Sir ChickenBurger
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Killer Kittens from Outer Space- Chapter Twenty Three
🕑 Added 2024-03-18 23:30:30 +0000 UTCJel
“So she’s awake?” he asked, sipping at his morning cup of electrolyte-laden hydrofluid as he willed his brain to properly start up. “And they sent word of this to you and not me because…”
“It was addressed to both of us,” Skara held her hands up as she scrolled through the message. “But yes, it seems she’s come good. Or as good as could be expected, considering. That’s not all though.”
“Oh?”
“It’s good news, I think. They want to go ahead with the interview anyway. Seems the Specialist will be recuperating planetside, close to where we’ll be, so they’ve extended the invitation again. Looks like you’ll get your scoop after all.”
Jel took another gulp and frowned. “It’s a little late now,” he sighed. “Reports from the correspondents in the north will start coming through either today or tomorrow. I’m assuming that there’ll be more than enough material there to occupy the headlines for a good long while.”
“Was that what you wanted? A headline?” Skara asked innocently, and Jel stopped in his tracks, his brain catching up to his words.
“I…” Was that really what he’d wanted? He’d come to Ervamir for a reason, and that hadn’t been it. “I don’t… I’m not…”
A soft hand brushed his shoulder, and Skara pulled him in. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, and he breathed a shaky breath out that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “You’re a journalist, of course you’d want your name in the headlines. You’re allowed to want more than one thing you know.”
Jel just shook his head to clear his thoughts. “No, you’re right. I should be focusing on my priorities right now. Tell them I accept. I need to talk to the specialist anyway.”
Skara shot him a sharp look. “Rumarr said—”
“Rumarr needs to be told, too.” Jel interrupted. “If Specialist Cardoso is going to be planetside, she’ll need to decide what her next course of action is.
---
“I’m staying up here,” the ursinian said in a low voice once she’d arrived in their temporary quarters. “That doctor, the one we dropped the specialist with? He’s being cycled off the fleet in the next rotation, I overheard one of the navy girls moaning about it. This might be my only chance to talk to him before he goes.”
“How are you going to get him to talk though?” Jel asked with raised eyebrows. “If they’re rotating him to keep him quiet, what makes you think the Admiralty is going to let you get close?”
“You leave that to me,” Rumarr looking down her snout at him with a steady gaze. “And while I appreciate the concern, it’s you I’m worried about. You’ve got that same look in your eyes that I’ve seen on a lot of young correspondents’ faces, right before they jump into the line of fire after a story. Too many of them are dead now. Don’t you go joining them.”
“I’ll be careful,” Jel promised.
“Be more than careful,” Rumarr snorted. “Be untouchable. Because if you make trouble for the wrong people, they’re going to notice eventually.” She turned to leave. “I’ll get to work up here, I’m sure there are more than a few women with blood on their hands trying to lay low in orbit. If I kick over enough stones, something’s going to scuttle out eventually.”
As they watched her go, and the door swung shut behind her, Skara slumped slightly. “Has it always been like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“The Imperium. The fringe worlds, all this ugliness. Have things always been this bad? Did I only open my eyes to it now that it can’t be avoided? Things seemed so peaceful on the core worlds. I never thought…” She looked down, her gaze tracing the edges of the tiles beneath her feet.
He had no answer.
They spent the next hour cramming their belongings back into cases and preparing for the shuttle ride down to the surface. Jel took the time to prepare a few summary questions to ask the humans once they arrived, and before they knew it, an alert came through that it was time to leave.
Finally, Jel thought as they closed the door to the suite and made their way toward the shuttle bay. Goddesses, I’m looking forward to getting some solid ground beneath my feet.
His excitement was short-lived though, as when they arrived in front of the small ship that was waiting to ferry them down to the surface, a large crowd had already begun gathering. Setting their bags down at the edge of the throng, they waited as more and more entities appeared around them.
“Tin can simulator, round two,” Skara intoned, and Jel snorted. So much for arriving looking my best. “I don’t see the human,” she said, as the final stragglers wandered in and a soldier at the shuttle ramp started to tick names off a list. “I guess she’s not on our flight.”
“Makes sense, she’d be crowded the moment she arrived,” Jel remarked. “I’m sure they’ve arranged alternate transport.”
“All aboard for transit down to the surface!” a voice called out. “We’re running on a schedule here and our window is small, so have your accreditation ready for inspection, and board in an orderly fashion. Please keep all limbs and orifices inside your assigned seating, and fasten your inertial dampeners. On behalf of the Admiralty, we thank you for your cooperation.”
“After you sir,” one of the beings in front of him bobbed a shaggy head and called out over the din from the crowd. “Let the man through! Gentry first, ladies!”
Jel smiled grimly as the crowd parted, and stepped aboard, the cavernous belly of the shuttle closing around him, and the rustic smell of scent glands and sweat suffused the air as his fellow journalists followed. It would be a long flight.
Humanity, here I come.
---
Mirai
I don’t know what’s worse, she thought as she pulled the hood of her weather guard up against the torrent of sheeting rain. That I’m soaking wet even underneath my armour, or the fact that I’m still overheating.
The weather seemed to change on a whim in this area of the planet. In the past week they’d baked, shivered and now broiled in their suits, with seemingly no rhyme or reason behind the abrupt shifts. At least in the rain there were fewer distractions from the locals.
Although I could use a distraction right about now, she scowled as another drip of water slipped between her neck and the seam of her suit to run down her back. Just half an hour into their shift and her socks were already soaked through. If only they’d figured out how to make kinetic shielding work on rain. That wasn’t to say that it couldn’t stop the water the same way it stopped bullets, but turning the sensitivity up until it did so would have drained the batteries from the unit in the first ten minutes. Not to mention that the splashes of deflected water droplets would be traveling at a much lower velocity and would end up passing through anyway.
Besides, since when was a soldier’s comfort a good enough reason to invest in better tech?
She’d just resigned herself to another six and a half hours of sodden guard duty when a call came through to her communicator. She raised a hand to signal Imrir, tapping at her ear with a claw, and the woman nodded, shifting over slightly to cover her sightlines. Mirai moved out of the rain and slipped into a tiny one-woman booth that stood next to the checkpoint as she accepted the call.
“Yes?” she answered simply.
“Is this Captain Mirai, of the She-Steps-Silently?” a formal voice asked in native kespan.
“Speaking.”
“Command needs a pilot to ferry a VIP. Your services are requested in orbit,” the woman on the other side of the line spoke with an even tone.
“When?” She tried not to get her hopes up.
“At your earliest convenience.”
Mirai couldn’t keep the grin off her face. Outside, the rain was only falling more heavily with each passing minute, laden droplets hammering the plastic windows without faltering. She kept her voice neutral. “We’re on duty. I’ll need a relief team to cover for my crew.”
“It will be arranged.” Success. The tip of her tail curled in satisfaction.
After a short back and forth, confirmation of their new orders came through, and, hanging up the call, Mirai poked her head out into the downpour.
“Alright you lot!” she called out to her troops over their private communications channel. “Keep an eye out in the direction of the barracks. We’re expecting about half a dozen sorry-looking souls to join us out here, ETA unknown, but hopefully soon. You’ll know it’s them ‘cos they’ll be spitting mad.”
“Why’s that, ma’am?” Imrir asked, and Mirai grinned.
“Now that would spoil the surprise, wouldn’t it?” she answered, and her second mate cocked her head inquisitively before wincing in regret as a fat droplet of water landed square on her eardrum, and she shook her head to clear it.
Five minutes later, the gates behind them opened, and a sodden mass of around eight Imperial troops trudged out.
“They’re looking sorry all right,” Rowla observed, snorting in amusement as the women approached. “How did you know they’d be pissy, ma’am?”
“Because they’re our relief crew,” Mirai answered with relish, and several sets of ears pricked up even as a fresh gust of tropical wind blew overtop them.
“Wait, really?” Krik asked, straightening up out of her slump. “We’re getting out of this weather ma’am?”
“Just as soon as I’ve had a word with their CO,” Mirai smiled widely as she approached the clump of soldiers. A disgruntled-looking officer met her just inside the checkpoint, scowling as a flurry of wet leaves and mud kicked up around her. “Lovely day for it,” she remarked to the woman, and the scowl deepened.
“I don’t know what strings you pulled, but you chose a shit fucking time to pull them,” the officer snarled, drawing the cowl of her weather guard up around her ears. “My girls were slated for R&R today, so you can spare me the small talk while we get this over with. Any issues?”
“Just the weather,” Mirai answered coolly before a detail caught her eye. Peering through the curtains of falling water, she smiled again as she recognized three familiar faces among the soldiers. Ohoho, who do we have here?”
“Don’t start,” growled the officer, stepping between her troops and Mirai. “I’m still dealing with the fallout from these three since the Admiralty received your complaint. Rest assured, they’re learning their lesson.”
It was true that the three huddled troops were looking decidedly more dejected than the rest, and Mirai noted their lack of sidearms. “Got themselves a court martial coming up then?” she asked. The officer’s face stayed locked in an unhappy frown. “Good to know the Admiralty is taking its soldiers’ behavior seriously for a change,” she smirked. “I thought they’d probably get away with a slap on the wrist.”
“They might have,” growled the officer, “if someone hadn’t leaked that blasted video all over the fleet’s intranet. We don’t even have the bodies to spare to replace them, so I’m stuck babysitting three useless, unarmed cunts.”
Mirai’s smile widened. “Now I’m sure I have no idea how that could have happened,” she said, and the officer’s scowl deepened. “You know soldiers though, once something embarrassing gets out, the whole barracks is going to hear about it.”
The officer rolled her eyes. “Once you’re done gloating,” she said, “I’d love it if you could shut the fuck up and go do whatever it is that’s so important that it got me dragged out here into a fucking monsoon.”
“Gladly,” Mirai grinned and turned to her crew. “Come on ladies! I don’t know about you lot, but I’ve got a change of boots waiting for me back on the ship that I can’t wait to get into.”
As they treaded their way back up the pavement toward the consulate’s landing pad, she couldn’t help but take one last look back over her shoulder at the trio of bedraggled kespan soldiers. Their CO had placed them on the most wind-stricken, exposed section of the checkpoint, and their gormless expressions were just too much to resist. With a soft click she took a surreptitious photo on her recorder and grinned again, whistling along with the wind as she led her crew back into the compound.
I’ll have to show Robert that photo if I see him around, she thought, and a bounce entered her step.
“You’re looking chipper ma’am,” Imrir noted, her head still lowered against the rain.
“Just a feeling that things are looking up,” Mirai replied as lightning cracked overhead, illuminating the ship in a flash of bright white. Her crew collectively groaned, and Rowla stopped for a moment to level a glare at her before continuing toward the ship. “What?”
“Every time you’ve said something like that,” her security officer grouched, lugging herself up the ramp and into the dry cargo hold. “And I do mean every time, without fail, we all end up regretting it. We all remember Teskir 6.”
“And Yimir 3, and Warchek 5…” Imrir listed off, counting on her fingers.
Mirai just smiled. “Call me an optimist,” she said, as the cockpit lit up with another bright flash. “But I can’t help but feel like something good is about to happen.”
---
Five kilometers away, in a quiet cul-de-sac just off the main road, close to the Derrimut Primary School, a car of grim-faced men sat staring at a white van. Outside the car the storm raged, torrents of water piping down the windshield, and the men squinted through the running water at a logo on the van’s side panel.
“Make sure it’s the right one,” the front seat passenger instructed, and one of the men in the back huffed, then reluctantly opened the door and jumped out.
He returned a moment later, soaked through. “That’s the one,” he confirmed.
The passenger nodded. "Alright. Take down the address and let's go." With a nod to the driver they pulled out into the street again, and as they rounded the cul-de-sac, he stared out the window at the house the van was parked in front of. Two storeys, brick, big lot. A comfortable living. "Fucking traitors," he growled, as the car sped away. Just you wait.
