and follow her.'
Sunday, 1 December 2013
Project: Leftovers 016
While she was fighting with the second rope she was also pre-emptively getting annoyed with Monica who Lane imagined was already done. Probably back in the bridge drinking bubbly being amused by how slow Lane was. She felt like a proper dick-head when she returned to the bridge finding only captain Idris. She felt even worse when Idris told her not to stand around like an idiot but to go out to help her friend securing the ship. The captain had to explain to her how to get to the other doors as it was in a part of the ship she had not been yet. The other door was easily reached. To Lanes surprise the 1880s charm of the forward part of the ship stopped before she reached the door that was located in a corridor that was following the industrial brutalism tradition of the industrial part of the ship.
The gap was even wider on this side of the ship. At least there were no ropes involved this time. Lane focused on a point that was well within the secure realms of the platform in front of her and took a running jump. She did jumped to far again this time though she knew about the floor so she skidded it a halt that might have been though of as elegant by penguins. She did not fall though. Finding Monica was easy as she a magnificent stream of Spanish swearing flowed out of her mouth. 'When does she breath in?' Lane wondered as she wandered towards Monica. As there was only the rope in her hand in sight Lane assumed that Monica was working on securing the last one. With little success. She had tied the rope around a column trying to throw a kind of improvised lasso onto a protrusion of the ship. With little success.
"Can I help you." Lane asked. She had hoped to startle Monica this time but her friend did not even bat an eyelid.
"I have no idea if you can but you are welcome to try." Monica said.
Lane could help her. She untied the rope again as it was kept to short leaving it with almost no slack to work with. Now that they were two it was also easier to get the rope around a metal loop on the ships outer frame. Lane would hold her while she leaned forward. "What happened to you fear of heights?" Lane asked.
"Right now there is just me and that wall over there. You are holding me and everything else is golden light." Monica said her eyes glued to her target. "There is no height only the target." She stretched out a little bit further, shoving the rope through the loop leaning further forward as the ship gently swayed away from her. She grabbed the part of the rope she had just threaded pulling back.
"Almost done." Monica said pulling the rope back taking the other end from the floor she walked around several columns which she used as impromptu pulleys pulling the rope tight securing the ship to the frame of the dock. "There we go." she said as she finished a complicated knot.
With the Unconquered Sun fastened in place Captain Idris could leave the bridge and start the actual docking procedure. It turned out to be hard work. As the captain had said if there were automatic mechanisms for the dock the way to activate them escaped them. Instead there were levers involved and cranks. Lane had expected these to be made out of wood but like everything else it was cut out of the same white stone shining with what looked like golden water reflections. The instruments could be set to manually extend bridge like structures towards the ship allowing easy access to the out side of the hull and the envelope above. It took two increasingly excruciating hours to extend enough to work on the ship.
"I am going to take care of the hull. You can cover up the envelope. I'll come with you and show you how to patch it up. Then you'll do it. Once I know that you can do it alone I'll leave you to it, all right?" Idris said.
"Sure thing." said Lane.
"Yes." said Monica.
When captain Idris had said patching the ship up she had meant it. The process which Lane had imaged to be something like they had done inside the ship was far less exciting than expected. It was actually very similar to repairing a punctured bicycle tube. One of them (Monica) hat to roughen the outer envelope, the other (Lane) had to apply a glue with a big brush to it that smelled like a cheap high garnished with dead brain cells. Then both of them applied a patch. Sometimes, for the bigger holes they had to do it in stages.
At first Lane and Monica were talking while doing their work wondering how what they were doing could be seen as any kind of repair. The fumes mixed with the the utter dullness of the task killed the conversation. They spend time in that golden Limbo for what seemed forever. At one point Lane thought about the helicopters that had done this feeling sorry that she could not shoot them down for a second time. For a moment the thought that there had been people inside of the choppers crossed Lane's mind sending a shiver down her spine, making her feel a bit queasy. But she had never seen the people who had died. She had seen how they had fired with monstrously large machine-guns at them, she remembered that they had been sent by who ever had hired the Pale Man who had tried to murder her, that helped a lot with suppressing her feelings of guilt. An eternity after that captain Idris returned.
"Good news. The damage to the hull is mostly minor and you have sealed most of the damage outside, it is very important that you close all the holes, it ruins the aero dynamics of the ship. Not only will it slow us down but we are risking that our fuel will not last until Fez." said captain Idris.
"Really? What about that trick you pulled of earlier when you said that you made the wind resistance go away?" Lane said.
"That's actually not something that we can do all the time. Telling the laws of physics to go and fuck themselves comes with a high price tag." Idris said.
"Do we need to sacrifice someone to reactivate the system?" Lane asked her eyes widening in horror.
"What?" Idris said. "No. Why would you even think that?"
"Didn't you say something about black magic?" Lane said.
"No. I said something about ancient magic. Well whatever. I need to get inside and see if I can repair some of the vacuum cells. Do not stop working. Under any circumstances. Once dawn approaches we must leave. We probably should also move onwards. hanging around here for another day isn't a good idea."
"Why? Are you sure that our enemies will come here?" Monica asked.
Idris shook her head. "Instinct. We should move on soon. Now less arguing. Get to work."
It didn't take long for Lane and Monica falling back into their trance of boredom, the only things that kept them going was when they had reached the point where they could count the final holes. Suddenly sealing one of them felt like incredible achievement. With the end in sight they shook off much of their drowsiness. They decided to leave the biggest hole that was more like a long diagonal rip in the envelope as the last one, closing the smaller ones first to be able to regain some of their strength to close the last big one properly.
Time refused to fly it was however willing to start crawling again. When there were only five left Lane and Monica started shouting out the numbers. When they had reached "FOUR!" and moved to three Monica started to sand the envelope of the Zeppelin with renewed vigour.
"You are really getting into it again." Lane said.
"Yes." Monica said. Her eye deadly serious signalling Lane to come closer.
"Wh..." Lane started to say but Monica stopped her with a hard stare signalling her with again with a motion of her eyes to come closer to the gap.
"First." Monica whispered "Do exactly as I say. No sudden movements. At all. Blink twice if you got that."
Lane blinked twice.
"Do not look around. Blink once."
Lane blinked once.
"Good. If you have a weapon with you rub your chin if not wipe away the sweat from your brow."
Lane swiped away the sweat of her brow. She would have loved to wonder what this was all about but she was very sure that this was serious and horrible.
"There are people coming. They are being sneaky. So probably enemies." Monica said then raising her voice again. "Great! This one is ready to. Can I have the brush and the glue? I really want to close this one my self." Lane had to work hard not roll her eyes. What Monica had just said made hardly any sense and her acting was wooden. It may have been enough for the unseen lurkers. Even now as Lane was paying enormous attention to the corners of her eyes she didn't see anything suspicious. She did trust Monica's judgement though, she could not remember a time when anyone had managed to sneak on Monica, ever.
Lane put the patch over the hole while Monica pretended to watch her how she was smoothing out the wrinkles from the fabric that now covered the hole. Monica moved her head shifting it a bit to the left and the right like she was appraising Lane's work. Lane looked back at her friend smiling nervously, Monica's eyes were unfocused focusing at no particular point instead they were absorbing everything around her.
"Almost done here." Lane said mostly to tell Monica that she could not pretend to be busy for much longer.
"Cool." said Monica with her hard on the rocks voice that she used only when she was in tense business meeting or getting ready to kill people. "Go ahead, let's get ready for the next hole." Lane walked towards the next tear in the envelope trying very hard not to start shaking while walking. She discovered that it was incredibly difficult to control shaking by tensing up it just made it worse. She has just passed one of the many ring shaped ribs that made up the dock tunnels when she saw a shadow that was hiding on the other side, the shade flung it self towards her, it was to fast, she had not even half turned around to face her attacker before it... it did not striker her. When she was expecting to be pushed into the Zeppelin she just heard a muffled gurgling. A snarling Monica had appeared between them and had appeared between them stopping the attacker with a hard punch to the throat with the handle of the brush. The man tried to scream but his broken throat only produced broken noises. He had some kind of rifle slung over his should which he tried to grope. Monica slapped him with the glue brush one, two, three times and followed by an open palm strike with which she attached a patch to his face. The man tried to rip off the patch from his face giving Monica enough time to grab the rifle and kick him in the shin. He made more crushed noises of pain pulling his leg up. Now that he was unbalanced Monica hit him with the butt of his own rifle sending him tumbling over the railing of the work platform, he missed the lower part of the support ring by hairs breadth and continued his log journey towards the ground in silence.
"Now I have a rifle." said Monica. "Now they are all dead. Amateurs. Here Take these." Monica said to Lane handing her the brush and the bucket full of glue."
"You can just put them on the floor." Lane said.
"No. Take this too." Monica said handing lane a long narrow lighter. "I can only cover one side. There is still one of these fuckers behind us. Walk towards him. But do not pass the fourth ring. Stay there and be ready to throw the glue on him when he appears. He will when I start shooting the other two who are going to attack us from the other side. It will not distract him forever. The moment the glue hits him set it on fire, he will do the rest."
"Set him on fire?" Lane said.
"Do it or we will die." Monica said her voice still cold but now far more commanding.
"OK. The brush?" Lane said.
"In case everything else goes wrong you can use it as a weapon. Now go. Go!" Monica said.
Lane walked away from Monica, now she was not shivering any more. She was probably shivering so fast now that she did not even feel notice it any more. She thought she was afraid or shocked but she was mostly numb now. So she moved forward bast the support rings carefully counting them. She reached the fifth, stopped, waited. She wanted to turn around to see what Monica was doing she could not though if she turned around now it would be the moment when the first few shots fell the man hiding behind the stone ring would appear, see her and kill her.
She decided instead to pull up the bucket into position. Faster that way. She twitched slightly as she waited for the fight to being. Seconds seemed to stretch into languid eternities. This was even worse the patching all those stupid holes. Then a loud shot.
A curse in Spanish. Someone crashing to the ground. There. Behind the circular support structure a man appeared ducked low with his rifle in hand. He was looking down the long narrow platform almost looking through Lane, his eyes were still refocusing surprise still crawling over his face when the splash glue hit him. He started to scream in alarm. He tried to clean the glue away from his face. Lane could not bring her self to use the lighter. The the man started to fire his gun blindly. Some bullets flying past lane others deep into the temple and one or two puncturing the envelope of the Unconquered Sun. That was enough for Lane. She pressed down the button of the lighter creating a small flame. She carefully hunkered down still looking at the man how was still busy screaming and firing wildly in very direction. In front of her was a narrow puddle of the glue growing broader as it reached the flailing figure, she held the flame against it. With a deep 'fwoomp' noise the glue caught fire. The man now looked like a dancing bonfire, his screams eaten by the flame he started to run disoriented towards Lane. She took a few steps back wards but the man was faster and she was afraid to stumble, so she did the thing that seemed like the best idea at that moment. She swung the bucket hitting the man with full force on the side of the head. This sent him falling over the handrail as another offering to the endless pit below her.
She heard another shot behind her. Whirling around she saw a man falling backwards a fountain of blood gushing from his forehead as he fell. It looked like she had gotten rid of the attackers on her side. It appeared that they had survived. Lane was not sure what exactly it was that they had just gone through or who these people where in the first place. But it was over now. Lane walked over towards Monica, brush and bucket still in hand.
"Any idea who those people were?" said Lane.
"You guess is as good as mine." Monica said.
"Did anyone of them survive?"
"I'm not good at taking prisoners." Monica looked back surveying her work there was the body that had just fallen with a neat entry wound on the brow and half the head missing on the back. A few meters further was another one is a very similar condition.
"Maybe we can find something on them to give us a clue. This looked more like an ambush and I somehow doubt that who ever is after us got this far ahead. We must really have personalities that inspire murder in people..." said Lane.
Monica was turning back to her smiling. Her smile faded. Lane was still wondering why when she heard the clunk , clunk, of heavy boots landing on the platform behind her. Monica's expression flowed from amused to cold anger, he rifle moving up pointing right past Lane towards who ever was behind her now.
"Drop you weapon or die." Monica said.
"You drop your weapon missy or your friend here's dead." a raspy male voice said behind her.
"If you kill here you have noting to bargain with and you still die." said Monica her expression hardening further.
"Or I could shoot your little friend here killing you too darling, because my bullet will travel through her right into you." the male countered.
"You will still die." Monica said.
"You really want to make that gamble?" the voice asked. Lane was thinking furiously about what she could do but apart from turning around quick enough hoping to hit the man's rifle maybe giving Monica enough time for a clear shot she could not think of much. The biggest problem with that plan was that she really did not like the odds of it. There was also the crippling fear that made breathing hard.
"How about this." said the voice of Captain Idris. "You let that gun fall so I don't need to shoot you through the arms holding the rifle. After that I will shoot you through the hip shattering it along with the upper ends of your thigh bones to make it harder for you to escape. "Give up or die slowly."
Lane heard the rifle clatter to the floor.
"Hand behind your neck. Make any kind of silly motion and I will shoot you. Somewhere where it won't kill you and then I will drag you away to put ants into the wound. With my friend over there you had your chance for a quick death. With me you have the choice between absolute obedience or a slow week-long death filled with agonies which will become legend once you finally arrive in hell." Idris said her voice was not cold like Monica's but filled with a malevolent viciousness that made Lane's skin crawl, she could feel the grin on the captains face, one that was there to show teeth. "You can turn around Lane."
Lane turned around. Behind her stood a large short haired man who looked like he could win a bar brawl all by himself. Apart from his face that looked terrified. Captain Idris was hanging out of the large tear supporting herself on a beam holding the envelope of the Unconquered Sun, the other arm holding her heavy revolver that was pointing at the man's head. Behind her Monica shifted in her position to have a clear shot at him.
"Lane." the captain said. "This piece of dog shit wanted to murder you. If you want you can show him how much you appreciate that plan, for some reason he mistook you for someone that could be simply used like that." Idris's expression changed after she had said that, he smile vanished nodding towards Lane. Lane did not even think about what she was doing. She swung her friend the bucket hitting the man in the face with it. Her target didn't have time to react, still dazed from the hit he didn’t see the second swing coming.
"You fucking piece of SHIT!" Lane screamed pounding him with the bucket. Her fear for her life turned into fury which she channelled completely into her blows. "How fucking dare you," the man had fallen to the floor his right hand lading suspiciously close to his rifle. Both the captain and Monica instantly moved forward, the captain pulling up her revolver again, Monica just making sure that her target would die the instant that hand touched the weapon. It was not necessary as it turned out. Lane stamped on the arm with her foot, something in the man's arm cracked and splintered. He howled in pain. "You bloody bastard. How often have you done that before." She threw the bucket at his head bouncing of, she took a step forward and kicked him in the stomach stopping his scream. "How often," she kicked him again turning him around with the force of the kick, "did you get away with this." and she stamped his stomach.
"Lane," the captain said with half a smile on her lips, "leave him alive we still need to talk to him."
Lane took a step back , screaming to vet her aggression that was still raging in her. She felt a hand on her shoulder. "Not like this Lane." it was Monica. "Nver like this."
The Captain jumped out of the ship onto the platform crouching next to the wriggling man. "How many of you were there?"
The man just made grunting sounds. "Do not taste my patience." the captain said. "The pain you feel could go away or become much more horrible. Trust me."
"Five." the man wheezed. Captain Idris looked up. Monica held up three fingers and then pointed at the man lying on the ground lifting a fourth finger. Monica had never stopped surveying their surroundings but now was intensifying her efforts.
"Where's the last guy? Did he just abandon you, you little shit?" asked Idris.
"b... base." the man gasped.
"You have a base here?" Idris asked?
The man shook his head. "Base-camp."
"He's guarding you shit?"
The man nodded.
"Great. Lead us there. Don't worry you are cooperating now which means no more pain and no death. Which makes me a much better person than you, you realize that?"
The man didn't say anything.
"The least you can say," Idris said her voice harsh, "is thank you, dog son."
"Thank you..." the man whispered.
"Much better." Idris said. "Lane take his rifle, we will need it when we get to this miscarriage's camp in case he was lying or in case his idiot friend is more competent than he and his friends were and he is actually guarding their base-camp."+
"But I have no idea how to shoot one..." Lane said. Idris rolled her eyes and sighed. "You didn't need to tell that to our guest though."
"Don't worry." Monica said. "Just shooting is easy. I can teach you in a few minutes."
"Well let's go and find the stray dog then." Idris said.
The gap was even wider on this side of the ship. At least there were no ropes involved this time. Lane focused on a point that was well within the secure realms of the platform in front of her and took a running jump. She did jumped to far again this time though she knew about the floor so she skidded it a halt that might have been though of as elegant by penguins. She did not fall though. Finding Monica was easy as she a magnificent stream of Spanish swearing flowed out of her mouth. 'When does she breath in?' Lane wondered as she wandered towards Monica. As there was only the rope in her hand in sight Lane assumed that Monica was working on securing the last one. With little success. She had tied the rope around a column trying to throw a kind of improvised lasso onto a protrusion of the ship. With little success.
"Can I help you." Lane asked. She had hoped to startle Monica this time but her friend did not even bat an eyelid.
"I have no idea if you can but you are welcome to try." Monica said.
Lane could help her. She untied the rope again as it was kept to short leaving it with almost no slack to work with. Now that they were two it was also easier to get the rope around a metal loop on the ships outer frame. Lane would hold her while she leaned forward. "What happened to you fear of heights?" Lane asked.
"Right now there is just me and that wall over there. You are holding me and everything else is golden light." Monica said her eyes glued to her target. "There is no height only the target." She stretched out a little bit further, shoving the rope through the loop leaning further forward as the ship gently swayed away from her. She grabbed the part of the rope she had just threaded pulling back.
"Almost done." Monica said pulling the rope back taking the other end from the floor she walked around several columns which she used as impromptu pulleys pulling the rope tight securing the ship to the frame of the dock. "There we go." she said as she finished a complicated knot.
With the Unconquered Sun fastened in place Captain Idris could leave the bridge and start the actual docking procedure. It turned out to be hard work. As the captain had said if there were automatic mechanisms for the dock the way to activate them escaped them. Instead there were levers involved and cranks. Lane had expected these to be made out of wood but like everything else it was cut out of the same white stone shining with what looked like golden water reflections. The instruments could be set to manually extend bridge like structures towards the ship allowing easy access to the out side of the hull and the envelope above. It took two increasingly excruciating hours to extend enough to work on the ship.
"I am going to take care of the hull. You can cover up the envelope. I'll come with you and show you how to patch it up. Then you'll do it. Once I know that you can do it alone I'll leave you to it, all right?" Idris said.
"Sure thing." said Lane.
"Yes." said Monica.
When captain Idris had said patching the ship up she had meant it. The process which Lane had imaged to be something like they had done inside the ship was far less exciting than expected. It was actually very similar to repairing a punctured bicycle tube. One of them (Monica) hat to roughen the outer envelope, the other (Lane) had to apply a glue with a big brush to it that smelled like a cheap high garnished with dead brain cells. Then both of them applied a patch. Sometimes, for the bigger holes they had to do it in stages.
At first Lane and Monica were talking while doing their work wondering how what they were doing could be seen as any kind of repair. The fumes mixed with the the utter dullness of the task killed the conversation. They spend time in that golden Limbo for what seemed forever. At one point Lane thought about the helicopters that had done this feeling sorry that she could not shoot them down for a second time. For a moment the thought that there had been people inside of the choppers crossed Lane's mind sending a shiver down her spine, making her feel a bit queasy. But she had never seen the people who had died. She had seen how they had fired with monstrously large machine-guns at them, she remembered that they had been sent by who ever had hired the Pale Man who had tried to murder her, that helped a lot with suppressing her feelings of guilt. An eternity after that captain Idris returned.
"Good news. The damage to the hull is mostly minor and you have sealed most of the damage outside, it is very important that you close all the holes, it ruins the aero dynamics of the ship. Not only will it slow us down but we are risking that our fuel will not last until Fez." said captain Idris.
"Really? What about that trick you pulled of earlier when you said that you made the wind resistance go away?" Lane said.
"That's actually not something that we can do all the time. Telling the laws of physics to go and fuck themselves comes with a high price tag." Idris said.
"Do we need to sacrifice someone to reactivate the system?" Lane asked her eyes widening in horror.
"What?" Idris said. "No. Why would you even think that?"
"Didn't you say something about black magic?" Lane said.
"No. I said something about ancient magic. Well whatever. I need to get inside and see if I can repair some of the vacuum cells. Do not stop working. Under any circumstances. Once dawn approaches we must leave. We probably should also move onwards. hanging around here for another day isn't a good idea."
"Why? Are you sure that our enemies will come here?" Monica asked.
Idris shook her head. "Instinct. We should move on soon. Now less arguing. Get to work."
It didn't take long for Lane and Monica falling back into their trance of boredom, the only things that kept them going was when they had reached the point where they could count the final holes. Suddenly sealing one of them felt like incredible achievement. With the end in sight they shook off much of their drowsiness. They decided to leave the biggest hole that was more like a long diagonal rip in the envelope as the last one, closing the smaller ones first to be able to regain some of their strength to close the last big one properly.
Time refused to fly it was however willing to start crawling again. When there were only five left Lane and Monica started shouting out the numbers. When they had reached "FOUR!" and moved to three Monica started to sand the envelope of the Zeppelin with renewed vigour.
"You are really getting into it again." Lane said.
"Yes." Monica said. Her eye deadly serious signalling Lane to come closer.
"Wh..." Lane started to say but Monica stopped her with a hard stare signalling her with again with a motion of her eyes to come closer to the gap.
"First." Monica whispered "Do exactly as I say. No sudden movements. At all. Blink twice if you got that."
Lane blinked twice.
"Do not look around. Blink once."
Lane blinked once.
"Good. If you have a weapon with you rub your chin if not wipe away the sweat from your brow."
Lane swiped away the sweat of her brow. She would have loved to wonder what this was all about but she was very sure that this was serious and horrible.
"There are people coming. They are being sneaky. So probably enemies." Monica said then raising her voice again. "Great! This one is ready to. Can I have the brush and the glue? I really want to close this one my self." Lane had to work hard not roll her eyes. What Monica had just said made hardly any sense and her acting was wooden. It may have been enough for the unseen lurkers. Even now as Lane was paying enormous attention to the corners of her eyes she didn't see anything suspicious. She did trust Monica's judgement though, she could not remember a time when anyone had managed to sneak on Monica, ever.
Lane put the patch over the hole while Monica pretended to watch her how she was smoothing out the wrinkles from the fabric that now covered the hole. Monica moved her head shifting it a bit to the left and the right like she was appraising Lane's work. Lane looked back at her friend smiling nervously, Monica's eyes were unfocused focusing at no particular point instead they were absorbing everything around her.
"Almost done here." Lane said mostly to tell Monica that she could not pretend to be busy for much longer.
"Cool." said Monica with her hard on the rocks voice that she used only when she was in tense business meeting or getting ready to kill people. "Go ahead, let's get ready for the next hole." Lane walked towards the next tear in the envelope trying very hard not to start shaking while walking. She discovered that it was incredibly difficult to control shaking by tensing up it just made it worse. She has just passed one of the many ring shaped ribs that made up the dock tunnels when she saw a shadow that was hiding on the other side, the shade flung it self towards her, it was to fast, she had not even half turned around to face her attacker before it... it did not striker her. When she was expecting to be pushed into the Zeppelin she just heard a muffled gurgling. A snarling Monica had appeared between them and had appeared between them stopping the attacker with a hard punch to the throat with the handle of the brush. The man tried to scream but his broken throat only produced broken noises. He had some kind of rifle slung over his should which he tried to grope. Monica slapped him with the glue brush one, two, three times and followed by an open palm strike with which she attached a patch to his face. The man tried to rip off the patch from his face giving Monica enough time to grab the rifle and kick him in the shin. He made more crushed noises of pain pulling his leg up. Now that he was unbalanced Monica hit him with the butt of his own rifle sending him tumbling over the railing of the work platform, he missed the lower part of the support ring by hairs breadth and continued his log journey towards the ground in silence.
"Now I have a rifle." said Monica. "Now they are all dead. Amateurs. Here Take these." Monica said to Lane handing her the brush and the bucket full of glue."
"You can just put them on the floor." Lane said.
"No. Take this too." Monica said handing lane a long narrow lighter. "I can only cover one side. There is still one of these fuckers behind us. Walk towards him. But do not pass the fourth ring. Stay there and be ready to throw the glue on him when he appears. He will when I start shooting the other two who are going to attack us from the other side. It will not distract him forever. The moment the glue hits him set it on fire, he will do the rest."
"Set him on fire?" Lane said.
"Do it or we will die." Monica said her voice still cold but now far more commanding.
"OK. The brush?" Lane said.
"In case everything else goes wrong you can use it as a weapon. Now go. Go!" Monica said.
Lane walked away from Monica, now she was not shivering any more. She was probably shivering so fast now that she did not even feel notice it any more. She thought she was afraid or shocked but she was mostly numb now. So she moved forward bast the support rings carefully counting them. She reached the fifth, stopped, waited. She wanted to turn around to see what Monica was doing she could not though if she turned around now it would be the moment when the first few shots fell the man hiding behind the stone ring would appear, see her and kill her.
She decided instead to pull up the bucket into position. Faster that way. She twitched slightly as she waited for the fight to being. Seconds seemed to stretch into languid eternities. This was even worse the patching all those stupid holes. Then a loud shot.
A curse in Spanish. Someone crashing to the ground. There. Behind the circular support structure a man appeared ducked low with his rifle in hand. He was looking down the long narrow platform almost looking through Lane, his eyes were still refocusing surprise still crawling over his face when the splash glue hit him. He started to scream in alarm. He tried to clean the glue away from his face. Lane could not bring her self to use the lighter. The the man started to fire his gun blindly. Some bullets flying past lane others deep into the temple and one or two puncturing the envelope of the Unconquered Sun. That was enough for Lane. She pressed down the button of the lighter creating a small flame. She carefully hunkered down still looking at the man how was still busy screaming and firing wildly in very direction. In front of her was a narrow puddle of the glue growing broader as it reached the flailing figure, she held the flame against it. With a deep 'fwoomp' noise the glue caught fire. The man now looked like a dancing bonfire, his screams eaten by the flame he started to run disoriented towards Lane. She took a few steps back wards but the man was faster and she was afraid to stumble, so she did the thing that seemed like the best idea at that moment. She swung the bucket hitting the man with full force on the side of the head. This sent him falling over the handrail as another offering to the endless pit below her.
She heard another shot behind her. Whirling around she saw a man falling backwards a fountain of blood gushing from his forehead as he fell. It looked like she had gotten rid of the attackers on her side. It appeared that they had survived. Lane was not sure what exactly it was that they had just gone through or who these people where in the first place. But it was over now. Lane walked over towards Monica, brush and bucket still in hand.
"Any idea who those people were?" said Lane.
"You guess is as good as mine." Monica said.
"Did anyone of them survive?"
"I'm not good at taking prisoners." Monica looked back surveying her work there was the body that had just fallen with a neat entry wound on the brow and half the head missing on the back. A few meters further was another one is a very similar condition.
"Maybe we can find something on them to give us a clue. This looked more like an ambush and I somehow doubt that who ever is after us got this far ahead. We must really have personalities that inspire murder in people..." said Lane.
Monica was turning back to her smiling. Her smile faded. Lane was still wondering why when she heard the clunk , clunk, of heavy boots landing on the platform behind her. Monica's expression flowed from amused to cold anger, he rifle moving up pointing right past Lane towards who ever was behind her now.
"Drop you weapon or die." Monica said.
"You drop your weapon missy or your friend here's dead." a raspy male voice said behind her.
"If you kill here you have noting to bargain with and you still die." said Monica her expression hardening further.
"Or I could shoot your little friend here killing you too darling, because my bullet will travel through her right into you." the male countered.
"You will still die." Monica said.
"You really want to make that gamble?" the voice asked. Lane was thinking furiously about what she could do but apart from turning around quick enough hoping to hit the man's rifle maybe giving Monica enough time for a clear shot she could not think of much. The biggest problem with that plan was that she really did not like the odds of it. There was also the crippling fear that made breathing hard.
"How about this." said the voice of Captain Idris. "You let that gun fall so I don't need to shoot you through the arms holding the rifle. After that I will shoot you through the hip shattering it along with the upper ends of your thigh bones to make it harder for you to escape. "Give up or die slowly."
Lane heard the rifle clatter to the floor.
"Hand behind your neck. Make any kind of silly motion and I will shoot you. Somewhere where it won't kill you and then I will drag you away to put ants into the wound. With my friend over there you had your chance for a quick death. With me you have the choice between absolute obedience or a slow week-long death filled with agonies which will become legend once you finally arrive in hell." Idris said her voice was not cold like Monica's but filled with a malevolent viciousness that made Lane's skin crawl, she could feel the grin on the captains face, one that was there to show teeth. "You can turn around Lane."
Lane turned around. Behind her stood a large short haired man who looked like he could win a bar brawl all by himself. Apart from his face that looked terrified. Captain Idris was hanging out of the large tear supporting herself on a beam holding the envelope of the Unconquered Sun, the other arm holding her heavy revolver that was pointing at the man's head. Behind her Monica shifted in her position to have a clear shot at him.
"Lane." the captain said. "This piece of dog shit wanted to murder you. If you want you can show him how much you appreciate that plan, for some reason he mistook you for someone that could be simply used like that." Idris's expression changed after she had said that, he smile vanished nodding towards Lane. Lane did not even think about what she was doing. She swung her friend the bucket hitting the man in the face with it. Her target didn't have time to react, still dazed from the hit he didn’t see the second swing coming.
"You fucking piece of SHIT!" Lane screamed pounding him with the bucket. Her fear for her life turned into fury which she channelled completely into her blows. "How fucking dare you," the man had fallen to the floor his right hand lading suspiciously close to his rifle. Both the captain and Monica instantly moved forward, the captain pulling up her revolver again, Monica just making sure that her target would die the instant that hand touched the weapon. It was not necessary as it turned out. Lane stamped on the arm with her foot, something in the man's arm cracked and splintered. He howled in pain. "You bloody bastard. How often have you done that before." She threw the bucket at his head bouncing of, she took a step forward and kicked him in the stomach stopping his scream. "How often," she kicked him again turning him around with the force of the kick, "did you get away with this." and she stamped his stomach.
"Lane," the captain said with half a smile on her lips, "leave him alive we still need to talk to him."
Lane took a step back , screaming to vet her aggression that was still raging in her. She felt a hand on her shoulder. "Not like this Lane." it was Monica. "Nver like this."
The Captain jumped out of the ship onto the platform crouching next to the wriggling man. "How many of you were there?"
The man just made grunting sounds. "Do not taste my patience." the captain said. "The pain you feel could go away or become much more horrible. Trust me."
"Five." the man wheezed. Captain Idris looked up. Monica held up three fingers and then pointed at the man lying on the ground lifting a fourth finger. Monica had never stopped surveying their surroundings but now was intensifying her efforts.
"Where's the last guy? Did he just abandon you, you little shit?" asked Idris.
"b... base." the man gasped.
"You have a base here?" Idris asked?
The man shook his head. "Base-camp."
"He's guarding you shit?"
The man nodded.
"Great. Lead us there. Don't worry you are cooperating now which means no more pain and no death. Which makes me a much better person than you, you realize that?"
The man didn't say anything.
"The least you can say," Idris said her voice harsh, "is thank you, dog son."
"Thank you..." the man whispered.
"Much better." Idris said. "Lane take his rifle, we will need it when we get to this miscarriage's camp in case he was lying or in case his idiot friend is more competent than he and his friends were and he is actually guarding their base-camp."+
"But I have no idea how to shoot one..." Lane said. Idris rolled her eyes and sighed. "You didn't need to tell that to our guest though."
"Don't worry." Monica said. "Just shooting is easy. I can teach you in a few minutes."
"Well let's go and find the stray dog then." Idris said.
Friday, 29 November 2013
Project: Leftovers 015
Chapter 7
"It has to be around here somewhere." said Idris.
"Why can't we just stop over there." Lane asked. "Those houses growing out of the column would make it possible to reach the Zeppelin from outside."
"Half arsed measure." Idris said. "I know a place that is almost perfect for our need. I've been there before and I know it is around here somewhere. Keep your eyes on the monitors."
"You were the one insisting on not wasting more time that strictly necessary." Lane said.
"I know what I said. This is important, the time we are losing now looking for the place we will make up in an under an hour once we are there." said Idris.
"What are we looking anyway? And don't even think about telling us to wait for it. While these sudden discoveries are all very dramatic it makes it rather hard to help you find it."
"You'll..." Idris started. Lane interrupted her immediately. "I'll know when you tell us."
"It's a dry dock."
"A dry dock? What good does a dry dock do us?" Lane asked.
"First it is not on ground level." Idris said. "I is an extension of these random cities you see here, what more important is that it is a dry dock that is designed for air-ships. It is a bit on the large side but it is functional if primitive and the Unconquered Sun will fit."
Lane was thinking about how to protest in away that would not set Captain Idris of when the ship rounded yet another corner revealing the hanging ship yard of the Temple.
"I," said captain Idris, "told you."
The structure was like everything else built out of bleached out stone. It formed a majestic bridge like structure closing the gap between two pillars. Lane had expected one structure into which they could fly the Unconquered Sun, some wildly out of place structure a dry dock for water ships with an arched roof that could be used to reach the outside of their ship. What she saw instead where tunnels of all sizes going on for nearly a mile. The Unconquered Sun would easily fit into the middle sized docks. What they had reached was a shipyard designed to maintain or maybe even build airships in a great scale. The thing that overwhelmed Lane the most that was that there were docks with enough space to house ships far larger than the already titanic Unconquered Sun.
"What is this place?" Monica said out loud what Lane was thinking. Monica who usually was reserved even in the face of things like a temple the size of a city was gwaping now with her eyes almost as wide as her mouth.
"No one really knows." Idris said. "Hardly anything is known about this cursed place. The Berber people have legends telling that one should never enter this valley. That those who do so do not come out alive. Most of the others that went in there to explore also never returned. It wasn't until the late 20th century that some clever bloke noticed that people only ever vanish during the day. A few years later another egghead discovered old myths and legends about a god or demon that hunted man only during the broad daylight." Idris voice changed swelling with pride that politeness was failing to suppress, "It was me who discovered the air docks over here and the eternal guardians."
"You discovered this place?" Lane said mostly to keep her mind from going completely blank. As their airship was navigating into the docks entering one of the tunnels she had the same feeling that she had when she had reached the temple for the first time. The sense of scale as she got nearer was so beyond anything she had experienced that it was hypnotising. Her brain was so busy rewriting everything it knew about the world trying to keep up with reality that everything else was pushed away.
"Yes. When I was younger and a bit more reckless I loved exploring this place. I had a ship and no fear. That I was surrounded by men who laughed at my ambition to become a courier pilot also helped I guess. I knew that during the night this place was safe. It is the prison of the Hunter in Daylight after all. Because of that I came to discover some neat things. Like for example this here."
"It sounds like this isn't a big hobby of yours any more." Monica said sounding all business again but still having problems hauling her jaw back up.
"I forgot the other hunters." said Idris.
"There are other hunters imprisoned here that come out during the night?" Lane said with a voice that was a bit more shrill than intended.
Idris turned around and smiled. "It's not what you think. See this?" she pointed at her eye-patch. "That happened here." she turned around garbing hold of the wheel again correcting their course slightly. "I started to turn my hobby into a business. There were enough parties interested in doing some research here. My ship was perfect. It acted as a base and point of retreat during the day and could take them almost everywhere in the temple including the underground parts."
"This thing has a basement?" Lane asked.
"Yes."
"And it is large enough that you can fly your ship into it?" said Lane.
"In many parts yes. It is incredibly dangerous though." said Idris. "You lose track of time down there and clocks and watches don't work properly. But that's not the point. Where was I...?"
"The archaeologists." said Monica
"The archaeologists...? I guess you could call them that. Well the first group was a bunch of fucking tomb raiders. They had no manners and were mostly interested in stealing things from here. Luckily there isn't much here really. Almost everything here is just the stone you see and when you break it off it stops glowing in the night. With the second group I was more careful and had them show me their credentials."
"What happened with them?" Monica asked.
"Noting should have happened. They were doing proper work. Taking pictures and rubbing of relieves. That sort of thing."
"But...?" Monica again.
"But it turns out that at least one of them was possessed by a demon who was using the expedition for its own ends."
"Possessed by a demon?" Lane asked more surprised that after all she had seen in the past day or two she was still being quite the septic.
"I know! Right?" said Idris. "Who would thing shit like that actually still happens? What ever the case, I found out when the special forces of the Inquisition appeared demanding that he should come with them in peace so that they could sort things out like civilised people. The demon declined rather forcefully. The following battle turned into utter chaos. Severe other members of the expedition were also possessed and the demon had some weird abilities, the worst being able to jump out of his host who was still primed with commands to keep him going for anther minute or so, while the essence or whatever of the thing could posses statues. That day we were not far from here and the entrance to the docks is completely covered in decorative statues. In the end I was caught in the cross fire and lost my eye."
"Who won?" Lane asked.
"Not me. That's fore sure. a few demons escaped others were taken prisoners and only three of the hosts were killed. So in the end I would say that the Vatican troops were closest to a victory? They only had two heavily injured guys on their side. At least they had the decency tow me to Fez putting me in a Rosicrucian hospital. Which by the way was the beginning of my aversion to passengers. Death and calamity always seems to follow very close behind them and as nice as you are you don't seem to be any exception."
Lane and Monica remained silent for a long while. Captain Idris concentrated on navigating her ship deeper into the ship yard, the golden light from out side washing over her face in waves. Despite what she had said she looked relaxed, almost happy.
"I am sorry." Lane said.
"We." Monica said.
"Yes." Lane said. "We are sorry. All we wanted to do was just get out of Morocco, leave all the horrible things that happened here behind us. We just wanted to go home. I had no idea that I was even carrying that thing. I should have looked better."
"You did not know." said Monica.
"It's OK." said Idris. "I believe you. Had you known that people were coming after you with attack helicopters I guess you would have pointed that out when I shoved you inside a Zeppelin."
"I guess not." Lane said.
"I just wonder why they didn’t come after you earlier." Idris said.
"It will have taken them a while to noticed that we had the thingy in the first place." Lane said. "After that we were already in the lower market. Deep underground surrounded by stone walls. No signal down there."
"Makes sense." said Idris. "Right here we are. This is the point when things get a little tricks. there are some strong wind currents inside the temple, nothing serious usually but I can't leave the helm. Which would be fine if there was a place where I could safely fire the earth anchors into. This dock has mechanisms to latch onto airships, but they were of a different size than the Unconquered Sun as well as not being automatic as far as I can tell. So I need you two to get outside With some ropes and tie up the ship in the tradition way. One of you should go port the other starboard. Take two ropes each tie one fore the other aft. Once you are done with that I can come out and show you how to use the mechanisms that are installed here."
A few minutes later Lane was standing at the starboard exit, the one they had entered the ship through at the beginning of the journey. She was carrying to thick ropes she could hardly move with them slung over her shoulders, she never expected that ropes could be so heavy. At least with two of them she was well balanced. As the door opened the still hot night air streaming into the ship, she knew that her original plan of just walking out of the ship would need a bit of a reworking. The dock wasn't far away a meter at most. But between the ship and the dock was nothing. Well there was the gap and the drop which was an abyss without a bottom. When Lane looked down she just saw the nothingness turn into a golden glow. That the dock was not level with the Unconquered Sun but a bit higher with the ship gently swaying in the night air didn't help either. Not one bit.
"Change of plans." she declared to the void. She let one of the rope bundles slide from her shoulder almost falling over as she was dragged down by the weight of the remaining one. Tottering towards the endless drop gave her a healthy shot of adrenalin which helped her jump back a bit, the weight of the rope be damned, back into the safety of the ship. Her heart still pounding hormone spiked blood through her body so that she could drop kick a bear out of its cave into the after life she took the remaining rope from her shoulder swinging it with force over onto the dock. It landed on the other side with a satisfying 'thump'. She took the other rope in front of her feet, hastily trying to return it to its originally coiled form. Her adrenaline seeing no cave bears to fight or flee from was already retreating, so this time it was harder to throw the rope. With an angry grunt she hurled the rope over. Which almost worked. This one was not as perfect a circle as the other one so a bit that was hanging over listened to the siren call of gravity sliding into the bottomless pit of golden light below.
As Lane saw the rope unspooling into oblivion, her adrenaline instantly returned realizing that losing the rope and angering captain Idris was probably worse than the bear. She took three quick steps jumping over the gap. She had so much fear of falling to death that she jumped over the gap and past the ropes onto the very well polished floor starting to skid almost losing her balance. Lane fought against her forward moment feet sliding over the strange floor. She extended one arm to keep her self from falling using it as a pivot to turn faster. Two thirds of the rope were already gone. She grabbed the free that remained on the platform almost relaxing. She immediately turned around again when she remembered that that fucking rope would still be monstrously heavy no matter how much of it she could see at this moment. She did the first thing that came to her mind, grab tight and run in the other direction. The more of the rope she pulled up the less it would try to drag her down. The plan worked well until she had pulled away all the slack that was still left, the moment it was gone she felt the weight of the rope which pulled at her hard. She felt the kind of surprise some would feel when trying to catch a bag stuffed with 60 pounds of feathers. She leaned against the resistance she felt falling over. She stretched out her hands to cushion her fall. Which meant letting go of the rope. Cursing she scrambled back up ran after the vanishing rope garbed hold of it just waiting for her own inertia and the friction of her shoes on the stone floor to do the rest of the work for her. She then spent some time pulling the rope back up cursing. Not much later she was cursing even more when she tried to somehow tie the rope to the Zeppelin and the dock.
Thursday, 28 November 2013
Project: Leftovers 014
Lane was surprised at how big the plane part of the ship actually was. She and the captain walked through what felt to her endless corridors which once they had left the residential parts were all metal walls, pipes, thick ropes of multicoloured wires. An oil refinery looked festive in comparison. For a change the passed through a large cargo hold that was mostly empty. There were a few crates and metal containers there fastened to the floor with thick cargo belts. Captain Idris interrupted their search of Monica to have a look at them. She asked Lane to help her with it. She was to look for any kind of damage. Especially bullet holes. Scratches were fine but as soon as you could look inside she should tell her. They spent the next twenty minutes doing a rather convincing re-enactment of two very forgiving art-critics visiting the worlds most boring contemporary art exhibitions.
"Did you find anything?" asked the captain.
"Not even a scratch really." said Lane.
"Great. Let's try to find your friend again."
They continued locking for Monica finally finding her in one of the upper decks. At least Lane thought they were in an 'upper' deck. They had climbed a ladder and some stairs to get here but by now she had lost all sense of direction. They might as well have left the plane part a long time ago and where now walking through some strange inner sanctum hidden away in the heart of the Zeppelin.
Monica had a two large gas bottles slung over her shoulder a red one and a blue one, welding something in the ceiling above her being very careful to not stand directly under the seam. It looked as she had not noticed them approaching, the light of the welder was blinding surprisingly noisy. Before they could come close to touching distance she turned towards them, moving the welding mask up while holding the welder it's pilot flame dancing playfully in front of the main in their general direction. While Lane was still deciding if that was a good sign. Monica let the welder sink.
"There were bullet holes up here?" Idris asked.
"No." said Monica, "The hull was cracking here. So I closed the cracks and just to make sure I added some reinforcing metal strips. I'm not an expert but if this was a body that," she pointed at the ceiling, "was in need of some stitches."
Captain Idris looked up and shook her head. "We need to get her to a proper airport soon or she won't be the Unconquered Sun for much longer. Can you keep working on the hull?"
"I can. Most damage can be patched up easily. There a few bits were I will need some help. I also found several broken wires which you might want to check. Those you will have to repair yourself though, this is already outside my field of expertise," she gestured to the ceiling, "and the only thing I know about life wires is to never touch them."
"Don't worry about that and continue closing all the holes. You're doing good work. Thanks."
Monica just shrugged flipped her mask down again to continue her work.
"I can help you with the cables." said Lane.
"You can?" said the Captain.
"As long as it is nothing to intricate but I did all the wiring in my apartment my self, I can even do some soldering." Lane said her pride making her almost an inch taller.
Captain Idris arched the eyebrow under her eye patch to creepy effect. "Very well then, I think I have work for you too." She led Lane around again until the reached a very small utility closet which contained tools. The captain pulled out a tool belt and started handing Lane all manners of pliers, screwdrivers, a voltmeter, insulating tape in different sized and other things what would make working with wires easier.
"Do you know how to reconnect a co-axial cable?" Idris asked.
"Are you trying to insult me?" Lane asked back.
"Follow me."
A few corridors later they were standing in front of a bunch wires ripped out of a wall sending merry sparks all over the place. Lane examined the damage from a safe distance. After the captain had shown her where to find the circuit breakers she left Lane alone with her task telling her that she would be back in about half an hour. She also asked her if she knew how to get back to her quarters, when Lane shook her head Idris told her to stay there and wait for her to return in case she was done faster than that.
She wasn't. There were to many cables that looked very much the same and she had to rip out quite a few of them just to see where they came from. So when captain Idris returned she was done with the most obvious and some more dubious options and asked the captain for help with the trickier ones.
The next few hours she spend with wire repair in several spots in the ship. When ever she was done the captain would return sooner or later and take her to the next bit. The first task was thankfully the hardest. She had not done stuff like this for a very long time. She remembered how Martin had gone through several shades and flavours of hysteria when she had connected their new electric stove. 'Bad memory. Bad, bad memory' she thought deciding instead to focus on learning some basic electric engineering from her mother and watching her work building little controller units for the house. That memory made her smile making her work all the more pleasurable for it.
"Ho long will that take to finish?" captain Idris asked who had somehow materialised right behind Lane startling her enough to drop the heavy pair of pliers she had been using to cut off the frayed end of a thick bundle of wires. It fell on her foot. Of course. It hurt. A lot. After she was done screaming and hopping around like an idiot she faced the captain who was pretending that nothing had happened. "This one is easy, just a lot of work. Maybe 20 minutes?"
"Right. I will send Monica to look for you in 15 minutes in case you are done early. The sun is about to set, we need to hurry. I'll be in the bridge we need to fly into the temple."
"Why can't we just stay outside?"
"Right now we are taking the smallest risk. Most sane people would never enter the valley of the Hunter in Daylight during the day. In the night the temple is safe as far as I can tell. We will go and hide inside. If any of our friends are looking for us they might have a peak in here after nightfall. They will probably not dare to enter the temple and even if they do we have the advantage. The Unconquered Sun will be well camouflaged in there we also have to option to fly almost silently at least compared to the helicopters who would be able to come after us. The most important part is that we need to repair as much of the Envelope as we can and for most of that work we need something to stand on outside of the ship. Something that we will only find inside the temple. Now work. Chop chop. The day is always over." Idris turned around walking away not even waiting for an answer.
Lane kept working on her cables thinking unhappy thoughts remembering the dark opaque colour of the light of her little torch. She suspected that that was the equivalent of a Geiger counter not making a crackling noise but instead starting to hum the tune of Once Upon a Time in the West.
"Are you done?" asked Monica. Lane shrieked another smaller pair of electronic hands slipping from her grasp, this time she jumped back a bit so that instead of her foot only her dignity was hit. "Why," Lane asked, "do you all keep doing that!"
"Force of habit I guess?" said Monica.
"No it's not." said Lane. "I always heard you approaching in the corridors back in the office, I can actually tell you apart from other people just by your footsteps."
"This here feels like a mission." Monica said. "So I guess that triggers my training, especially when walking through metal corridors. They make so much noise if you aren't careful."
"Aren't they?" said Lane. "How great that you instead chose to go all silent running and scare the shit out of me."
"Sorry? I will try to be more hippoish in my walking habits the next time I approach you?"
"It's OK. Just try not to startle me like that."
"So how long?" asked Monica.
"Preferably until the day I die." said Lane.
"No I meant how long until you are done."
"Oh." Lane looked at the wires. "Not long only two left. A couple of minutes."
"Cool. I'll wait."
Lane felt Monica staring over her shoulder. At first it annoyed her having that other presence lurking behind her, but this was not the gaze of someone waiting to let go some snide remark. It was a gaze of curiosity. So Lane started to explain what she was doing. She was half way done with the last cable, having just fitted a short piece of wire to it after she had cut of the frayed ends when the turbines of the Unconquered Sun came to life. She paused for a moment but then kept going just raising her voice so that Monica could hear her over the noise of the engines.
When they walked towards the bridge they felt the ship start rising slowly and then shaking slightly when the earth anchors broke free of the ground. Reaching the bridge they saw that the ship had covered about half the way to the temple.
"You haven't missed anything interesting yet." said captain Idris who was steering the ship using the large ship's wheel again. "Dusk is almost over, as long as it'S not proper night we don't need to hurry."
Lane craned her neck looking out of the window trying to catch a glimpse of the sky above. "How do we know that night has fallen."
Captain Idris grinned broadly. "You will know. Trust me." she said.
As the Unconquered Sun approached the temple the structure kept expanding until everything they could see out of the bridge's window was a forest of columns. Now that they were high in the air Lane could also see that inside the temple was filled with giant statues, platforms, stairs, all manner of structures. Some of the pillars inside looked lie they had buildings carved into them complete with windows and sometimes entire terraces of houses carved into them. While other columns had buildings growing out of them, sometimes like tiny barnacles on the hull of a super freighter, sometimes resembling the crowns of cubist trees. The temple looked like it was filled with villages and cities stretching in all three dimensions. The styles in which they were built were wildly divergent, the only things they had in common was that they were all built out of the same pale yellow stone and that there was no sign of life anywhere.
As the ship approached the outer limits of the temple captain Idris slowed it down until it came to a stop, drifting ever so slightly back.
"Why are we waiting?" Monica asked.
"It's not safe yet." Idris said. "It is no proper night."
"Is there some kind of secret signal we are waiting for?" said Lane.
"You could say that. Yes." said captain Idris.
They waited floating in front of the temple as the remnants of sunlight slowly disappeared from the valley, taking the view of the temple with them. It was when Lane wasn't sure any more if she could still see the building in front of her or was just imagining things that the temple reappeared. Every surface of it started to glow in a rippling golden light.
"Night," Idris said, "has fallen." she pushed the throttle forward the Unconquered Sun lurched forward gaining speed by the second vanishing inside the Temple of the Hunter in Daylight.
"Did you find anything?" asked the captain.
"Not even a scratch really." said Lane.
"Great. Let's try to find your friend again."
They continued locking for Monica finally finding her in one of the upper decks. At least Lane thought they were in an 'upper' deck. They had climbed a ladder and some stairs to get here but by now she had lost all sense of direction. They might as well have left the plane part a long time ago and where now walking through some strange inner sanctum hidden away in the heart of the Zeppelin.
Monica had a two large gas bottles slung over her shoulder a red one and a blue one, welding something in the ceiling above her being very careful to not stand directly under the seam. It looked as she had not noticed them approaching, the light of the welder was blinding surprisingly noisy. Before they could come close to touching distance she turned towards them, moving the welding mask up while holding the welder it's pilot flame dancing playfully in front of the main in their general direction. While Lane was still deciding if that was a good sign. Monica let the welder sink.
"There were bullet holes up here?" Idris asked.
"No." said Monica, "The hull was cracking here. So I closed the cracks and just to make sure I added some reinforcing metal strips. I'm not an expert but if this was a body that," she pointed at the ceiling, "was in need of some stitches."
Captain Idris looked up and shook her head. "We need to get her to a proper airport soon or she won't be the Unconquered Sun for much longer. Can you keep working on the hull?"
"I can. Most damage can be patched up easily. There a few bits were I will need some help. I also found several broken wires which you might want to check. Those you will have to repair yourself though, this is already outside my field of expertise," she gestured to the ceiling, "and the only thing I know about life wires is to never touch them."
"Don't worry about that and continue closing all the holes. You're doing good work. Thanks."
Monica just shrugged flipped her mask down again to continue her work.
"I can help you with the cables." said Lane.
"You can?" said the Captain.
"As long as it is nothing to intricate but I did all the wiring in my apartment my self, I can even do some soldering." Lane said her pride making her almost an inch taller.
Captain Idris arched the eyebrow under her eye patch to creepy effect. "Very well then, I think I have work for you too." She led Lane around again until the reached a very small utility closet which contained tools. The captain pulled out a tool belt and started handing Lane all manners of pliers, screwdrivers, a voltmeter, insulating tape in different sized and other things what would make working with wires easier.
"Do you know how to reconnect a co-axial cable?" Idris asked.
"Are you trying to insult me?" Lane asked back.
"Follow me."
A few corridors later they were standing in front of a bunch wires ripped out of a wall sending merry sparks all over the place. Lane examined the damage from a safe distance. After the captain had shown her where to find the circuit breakers she left Lane alone with her task telling her that she would be back in about half an hour. She also asked her if she knew how to get back to her quarters, when Lane shook her head Idris told her to stay there and wait for her to return in case she was done faster than that.
She wasn't. There were to many cables that looked very much the same and she had to rip out quite a few of them just to see where they came from. So when captain Idris returned she was done with the most obvious and some more dubious options and asked the captain for help with the trickier ones.
The next few hours she spend with wire repair in several spots in the ship. When ever she was done the captain would return sooner or later and take her to the next bit. The first task was thankfully the hardest. She had not done stuff like this for a very long time. She remembered how Martin had gone through several shades and flavours of hysteria when she had connected their new electric stove. 'Bad memory. Bad, bad memory' she thought deciding instead to focus on learning some basic electric engineering from her mother and watching her work building little controller units for the house. That memory made her smile making her work all the more pleasurable for it.
"Ho long will that take to finish?" captain Idris asked who had somehow materialised right behind Lane startling her enough to drop the heavy pair of pliers she had been using to cut off the frayed end of a thick bundle of wires. It fell on her foot. Of course. It hurt. A lot. After she was done screaming and hopping around like an idiot she faced the captain who was pretending that nothing had happened. "This one is easy, just a lot of work. Maybe 20 minutes?"
"Right. I will send Monica to look for you in 15 minutes in case you are done early. The sun is about to set, we need to hurry. I'll be in the bridge we need to fly into the temple."
"Why can't we just stay outside?"
"Right now we are taking the smallest risk. Most sane people would never enter the valley of the Hunter in Daylight during the day. In the night the temple is safe as far as I can tell. We will go and hide inside. If any of our friends are looking for us they might have a peak in here after nightfall. They will probably not dare to enter the temple and even if they do we have the advantage. The Unconquered Sun will be well camouflaged in there we also have to option to fly almost silently at least compared to the helicopters who would be able to come after us. The most important part is that we need to repair as much of the Envelope as we can and for most of that work we need something to stand on outside of the ship. Something that we will only find inside the temple. Now work. Chop chop. The day is always over." Idris turned around walking away not even waiting for an answer.
Lane kept working on her cables thinking unhappy thoughts remembering the dark opaque colour of the light of her little torch. She suspected that that was the equivalent of a Geiger counter not making a crackling noise but instead starting to hum the tune of Once Upon a Time in the West.
"Are you done?" asked Monica. Lane shrieked another smaller pair of electronic hands slipping from her grasp, this time she jumped back a bit so that instead of her foot only her dignity was hit. "Why," Lane asked, "do you all keep doing that!"
"Force of habit I guess?" said Monica.
"No it's not." said Lane. "I always heard you approaching in the corridors back in the office, I can actually tell you apart from other people just by your footsteps."
"This here feels like a mission." Monica said. "So I guess that triggers my training, especially when walking through metal corridors. They make so much noise if you aren't careful."
"Aren't they?" said Lane. "How great that you instead chose to go all silent running and scare the shit out of me."
"Sorry? I will try to be more hippoish in my walking habits the next time I approach you?"
"It's OK. Just try not to startle me like that."
"So how long?" asked Monica.
"Preferably until the day I die." said Lane.
"No I meant how long until you are done."
"Oh." Lane looked at the wires. "Not long only two left. A couple of minutes."
"Cool. I'll wait."
Lane felt Monica staring over her shoulder. At first it annoyed her having that other presence lurking behind her, but this was not the gaze of someone waiting to let go some snide remark. It was a gaze of curiosity. So Lane started to explain what she was doing. She was half way done with the last cable, having just fitted a short piece of wire to it after she had cut of the frayed ends when the turbines of the Unconquered Sun came to life. She paused for a moment but then kept going just raising her voice so that Monica could hear her over the noise of the engines.
When they walked towards the bridge they felt the ship start rising slowly and then shaking slightly when the earth anchors broke free of the ground. Reaching the bridge they saw that the ship had covered about half the way to the temple.
"You haven't missed anything interesting yet." said captain Idris who was steering the ship using the large ship's wheel again. "Dusk is almost over, as long as it'S not proper night we don't need to hurry."
Lane craned her neck looking out of the window trying to catch a glimpse of the sky above. "How do we know that night has fallen."
Captain Idris grinned broadly. "You will know. Trust me." she said.
As the Unconquered Sun approached the temple the structure kept expanding until everything they could see out of the bridge's window was a forest of columns. Now that they were high in the air Lane could also see that inside the temple was filled with giant statues, platforms, stairs, all manner of structures. Some of the pillars inside looked lie they had buildings carved into them complete with windows and sometimes entire terraces of houses carved into them. While other columns had buildings growing out of them, sometimes like tiny barnacles on the hull of a super freighter, sometimes resembling the crowns of cubist trees. The temple looked like it was filled with villages and cities stretching in all three dimensions. The styles in which they were built were wildly divergent, the only things they had in common was that they were all built out of the same pale yellow stone and that there was no sign of life anywhere.
As the ship approached the outer limits of the temple captain Idris slowed it down until it came to a stop, drifting ever so slightly back.
"Why are we waiting?" Monica asked.
"It's not safe yet." Idris said. "It is no proper night."
"Is there some kind of secret signal we are waiting for?" said Lane.
"You could say that. Yes." said captain Idris.
They waited floating in front of the temple as the remnants of sunlight slowly disappeared from the valley, taking the view of the temple with them. It was when Lane wasn't sure any more if she could still see the building in front of her or was just imagining things that the temple reappeared. Every surface of it started to glow in a rippling golden light.
"Night," Idris said, "has fallen." she pushed the throttle forward the Unconquered Sun lurched forward gaining speed by the second vanishing inside the Temple of the Hunter in Daylight.
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Project: Leftovers 013
Chapter 6
The Unconquered Sun floated slowly into a maze of canyons and narrow valleys. The envelope of the Zeppelin was in tatters in many places from fore to aft, the rags flapping in the head wind. Inside Lane and Monica had crawled back out of the weapon pods returning to the bridge where captain Idris had refilled their champagne glasses and was now standing behind the large ship steering wheel directing her wounded but not beaten ship through stone labyrinth in front of them.
Monica drained her glass in one go and went to the bottle to get a refill. Lane only drank half of hers before she regained control over herself again.
"Where that also friends of yours?" Lane said.
"The helicopter guys? No. None of mine. I would say that those were actually friends of yours." she said turning towards Lane eyebrows raised.
"Friend of ours? Nooo. Monica?"
"Not that I know off. It could be. But very unlikely. How could they have found us? No one knew we were going to fly away in your ship."
"You said that you were in trouble with Khalid El Harrak." said Captain Idris.
"We were also seen by a few people who saw us walking with you to your ship." Lane said.
"Possible. But I don't think so everyone knows I don't take passengers." said Idris.
"There were people in the restaurant when you decided to take us with you." said Lane.
"You're paranoid." said Idris.
"Yeah, that's kind of her thing." said Monica. "But her paranoia is usually well founded."
"While I do have some people who'd love to see me resting forever none of them could get three combat helicopters launched on a moments notice much less without making the Moroccan military extremely angry. El Harrak that deformed dog afterbirth does have contacts to the police and the military and you told me that at least the police was also looking for you... so that would bring us back to you."
"But how could they have found us?" Lane asked.
"The only people that attacked us in the under market where Brynjar's pyjama brigade, who were after me not you. The fuckers did appear quickly but where not waiting for us at the entrance to my underground hanger. It took them a while to find us, which they did in the open desert out of line of sight to the city. This means one of you idiots is carrying around a tracking device..." captain Idris said crossing her arms and resting her case.
"But I'm paranoid?" said Lane. Monica just shrugged and nodded.
"Captain Idris," Monica said pointing behind the captain that was enjoying her moment of smugness, "there is a cliff in front of us." Idris turned around rapidly remembering that they were not flying through the open sky.
"Look for the device, break it and we'll be out of trouble." said Idris.
"Maybe during the fight with the three stooges back in the hotel?" Lane suggested. Monica made a 'could be' gesture with her head and started searching her cloths for anything that shouldn't be there. "could you check my back?" she said to Lane.
"Nothing." Lane said.
"Your turn." said Monica.
Lane patted her pockets, taking out her things. "Keys, phone, wallet nothing in my pockets." Something fell out of her wallet. A small black square thing that looked like it was made of plexiglass.
"What's that?" Monica asked pointing at the thing.
"No idea." Lane said she was trying to come up with a rational story how that thing had entered her pocket. Maybe something she put in her pocket when she was roaring drunk after the Vodka and gherkins? But that couldn't be, she had taken her wallet out after wards. Several times and there certainly hadn't been that thing there.
"Throw it out of a window and be done with it." said Captain Idris.
"OK." said Lane scratching her head.
"No. Wait." said Monica. "We should better keep it for now."
"Are you crazy?" Lane asked.
"If she insists you can throw her out of the window too." said captain Idris.
"I know where that thing comes from." Monica said.
"Really..." said Lane.
"The man who was hunted down by the Pale Man. He was running away, but he was not only running for his life he was also running away with something. That thing. When he died he put it in your pocket. I guess he hoped that maybe that way it would not come into the hands of El Harrak."
"Can't have been then. I paid for my amulet with my money from my wallet." Lane said holding up her hand showing her jade bracelet."
"It wasn't in your wallet. It fell out when you took it out of your pocket. The thing was there the whole time. At some point you pushed your wallet back into your pocket shoving what ever that is into the fold of your wallet." Monica said extending her hands out wards palms held upwards in a 'and there you have it' gesture.
"Fascinating Mrs. Holmes." said captain Idris. "Can you throw it out of the window now?"
"That would not be prudent." said Monica.
"That's not what prudent means." said Lane.
"Do you know how we say prudent in Spanish? 'Prudente'. I know very well what it means." said Monica. "Captain how well do radio signals travel here?"
"Down here in the labyrinth? Like shit." said Idris.
"As we have not been attacked again we I would guess that they are not able to locate us. We are going to land soon enough for some repairs, right." Monica said.
"I need to assess the damage, yes. Repairing the ship properly will be impossible out here but we will fix what we can."
"Which will give us enough time to find out what that thing down there is." said Monica.
"You may be right. The dead guy risked his life to get that thing out of El Harrak's hands and El Harrak in turn went through a lot of trouble to get it back." Lane said. "That also mean that we are still being followed, the moment they see that we have the thing we are probably dead."
Monica thought for a moment in silence. "You are probably right. It's what I would do. They might think that we know what it does so they will try to capture and torture us first for information we do not have."
Lane started to fidget with her phone. "So why are we keeping it? We could destroy it or at least throw it away."
"Right now," Monica said, "we are just reacting to a situation we hardly know anything about, that makes us weak. Right now there is no one attacking us, so I assume for the moment at least, that they can't detect what ever signal that thing is giving off. If I had to guess I would say the mountains are blocking the signal." Monica picked up the little square. "I would have expected some blinking lights, or something. But there is something embedded into the resin."
"Do you know what it is?" Idris asked, gently pushing the Unconquered Sun past a sharp corner leading to a a broad valley that lay mostly in shadows as the cliffs on both sides stretched towards each other leaving only a narrow opening between them.
"I have no clue. It seems to be a technical device that is able to transmit its position to those who know what to look for... Do you have a safe, captain?" Monica asked.
"Yes. Several. We can put that stupid thing into a secure lead box and put that inside of a large safe, that way we should be able to block all kinds of signals." Idris said.
"You have a lockable lead box?" Lane asked.
"Yes. Several actually."
"Why?" Lane asked."
"Because I sometimes need to transport things that are better kept sealed away and there are some business partners that I trust, but I don't trust their partners. Especially if all I have to transport is a small thing that is of course completely harmless... Let me put it this way my Geiger counter was one of the best inventions of my life."
"We will probably need that too. Just in case." said Monica.
"And I think I might have to give some courses in moral eduction..." Lane murmured.
"What was that?" asked Monica. Before Lane could come up with an excuse the captain interrupted them.
"We have reached our destination. We will be safe for the night."
"Really? How so?" said Lane turning around looking out of the bridges window.
"That in front of us is the Temple of the Hunter in Daylight." said Idris.
"Great. How does that help us?" said Lane.
"It helps us because this is a forbidden place, no one in their right mind would come here. It isn't really a temple but a prison. Built millennia ago. It is where the Hunter in Daylight is kept prisoner."
"So we can hide there and who ever is looking for us would prefer to look here last?" Lane said.
"Pretty much also the temple is very large, the Unconquered Sun can be parked inside it. It remains better hidden and all the columns and galleries inside will help us with patching up the ship.
"Cool." said Lane. "So what are we waiting for?"
"Dusk." said Idris.
"Why don't we fly in now? We could start assessing the damage faster and repair more that way. Couldn't we?"
Captain Idris turned around her eyes wide. "Are you insane?"
"Wh..." Lane attempted to say.
"It is the prison of the Hunter in: Day Light. An ancient monstrosity that relishes bright sunlight, stalking its price for all to see. If we go in there now we will not come out alive. Do you understand? The 'temple' is built to confuse it, within its walls there is a maze of light that it can't escape and at night it sleeps. So we have to wait for the night to come."
"You can't be serious." Lane said.
Captain Idris shrugged. "If you feel so sure about yourself then go have a look around inside the temple. If you come back out again I will make offerings at the altar of modern science and renounce my silly superstitious ways. Maybe after I am done fixing the incantations in the frame of vacuum bags above which would collapse without them. Come on go ahead. And take that fancy torch of yours with you in case there are some shadowy corners in the temple."
"Fine." said Lane her eyes throwing sparks.
"Really?" asked Idris with genuine surprise.
"Yes. I will take my torch and have a look." Lane said.
"Are you crazy Lane?" said Monica blanching slightly, "Didn't you hear her?"
"Yes I did and she also dissed science. Which is not going to happen on my watch." Lane said.
"Since when do you care so much about science?" Monica said.
"I always cared about sciences." Lane said. "I always read the articles about mice with ears on their backs and about the galaxies in the Hubble deep field and things like that. Just because I work in an office doesn't mean I can't be into science. You... racist."
"Racist?" Monica said. "What you say makes even less sense. Why would that make you walk into a death trap?"
"Because" Lane started pointing her finger at captain Idris, "she just said some bullshit about an ancient thing that eats people and only comes out during the day and that creature is kept in that... ruin over there."
"I still don't get the science part." Monica said.
"Just because someone tells you that something exists doesn't make it so. What I will do is take my torch, walk over there and shine it at the temple. I know that my torch changes the colour of its light. It reacts to something, that we know by now and that something might be effective. So if I shine the light at the temple and it changes its colour I will know that there is something there something strange going on there. If that is the case I will give the captain the benefit of doubt if not we will know that it's just a legend and just fly in saving giving us a significant amount of extra hours. What do you say to that."
"What if your torch does not detect the kind of magic behind the temple or the Hunter in Daylight? What do you say to that." said Monica crossing her arms.
"Shut up." Lane said. "What do you think captain?"
"I think I that I should have gotten some popcorn." Idris said. "Wait until we have made landfall and then you can go ahead with your plan. I like it."
"How do you land a Zeppelin anyway? I thought you needed someone on the ground to pull you down." Lane said.
"Pff. That was true for the old Zeppelins of the 20th Centruy. This thing might look like the ships of old but that's mostly style. Among other things the Unconquered Sun has four harpoon cannons that shoot earth anchors into the ground, they are connected by thick metal cords to a winch systems. It anchors the ship in place and through some high-tech wizardry it will keep the ship in place even during high winds." Idris activated the landing system arming the harpoons, aiming them through a strange targeting device resembling a binocular telescope and two control wheels to choose good spot for landfall. When she was happy with her choice she secured the wheels and pulled a big metal lever. Lane and Monica expected a sound. But heard nothing. They only noticed that it had worked when the airship began to sink slowly to the ground. After a while they felt a slight bump.
"Landfall." said captain Idris. "You can go now an shed some light on the temple of the hunter in Daylight, while your friend and I have a look at the ground-effect vehicles hull."
When captain Idris opened the pressure door to the outside Lane was almost pushed back by the hot dry air that flooded into the plane. There was a very well behaved air-condition she had not noticed active in the airship.
"How did it suddenly become so hot?" Lane asked.
"The valley of the Hunter in Daylight is always blistering hot. IT gets cooler in the night but those walls capture the heat and only let go of it grudgingly." captain Idris said.
"So what are we looking for?" asked Monica who was again all business now that she had a task at hand. She had only looked briefly at the temple most of her attention now was focused on the captain.
"We look for damage. Big things are obvious, but we are looking for small things. Single bullet holes, cracks, even scratches. The Unconquered Sun needs to go into a proper hanger for proper maintenance, but this has to do for now. Later we go upstairs and look how much damage was done to the vacuum bags and see what we can do there."
"Have fun." said Lane who had decided that going to check out the Forbidden Temple of Death was way more interesting than looking at scratches. She waved at them with what she hopped looked like friendly encouragement and not delight and stalked towards the supposedly ancient building. 'Ha' she thought, 'older than history my arse, those columns and that architectural style looks like classical Greek style to me. And to think that Martin was making fun of me because I liked to read those books and watch my documentaries. Not proper education. Stupid fuck. But then when was he not sneering at me...' as she kept on walking she noticed that the temple was much further away than it had looked at first. It looked like a large temple all right, it turned out to be a gigantic temple. While the building kept growing in her field of vision it never felt like she was getting significantly closer. She looked back, the Unconquered Sun still loomed behind her but was now a just an airship in a large desert valley. Monica and captain Idris just small figures looking up at the flying leviathan like ants discussing a daring monumental statue of their queen.
The temple in front of her was still far away and covered most of the ground. A Cyclopean structure built by giants for what they imagined Giants to be Like.
When she finally arrived she was incredibly thirsty. She had noticed that she had not brought any water with her when she was maybe three quarters there. She had considered for a moment to walk back but then decided that it was a stupid idea and a waste of everybodies time. She tried to use her little torch a few times but even in the shadow of the mountains above her the light of day was far to bright outshining her poor torch into insignificance. When she finally had reached the temple, ever step bringing its walls closer, she was day dreaming about could mountain springs and considering liking the sweat of her arms. It was only when she looked up that she was pulled out of her dreams of cool refreshments. She had concentrated on just moving forward mostly looking at the sand in front of her feet that she had not noticed how close she got. The structure was far larger than she had expected. The stone base alone was more then twenty stories tall. On them stood pillars as large a skyscrapers. Lane had to actually bend over backwards to see the top of the temple. When they had arrived she had thought that the Unconquered Sun might have to squeeze through the large open middle of the temple, but now she realized that the air ship could enter the building between any two columns. Once inside it could manoeuvre between the inner structures without much difficulties. She tried to swallow but that only created a strange rasping sensation in her throat.
"Time for science." she said instantly regretting it. Breathing in the dry desert air made her mouth even dryer than it was. Her tongue now feeling like a sock stuck to the roof of her mouth. She pulled out her little torch and shone it at the temple. She did not expect to see much as the sun was still high in the sky. The glow of her torch could hardly be seen at first but the light turned instantly a deep verdant green. She was still dealing with he surprise when she saw that the green intensified and darkened until the entire beam of the torch looked solid dark cobalt green. She turned away pointing the light away from the temple, it instantly lost its colouring, then when Lane thought it could not get any creepier she noticed that waves of greenish colour still washed through the light of her torch when pointed into the direction of the ship. She decided that this was the perfect moment to walk back to the ship. Maybe she could help find some scratches on the hole or glue together some vacuum tubes. Or what ever you did with these things to repair them. Despite her thirst she found a new spring in her steps and hurried back, she would have to have something to drink sooner rather then later. No sense in delaying that. As Lanes curiosity was stronger than most of her fears she turned on the torch again holding it in her hand while she was walking pointing backward. It took a while yet again the beam turned deep green. She kept walking, now with the feeling that something was watching her with hungry eyes. She turned her head every once in a while sometimes slow with terror then fast with curiosity but there was just that gargantuan structure which was mostly filled with air. The light of the torch remained green. As she moved away from the temple the colour grew lighter. She was half way back to the Unconquered Sun before she could not see the change of colour any more.
"So how did your little expedition go." asked captain Idris who was waiting for her at the entrance to the ship.
"Thirst." croaked Lane.
"You didn't take any water with you?" the captain asked?
Lane just shook her head.
"Son of a dog." Idris cursed. "Well come with me then and let's see if we can get you back to the world of the living."
The captain took Lane to the music room, where there was indeed a pool table covered in red felt, a pipe organ and a bar. Idris walked to the bar took out a clean neatly folded white cloth towel. She then took a soda bottle and soaked the towel in water. "Here suck on this." she said.
"Are you fucking with..." Lane tried to push an angry protest through her brittle vocal cord and her parched mouth. The captain silenced her with a sharp motion of her hand.
"Do not talk. Suck the cloth. If you start drinking now you will have the worst stomach cramps of your life and as dried out as you are you would do more damge to your body than help it in any way."
Lane took the towel glowering at the captain. The second the water passed into her mouth she forgot everything she wanted to say to the captain lost in the moment of tasting a bit of water. She almost ate the towel but her mouth was still to dry.
"More?" captain Idris asked,
Lane nodded vigorously. When the captain took back the towel Lane lunged forward trying to grab the bottle. "Oh no!" said the captain shoving Lane back with force. While lane was still stumbling she soaked the towel with water again. "You can have the towel back or I can hit you with the bottle." Idris said the dripping towel held towards Lane, the bottle in her hand held high ready to strike. Lane looked with greed clouded eyes at the bottle for a moment, tensing ready to lunge for it. "Careful Lane." said the captain in a voice painting consequences holding the towel again in Lane's line of sight.
Lane snatched the towel out of the captains hand.
"Good." the captain said. Now sit down on chair put your hands on your lap and promise me that you will not make me knock you unconscious turn you into a rolled joint for roasting, I will keep that towel filled with water at a sensible pace. Is that OK? Lane nodded her eyes still showing a bit to much animal cunning for the captains taste. She walked back to the bar never turning her back to Lane. She took a glass and filled it with tap water, put the soda bottle out of sight and came back with the water glass to soak Lanes towel before it was completely dry.
After a while Lane got her first half filled shot glass with water which she inhaled more than drink it. Ten minutes later Idris trusted Lane enough to give her a small bottle of water and refill her glass on her own. "You'll still get some glorious cramps in a while but while you lie on the floor rolling around in pain I hope you remember that I did my best from preventing you from doing worse to yourself."
"I'll live." said Lane who by now was thinking more sane thoughts than lizard brain thoughts of acquiring water with no regards to the consequences.
"You will." said Idris. "So how did your expedition go?"
"If my torch is right than it is more ancient magic than stone."
"I told you so."
"And now I know." she said in between downing shot glasses full of water. "Where is Monica?"
"Welding holes shut. She is pretty good with it, although she told me that she isn't really used to use to weld things shut."
"She has strange hobbies. Why aren't you helping her?" Lane asked.
Captain Idris gave her a 'you didn't just ask that, did you?' look. "Because you came back with a serious case of dehydration?"
"You could have told her." Lane said looking down at the little shot glass in her fingers. Her shame tried to stop her from refilling it that instant with water, her thirst won.
"Yes I could have wandered the ship looking for her with you in tow. So that she could have stopped patching up the ship so we can both watch you trying to kill yourself with water after you did not manage to do it without." said Idris.
"Sorry."
"It's OK, just try to be less of an idiot next time." said Idris.
"That was uncalled for." Lane said now looking the captain straight in the eyes again. The two women stared at each other for a while until the captain relaxed. "No offence intended. Next time you do something in a dangerous environment that you do not know that well, pause to think and maybe if there is someone around who knows about these things asked them if they can help you out. All right?" said Idris.
Lane's expression softened. "Yes captain. Sorry. When it looks like people are trying to push me I have learned to push back."
"No worries. I like your spirit. I think you need to learn how to better gauge who your are trying to push and what situation you are in." Idris said when she saw that Lane's eyes were growing hard again she arched her eyebrows. "This is just friendly advice, no attack. Trust me with me you will always know the difference."
After a deep breath Lane relaxed again. "Sorry captain. Bad habits die hard."
"As I said you are doing well already, work on it and you'll be doing even better. Now come, take a water bottle with you and we go looking for your friend." Idris said. As she led Lane towards the back of the craft she asked Lane: "Do you know how to weld?"
"I wouldn't know where the burny bit of the welder is."
"Great."
The Unconquered Sun floated slowly into a maze of canyons and narrow valleys. The envelope of the Zeppelin was in tatters in many places from fore to aft, the rags flapping in the head wind. Inside Lane and Monica had crawled back out of the weapon pods returning to the bridge where captain Idris had refilled their champagne glasses and was now standing behind the large ship steering wheel directing her wounded but not beaten ship through stone labyrinth in front of them.
Monica drained her glass in one go and went to the bottle to get a refill. Lane only drank half of hers before she regained control over herself again.
"Where that also friends of yours?" Lane said.
"The helicopter guys? No. None of mine. I would say that those were actually friends of yours." she said turning towards Lane eyebrows raised.
"Friend of ours? Nooo. Monica?"
"Not that I know off. It could be. But very unlikely. How could they have found us? No one knew we were going to fly away in your ship."
"You said that you were in trouble with Khalid El Harrak." said Captain Idris.
"We were also seen by a few people who saw us walking with you to your ship." Lane said.
"Possible. But I don't think so everyone knows I don't take passengers." said Idris.
"There were people in the restaurant when you decided to take us with you." said Lane.
"You're paranoid." said Idris.
"Yeah, that's kind of her thing." said Monica. "But her paranoia is usually well founded."
"While I do have some people who'd love to see me resting forever none of them could get three combat helicopters launched on a moments notice much less without making the Moroccan military extremely angry. El Harrak that deformed dog afterbirth does have contacts to the police and the military and you told me that at least the police was also looking for you... so that would bring us back to you."
"But how could they have found us?" Lane asked.
"The only people that attacked us in the under market where Brynjar's pyjama brigade, who were after me not you. The fuckers did appear quickly but where not waiting for us at the entrance to my underground hanger. It took them a while to find us, which they did in the open desert out of line of sight to the city. This means one of you idiots is carrying around a tracking device..." captain Idris said crossing her arms and resting her case.
"But I'm paranoid?" said Lane. Monica just shrugged and nodded.
"Captain Idris," Monica said pointing behind the captain that was enjoying her moment of smugness, "there is a cliff in front of us." Idris turned around rapidly remembering that they were not flying through the open sky.
"Look for the device, break it and we'll be out of trouble." said Idris.
"Maybe during the fight with the three stooges back in the hotel?" Lane suggested. Monica made a 'could be' gesture with her head and started searching her cloths for anything that shouldn't be there. "could you check my back?" she said to Lane.
"Nothing." Lane said.
"Your turn." said Monica.
Lane patted her pockets, taking out her things. "Keys, phone, wallet nothing in my pockets." Something fell out of her wallet. A small black square thing that looked like it was made of plexiglass.
"What's that?" Monica asked pointing at the thing.
"No idea." Lane said she was trying to come up with a rational story how that thing had entered her pocket. Maybe something she put in her pocket when she was roaring drunk after the Vodka and gherkins? But that couldn't be, she had taken her wallet out after wards. Several times and there certainly hadn't been that thing there.
"Throw it out of a window and be done with it." said Captain Idris.
"OK." said Lane scratching her head.
"No. Wait." said Monica. "We should better keep it for now."
"Are you crazy?" Lane asked.
"If she insists you can throw her out of the window too." said captain Idris.
"I know where that thing comes from." Monica said.
"Really..." said Lane.
"The man who was hunted down by the Pale Man. He was running away, but he was not only running for his life he was also running away with something. That thing. When he died he put it in your pocket. I guess he hoped that maybe that way it would not come into the hands of El Harrak."
"Can't have been then. I paid for my amulet with my money from my wallet." Lane said holding up her hand showing her jade bracelet."
"It wasn't in your wallet. It fell out when you took it out of your pocket. The thing was there the whole time. At some point you pushed your wallet back into your pocket shoving what ever that is into the fold of your wallet." Monica said extending her hands out wards palms held upwards in a 'and there you have it' gesture.
"Fascinating Mrs. Holmes." said captain Idris. "Can you throw it out of the window now?"
"That would not be prudent." said Monica.
"That's not what prudent means." said Lane.
"Do you know how we say prudent in Spanish? 'Prudente'. I know very well what it means." said Monica. "Captain how well do radio signals travel here?"
"Down here in the labyrinth? Like shit." said Idris.
"As we have not been attacked again we I would guess that they are not able to locate us. We are going to land soon enough for some repairs, right." Monica said.
"I need to assess the damage, yes. Repairing the ship properly will be impossible out here but we will fix what we can."
"Which will give us enough time to find out what that thing down there is." said Monica.
"You may be right. The dead guy risked his life to get that thing out of El Harrak's hands and El Harrak in turn went through a lot of trouble to get it back." Lane said. "That also mean that we are still being followed, the moment they see that we have the thing we are probably dead."
Monica thought for a moment in silence. "You are probably right. It's what I would do. They might think that we know what it does so they will try to capture and torture us first for information we do not have."
Lane started to fidget with her phone. "So why are we keeping it? We could destroy it or at least throw it away."
"Right now," Monica said, "we are just reacting to a situation we hardly know anything about, that makes us weak. Right now there is no one attacking us, so I assume for the moment at least, that they can't detect what ever signal that thing is giving off. If I had to guess I would say the mountains are blocking the signal." Monica picked up the little square. "I would have expected some blinking lights, or something. But there is something embedded into the resin."
"Do you know what it is?" Idris asked, gently pushing the Unconquered Sun past a sharp corner leading to a a broad valley that lay mostly in shadows as the cliffs on both sides stretched towards each other leaving only a narrow opening between them.
"I have no clue. It seems to be a technical device that is able to transmit its position to those who know what to look for... Do you have a safe, captain?" Monica asked.
"Yes. Several. We can put that stupid thing into a secure lead box and put that inside of a large safe, that way we should be able to block all kinds of signals." Idris said.
"You have a lockable lead box?" Lane asked.
"Yes. Several actually."
"Why?" Lane asked."
"Because I sometimes need to transport things that are better kept sealed away and there are some business partners that I trust, but I don't trust their partners. Especially if all I have to transport is a small thing that is of course completely harmless... Let me put it this way my Geiger counter was one of the best inventions of my life."
"We will probably need that too. Just in case." said Monica.
"And I think I might have to give some courses in moral eduction..." Lane murmured.
"What was that?" asked Monica. Before Lane could come up with an excuse the captain interrupted them.
"We have reached our destination. We will be safe for the night."
"Really? How so?" said Lane turning around looking out of the bridges window.
"That in front of us is the Temple of the Hunter in Daylight." said Idris.
"Great. How does that help us?" said Lane.
"It helps us because this is a forbidden place, no one in their right mind would come here. It isn't really a temple but a prison. Built millennia ago. It is where the Hunter in Daylight is kept prisoner."
"So we can hide there and who ever is looking for us would prefer to look here last?" Lane said.
"Pretty much also the temple is very large, the Unconquered Sun can be parked inside it. It remains better hidden and all the columns and galleries inside will help us with patching up the ship.
"Cool." said Lane. "So what are we waiting for?"
"Dusk." said Idris.
"Why don't we fly in now? We could start assessing the damage faster and repair more that way. Couldn't we?"
Captain Idris turned around her eyes wide. "Are you insane?"
"Wh..." Lane attempted to say.
"It is the prison of the Hunter in: Day Light. An ancient monstrosity that relishes bright sunlight, stalking its price for all to see. If we go in there now we will not come out alive. Do you understand? The 'temple' is built to confuse it, within its walls there is a maze of light that it can't escape and at night it sleeps. So we have to wait for the night to come."
"You can't be serious." Lane said.
Captain Idris shrugged. "If you feel so sure about yourself then go have a look around inside the temple. If you come back out again I will make offerings at the altar of modern science and renounce my silly superstitious ways. Maybe after I am done fixing the incantations in the frame of vacuum bags above which would collapse without them. Come on go ahead. And take that fancy torch of yours with you in case there are some shadowy corners in the temple."
"Fine." said Lane her eyes throwing sparks.
"Really?" asked Idris with genuine surprise.
"Yes. I will take my torch and have a look." Lane said.
"Are you crazy Lane?" said Monica blanching slightly, "Didn't you hear her?"
"Yes I did and she also dissed science. Which is not going to happen on my watch." Lane said.
"Since when do you care so much about science?" Monica said.
"I always cared about sciences." Lane said. "I always read the articles about mice with ears on their backs and about the galaxies in the Hubble deep field and things like that. Just because I work in an office doesn't mean I can't be into science. You... racist."
"Racist?" Monica said. "What you say makes even less sense. Why would that make you walk into a death trap?"
"Because" Lane started pointing her finger at captain Idris, "she just said some bullshit about an ancient thing that eats people and only comes out during the day and that creature is kept in that... ruin over there."
"I still don't get the science part." Monica said.
"Just because someone tells you that something exists doesn't make it so. What I will do is take my torch, walk over there and shine it at the temple. I know that my torch changes the colour of its light. It reacts to something, that we know by now and that something might be effective. So if I shine the light at the temple and it changes its colour I will know that there is something there something strange going on there. If that is the case I will give the captain the benefit of doubt if not we will know that it's just a legend and just fly in saving giving us a significant amount of extra hours. What do you say to that."
"What if your torch does not detect the kind of magic behind the temple or the Hunter in Daylight? What do you say to that." said Monica crossing her arms.
"Shut up." Lane said. "What do you think captain?"
"I think I that I should have gotten some popcorn." Idris said. "Wait until we have made landfall and then you can go ahead with your plan. I like it."
"How do you land a Zeppelin anyway? I thought you needed someone on the ground to pull you down." Lane said.
"Pff. That was true for the old Zeppelins of the 20th Centruy. This thing might look like the ships of old but that's mostly style. Among other things the Unconquered Sun has four harpoon cannons that shoot earth anchors into the ground, they are connected by thick metal cords to a winch systems. It anchors the ship in place and through some high-tech wizardry it will keep the ship in place even during high winds." Idris activated the landing system arming the harpoons, aiming them through a strange targeting device resembling a binocular telescope and two control wheels to choose good spot for landfall. When she was happy with her choice she secured the wheels and pulled a big metal lever. Lane and Monica expected a sound. But heard nothing. They only noticed that it had worked when the airship began to sink slowly to the ground. After a while they felt a slight bump.
"Landfall." said captain Idris. "You can go now an shed some light on the temple of the hunter in Daylight, while your friend and I have a look at the ground-effect vehicles hull."
When captain Idris opened the pressure door to the outside Lane was almost pushed back by the hot dry air that flooded into the plane. There was a very well behaved air-condition she had not noticed active in the airship.
"How did it suddenly become so hot?" Lane asked.
"The valley of the Hunter in Daylight is always blistering hot. IT gets cooler in the night but those walls capture the heat and only let go of it grudgingly." captain Idris said.
"So what are we looking for?" asked Monica who was again all business now that she had a task at hand. She had only looked briefly at the temple most of her attention now was focused on the captain.
"We look for damage. Big things are obvious, but we are looking for small things. Single bullet holes, cracks, even scratches. The Unconquered Sun needs to go into a proper hanger for proper maintenance, but this has to do for now. Later we go upstairs and look how much damage was done to the vacuum bags and see what we can do there."
"Have fun." said Lane who had decided that going to check out the Forbidden Temple of Death was way more interesting than looking at scratches. She waved at them with what she hopped looked like friendly encouragement and not delight and stalked towards the supposedly ancient building. 'Ha' she thought, 'older than history my arse, those columns and that architectural style looks like classical Greek style to me. And to think that Martin was making fun of me because I liked to read those books and watch my documentaries. Not proper education. Stupid fuck. But then when was he not sneering at me...' as she kept on walking she noticed that the temple was much further away than it had looked at first. It looked like a large temple all right, it turned out to be a gigantic temple. While the building kept growing in her field of vision it never felt like she was getting significantly closer. She looked back, the Unconquered Sun still loomed behind her but was now a just an airship in a large desert valley. Monica and captain Idris just small figures looking up at the flying leviathan like ants discussing a daring monumental statue of their queen.
The temple in front of her was still far away and covered most of the ground. A Cyclopean structure built by giants for what they imagined Giants to be Like.
When she finally arrived she was incredibly thirsty. She had noticed that she had not brought any water with her when she was maybe three quarters there. She had considered for a moment to walk back but then decided that it was a stupid idea and a waste of everybodies time. She tried to use her little torch a few times but even in the shadow of the mountains above her the light of day was far to bright outshining her poor torch into insignificance. When she finally had reached the temple, ever step bringing its walls closer, she was day dreaming about could mountain springs and considering liking the sweat of her arms. It was only when she looked up that she was pulled out of her dreams of cool refreshments. She had concentrated on just moving forward mostly looking at the sand in front of her feet that she had not noticed how close she got. The structure was far larger than she had expected. The stone base alone was more then twenty stories tall. On them stood pillars as large a skyscrapers. Lane had to actually bend over backwards to see the top of the temple. When they had arrived she had thought that the Unconquered Sun might have to squeeze through the large open middle of the temple, but now she realized that the air ship could enter the building between any two columns. Once inside it could manoeuvre between the inner structures without much difficulties. She tried to swallow but that only created a strange rasping sensation in her throat.
"Time for science." she said instantly regretting it. Breathing in the dry desert air made her mouth even dryer than it was. Her tongue now feeling like a sock stuck to the roof of her mouth. She pulled out her little torch and shone it at the temple. She did not expect to see much as the sun was still high in the sky. The glow of her torch could hardly be seen at first but the light turned instantly a deep verdant green. She was still dealing with he surprise when she saw that the green intensified and darkened until the entire beam of the torch looked solid dark cobalt green. She turned away pointing the light away from the temple, it instantly lost its colouring, then when Lane thought it could not get any creepier she noticed that waves of greenish colour still washed through the light of her torch when pointed into the direction of the ship. She decided that this was the perfect moment to walk back to the ship. Maybe she could help find some scratches on the hole or glue together some vacuum tubes. Or what ever you did with these things to repair them. Despite her thirst she found a new spring in her steps and hurried back, she would have to have something to drink sooner rather then later. No sense in delaying that. As Lanes curiosity was stronger than most of her fears she turned on the torch again holding it in her hand while she was walking pointing backward. It took a while yet again the beam turned deep green. She kept walking, now with the feeling that something was watching her with hungry eyes. She turned her head every once in a while sometimes slow with terror then fast with curiosity but there was just that gargantuan structure which was mostly filled with air. The light of the torch remained green. As she moved away from the temple the colour grew lighter. She was half way back to the Unconquered Sun before she could not see the change of colour any more.
"So how did your little expedition go." asked captain Idris who was waiting for her at the entrance to the ship.
"Thirst." croaked Lane.
"You didn't take any water with you?" the captain asked?
Lane just shook her head.
"Son of a dog." Idris cursed. "Well come with me then and let's see if we can get you back to the world of the living."
The captain took Lane to the music room, where there was indeed a pool table covered in red felt, a pipe organ and a bar. Idris walked to the bar took out a clean neatly folded white cloth towel. She then took a soda bottle and soaked the towel in water. "Here suck on this." she said.
"Are you fucking with..." Lane tried to push an angry protest through her brittle vocal cord and her parched mouth. The captain silenced her with a sharp motion of her hand.
"Do not talk. Suck the cloth. If you start drinking now you will have the worst stomach cramps of your life and as dried out as you are you would do more damge to your body than help it in any way."
Lane took the towel glowering at the captain. The second the water passed into her mouth she forgot everything she wanted to say to the captain lost in the moment of tasting a bit of water. She almost ate the towel but her mouth was still to dry.
"More?" captain Idris asked,
Lane nodded vigorously. When the captain took back the towel Lane lunged forward trying to grab the bottle. "Oh no!" said the captain shoving Lane back with force. While lane was still stumbling she soaked the towel with water again. "You can have the towel back or I can hit you with the bottle." Idris said the dripping towel held towards Lane, the bottle in her hand held high ready to strike. Lane looked with greed clouded eyes at the bottle for a moment, tensing ready to lunge for it. "Careful Lane." said the captain in a voice painting consequences holding the towel again in Lane's line of sight.
Lane snatched the towel out of the captains hand.
"Good." the captain said. Now sit down on chair put your hands on your lap and promise me that you will not make me knock you unconscious turn you into a rolled joint for roasting, I will keep that towel filled with water at a sensible pace. Is that OK? Lane nodded her eyes still showing a bit to much animal cunning for the captains taste. She walked back to the bar never turning her back to Lane. She took a glass and filled it with tap water, put the soda bottle out of sight and came back with the water glass to soak Lanes towel before it was completely dry.
After a while Lane got her first half filled shot glass with water which she inhaled more than drink it. Ten minutes later Idris trusted Lane enough to give her a small bottle of water and refill her glass on her own. "You'll still get some glorious cramps in a while but while you lie on the floor rolling around in pain I hope you remember that I did my best from preventing you from doing worse to yourself."
"I'll live." said Lane who by now was thinking more sane thoughts than lizard brain thoughts of acquiring water with no regards to the consequences.
"You will." said Idris. "So how did your expedition go?"
"If my torch is right than it is more ancient magic than stone."
"I told you so."
"And now I know." she said in between downing shot glasses full of water. "Where is Monica?"
"Welding holes shut. She is pretty good with it, although she told me that she isn't really used to use to weld things shut."
"She has strange hobbies. Why aren't you helping her?" Lane asked.
Captain Idris gave her a 'you didn't just ask that, did you?' look. "Because you came back with a serious case of dehydration?"
"You could have told her." Lane said looking down at the little shot glass in her fingers. Her shame tried to stop her from refilling it that instant with water, her thirst won.
"Yes I could have wandered the ship looking for her with you in tow. So that she could have stopped patching up the ship so we can both watch you trying to kill yourself with water after you did not manage to do it without." said Idris.
"Sorry."
"It's OK, just try to be less of an idiot next time." said Idris.
"That was uncalled for." Lane said now looking the captain straight in the eyes again. The two women stared at each other for a while until the captain relaxed. "No offence intended. Next time you do something in a dangerous environment that you do not know that well, pause to think and maybe if there is someone around who knows about these things asked them if they can help you out. All right?" said Idris.
Lane's expression softened. "Yes captain. Sorry. When it looks like people are trying to push me I have learned to push back."
"No worries. I like your spirit. I think you need to learn how to better gauge who your are trying to push and what situation you are in." Idris said when she saw that Lane's eyes were growing hard again she arched her eyebrows. "This is just friendly advice, no attack. Trust me with me you will always know the difference."
After a deep breath Lane relaxed again. "Sorry captain. Bad habits die hard."
"As I said you are doing well already, work on it and you'll be doing even better. Now come, take a water bottle with you and we go looking for your friend." Idris said. As she led Lane towards the back of the craft she asked Lane: "Do you know how to weld?"
"I wouldn't know where the burny bit of the welder is."
"Great."
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