Homecoming, Part 2
16 Jan 2017Tisiphone Moreau
The Dragoons are going back to work.Tiler’s words kept echoing in my head, rolling around like stones and making sleep impossible. It had been two and a half years since the Crimson Mercenary Dragoons had been all but wiped out, stuck on the losing side of the Barai Rebellion. On the brink of annihilation we’d abandoned the monarchy - abandoned our employer. In the hundreds of years of the company’s history that had never been done before.
Shame, more than anything else, drove us apart after that. Most of us had gone off into the black and found new lives and new livings. We promised to keep in touch and didn’t. The company died.
Or so I’d thought.
But Tiler had stayed here this whole time. Poor, broken Tiler; trapped in his chair. Leaving was easy for the rest of us, but where could he have gone? What could he have done? He stayed because the Redoubt gave his life a purpose. We were so willing to let the flame die, but Tiler - alone - kept it alive.
And now he’s brought us back.
It was a losing battle, trying not to think about how many people I’d let down over the years - and how many people I’d let die. Now I could add Tiler’s name to the list. We’d been so ready to leave the company behind and let it wither, and he’d called us home and let us in like we’d been with him the whole time.
Did he believe it? Was he lying to himself so he didn’t need to face the truth that he’d been abandoned - a cripple trapped in a crumbling castle, alone in the dark?
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Rogue Planet JERICHO
1/1/3303 02:42:38 GMT
Guilt crept up and wrapped itself around me like a familiar old blanket there in my quarters in High Redoubt. The old noises of machinery in the walls brought back old memories and I eventually gave up the hope of getting any rest.
There were hundreds of rooms, nearly all of them empty and barren, and I stalked past their open doors on my way to the canteen to hunt up a late-night snack. Raised voices, some kind of argument, swelled up to greet me as I neared the mess hall.
Inside, Kristal and another of our fighter pilots, Doyle Harrington, were squared off across at table from one another. Kristal’s meter-and-a-half frame and pixie-cut hair did nothing to help the ferocity showing on her face, and she gripped a flat, stubby fork as though she were about to use it to gut Harrington. All the same, the much larger man was making a point to keep the table between them.
“Just because you’ve never seen it doesn’t make it impossible,” he said, gripping the table’s edge with both hands to lever himself left or right in response to Kristal’s menacing weaving with her fork.
“You’re full of shit, Harrington! It’s not possible, period,” Kristal spat back, jabbing her weapon in the air in his direction.
I stood in the doorway a moment, transfixed by the scene in front of me. The whole thing was comical, but Doyle was going to earn himself a trip to the infirmary.
“I’m telling you, I’ve done it. You have to be spot on but you can hit it!” Doyle took his eyes off Kristal for a moment, glancing my way, then staggered backwards as Kristal launched herself across the table at him.
“Bridges!” I barked, grabbing her attention as I stalked into the room. She paused, one hand and both knees planted on the table, the other hand holding the fork up at the ready. I looked from her to Harrington and back again. “What are you two fighting about?”
She huffed and stood up on the table, gesturing at Doyle with the fork. “He’s trying to piss me off.”
“He’s succeeding,” I remarked, brows raised at her utensil.
The sudden flush of embarrassment to her cheeks seemed to calm her down a bit. “He’s trying to convince me that he’s made his attitude indicator read ninety. It’s not fucking possible, and he knows it.”
I shot a glance over at Harrington, who was doing a lousy job of hiding his grin.
“Doyle,” I said, dripping ice with every word. “Me and Kristal have been out in the black for the last three weeks, living on salty autochef slop and sludgy black coffee. She hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since we left and while she should be in her bunk getting some actual rest in normal-G, this is not time to start in on her.”
“But…” Doyle stammered. I cut him off with a warning finger.
“It rounds down, Harrington. Eighty-nine point nine, then flips to eighty-nine point nine the other way. There’s no ninety.” The fact that I was even having this conversation was making me irritable. “You two figure it out. I need food.”
I continued past them to the pantry, vaguely aware of Doyle’s mumbled apology before he left the mess hall. While I rummaged through bins of nutrient bars, Kristal drew closer and dropped her fork with a clatter into one of the deep washing sinks in the galley.
“Thanks, Tish,” she murmured thickly. Looking up from my handful of food bars to her, I could see the fatigue in the drawn lines and deep rings under her eyes.
“You really do need to get some rest, Kris,” I said in reply, motioning towards the exit with a dip of my head. “Hold it together.”
She nodded, snatched one of the bars out of my hands and walked off without another word. We’d been doing a lot of not-talking lately.
Being back here is affecting everyone, not just me. My teeth bit into my lower lip and I watched her go.
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1/1/3303 03:02:17 GMT
I gnawed on one of the nutrient bars as I rode High Redoubt’s central lift down to the flight deck, turning my thoughts over with each mouthful. Since I wasn’t able to sleep, I’d decided to get started on Redemption’s repairs myself.
She’d been brought down off the pad and sat in a darkened bay when I reached the bottom of the lift and I walked past the silent, hulking frames of three other ships to reach her berth. In the dim lighting of the night-cycle she didn’t look so worn out. I hoped the same was true for me.
I finished a second bar while I stared up at her - my home, my life, my love - without even tasting it. The hydraulics of the cargo hatch seemed a good place to start - it also served as the Keelback’s loading ramp and was already lowered, exposing most of the mechanicals. I scrounged up a few spanners and tools from the hangar and let myself get lost in the meditation of maintenance.
A couple of hours later I was standing under Redemption’s fore strut, testing the raising and lowering of the cargo ramp and the quality of my work. The fighters from the night patrol roared into the hangar to settle on a pad on the far end, bringing my attention up to the realization that I was no longer alone.
“Hey Moreau!” Doyle Harrington waved his helmet at me as he walked past towards his own fighter parked near the hangar’s entrance.
I blinked at him in a stupor, fatigue making the words a long time in coming. “Harrington. Are you on the morning shift?”
It was a stupid question - the answer was obviously a yes and I realized it as I heard the words coming out of my mouth. He spared me the embarrassment of responding to it.
“I’m going to have something for you when I get back,” he promised instead. “You guys are going to love it!”
Lacking the energy to try and process what he was getting at, I mutely shook my head and went back to my work. Eventually I collapsed into a folding cot in Redemption’s cargo hold, woken once by the ratchet tool slipping from my hand and clattering to the deck, then sliding into a vast blackness of a dreamless sleep.
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1/1/3303 12:27:03 GMT
The next thing I was aware of was the feeling of everything rolling sideways. I woke with a jolt, imagining for a moment that we were out on the landing pad, tumbling over the side and free-falling into the river of magma down below.
My eyes flew open to instead find Kristal leaning over me, shaking my shoulder with one hand.
“Tish? Hey, were you going to eat some lunch?” She glanced over at the collection of empty nutrient bar wrappers I’d gathered at the edge of the ramp. “There’s real food up there,” she added with a hint of concern.
She had work of her own to do on the Taipan in Redemption's fighter bay so I left her with the ship. Rubbing sleep from my eyes and weariness from my face I made my slow way back up to High Redoubt’s living levels and the mess hall. The smell of hot food - actual food prepared by human hands with ingredients - was a surprising delight after going nearly a month without. Mentally, I made a note to keep Redemption’s galley better stocked so we wouldn’t always be relying on the chef machine and food cartridges.
Some kind of sweet tuber - boiled and mashed - and slices of a rich synthetic meat in thick gravy were piled up on a plate and set before me. Tiler was clearly going all out with this Moot, trying to put on a show that the company’s future was more secure than it likely was, but a rumble from my stomach kept me from looking too closely at the motives behind my meal.
Flavor exploded across my tongue with the first bite and I tucked into the food with a single-minded purpose. I’d arrived on the tail end of the meal hour and most of the mess was cleared out by the time I’d finished. It gave me a chance to finish the food in silence and take some time to check my PDA.
There were a couple of notices waiting from Redoubt’s communications core; one to notify me that the Dragoons had some surplus Type-6 parts that would work to fix Redemption’s thruster arrays and another that I’d been scheduled for a delivery run set to depart later in the evening. Below that was a message from Tiler:
Not everyone’s here yet. Figured you’d rather be out doing something than sitting around waiting. It’s a short hop. Deliver some radioactives to a buyer in Eravate, pick up some food on the way back. You mind?
I considered for a moment before tapping back a reply: Nah. Thanks for thinking of me. See you in a couple days.
I slipped the pad back into my pocket and looked out the mess hall windows at the dark, craggy landscape beyond. The thruster arrays were going to have to wait.
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1/1/3303 13:38:58 GMT
On the short list of luxuries High Redoubt offers, free access to hot water showers is in the top three. I took full advantage before getting suited back up in my flight gear for the trip. With a full stomach and clean hair I was feeling a dozen times better returning to Redemption than I had been when I’d left for lunch.
Kristal was strapped into one of the hangar’s exo-loaders and was stomping up and down the cargo ramp, moving the shielded canisters of radioactives into the hold. I doubted she was any less eager to sit around High Redoubt as I was.
The radioactives were harvested from the magma wells that High Redoubt used for heat and power. We’d made these kinds of sales in the past, when credits were short and we needed to get through to the next job, but it looked like Tiler had expanded it into an ongoing arrangement. I made a conscious choice to admire his resourcefulness rather than feel guilty again for abandoning him.
I slipped past Kristal’s exo-loader on the ramp and entered Redemption’s cargo bay, then made my way up to the cockpit to get busy with the pre-flight checklist while she finished loading the cargo. As soon as the ramp was closed I started warming up the engines and signaled the deck officer to clear the launch tunnel.
Before lifting her off the hangar floor I gave Redemption’s ventral thrusters a few quick blasts, trying to clear the stickiness out of the troublesome array at the port-aft side. I was bothered that there wasn’t time to get it properly repaired. The engines responded well enough though, and the Keelback rose up on hovering jets so I could guide her out into the yawning cavern of the hangar’s central axis. The landing struts retracted up into her belly with a familiar thump and as soon as I had a go signal from flight control, I pushed the throttle forward and eased us out into the open air over the Redoubt’s canyon.
We started to gain speed and altitude, gently rising up to get clear of masslock and a place where I could start plotting the hyperjump. Kristal came up to join me in the cockpit, gripping a handhold near the cartographics equipment on the aft bulkhead.
“Looks like we’re getting an escort,” she remarked. The three Taipan patrol fighters dropped into formation around us as we rose clear of the canyon walls. One of them abruptly boosted ahead and jinked across our bow. Redemption’s shields rippled against the heat of the fighter’s exhaust.
I glanced down at the holographic instruments on my left, identifying the ship. Taipan Delta Oscar Yankee. Doyle Harrington.
“Harrington, what are you doing?” I barked into the comms.
“I said I would have something for you guys,” he said in reply. “Transmitting the data package now. Godspeed, Lieutenant!”
He gave a good natured laugh before cutting his mic. The fighters peeled off and headed back towards High Redoubt. Kristal dragged the data package out of the ship’s buffer and pinched it open on the systems panel behind and above my right shoulder.
“It’s an image file,” she said, then paused and blew out a puff of breath. “Sonovabitch.”
I turned and looked up to see what she saw. A still frame, taken from the Taipan’s HUD, hastily zoomed and cropped to focus on the important part.
It was a picture of Harrington’s attitude indicator. It was showing an even 90 degree climb, straight up, no rounding.
I laughed. Kristal laughed. Redemption’s hyperdrive coils laughed. We jumped, leaving planet Jericho behind with a flash and a crack.
It’s good to be home.