The looming shape of Pandora's surface began to dominate the viewscreens as their ship began its approach vector towards the planet's surface. The dull hum of the engines began to pick up again as the forward thruster struggled to shed the excess speed before it descended into the atmosphere. The increasing rumbling of the ship was doing little to sooth Timothy's already frayed nerves. A fear of heights was really just a fear of falling, and right now they were falling towards an unforgiving surface at several thousand miles per hour.
The trip up until this point had been a surprisingly smooth one. Angel was treating the ship with all the enthusiasm that a child would be giving a new toy. Though, Timothy had to admit that that description was probably more accurate that it should have been. Since the ship's launch, she hadn't left the controls, marveling over the tech and fiddling with its functions. At length, Timothy settled for trying not to carve his fingers into the armrests and hoping her meddling didn't bring the ship down.
"What's wrong, Dad?" Angel's voice spoke over the engines, the light of the screen washing her face in a muted glow.
Timothy tore his eyes away from the screen in an effort to land on anything else. "N-nothing. Just ahhh… not big on flying."
"That's news to me." She turned around in her seat with something of a smirk about her lips. "When did that happen?"
"Uhhh… recently." It was growing increasingly obvious that Timothy was going to have to break the news about Angel's ass-hat of a father sooner rather than later.
Catching sight of the planet again, Timothy hoped it would be way, way later. There's no telling how she would react to the news and he would rather not find out while he was currently hurtling through the atmosphere in a ship completely under her control. No. His confession was better left for the ground where he would have ample enough space to run away if she decided to get all glowy-vengeful-daughter on him. Still, he felt a tiny nudge at the back of his mind that was most likely his conscience trying to tell him off for being a jerk. Of course, that voice was easily drowned out by the much louder scream for survival.
In an attempt to change the subject, Timothy decided to turn this line of questioning into something more relevant. "So, how long till we land this thing?"
Angel turned back to the screen and hovered a glowing hand over the control panel. "We should be landing at Tartarus Station in fourteen minutes."
Timothy had to fight back the panicked frustration in his voice. "Angel… what do you mean we're landing at Tartarus Station?"
Angel stiffened in her seat. "This is an automatic transport. It goes to the same two destinations every time."
Timothy could practically feel his life expectancy plunging with every word Angel said. "Yeah, but we just left a Hyperion Station. Why would we go to another one?"
"Well…Tassiter isn't at Tartarus Station and I thought we could go there and figure out what we're going to do about-"
"No – we can't."
"And why can't we? You shipped me to the station, you're acting weird, and now we're running for our lives and you haven't said a thing. What's going on?"
Timothy reached up to rub at his temples with a sigh. "Y'know, you're right. Things have been real crazy and I haven't had the time to fill you in. I promise we'll talk about it after we get somewhere safe." Although I can't promise you'll like what I have to say.
After a moment, Angel nodded reluctantly and turned back to the screen with a sullen expression. "Well, I can't change the heading. The system is automatic and if I try to change it, then someone is going to notice where we're going."
We're dead. This fucking close, and we're dead. Timothy seethed in silence and tried to ignore the way her discomfort began to grate on him. After a minute of self pity, he was drawn out of his thoughts when Angel began to speak.
"There might be another way. I can't alter the ship's course, but I can make sure we don't reach the destination."
Timothy was quick to grasp at the glimmer of hope this provided. "Yes. That. Let's do that. Sooo… what're you gonna do?"
"I can get into the ship's operating systems and cut the fuel delivery lines to stall the engines."
It took a moment for Timothy's mind to process this statement without the techno jargon. "Wait – are you saying you're going to crash us?"
Angel finally turned back with a look of barely contained frustration across her features, "I don't see you coming up with any better ideas."
Woah, okay then. Timothy knew he probably deserved that. "No, no. That's fine. We'll do it your way – firey explosion and all."
Angel turned back to the console and the glow on her arm intensified as she did her strange machine-voodoo thing. "We're not going to crash; it's more like aaa... semi-controlled descent."
"Riiight." Timothy immediately reached out for the straps on his chair and tightened them to an almost painful extent. He had a feeling he was going to need it. Still, better a high chance of death than a guaranteed one.
The rear end a lonely skag crested over a sand dune as it dragged the carcass of its latest kill. A midget's torso dangled from its jowls, its appendages trailing in the sand. The lazy heat rose up in waves under the Pandoran sun and the skag was in a hurry to take its meal back to its den before scavengers caught wind.
What once was a tiny pinprick in the sky, continued to grow in size and brightness until it rivaled the sun. Suddenly, a wave of force kicked up a cloud of dust and a roar began to fill the air. The skag yelped at this new intrusion and began to dig into the sand in an attempt to hide. With the skag's head buried in the sand, only the corpse of the midget was able to bear witness to the disintegrating fireball that passed overhead in its inevitable journey towards the ground. The cacophony of sounds and movement began to fade as the fireball disappeared over the horizon.
After a few moments of silence, a flurry of sand filled the air as the skag shook off its temporary camouflage. Completely indifferent to the strange event now that it had passed, it bounded back over to its prize. Clenching an arm between its jaws, it continued with its uphill struggle. This act of nature was prematurely cut short as a falling piece of flaming metal turned the skag and area around it into a smoking crater of charred sand and glass.
Inside the fireball in question, also known as the hurtling metal box of death, Timothy was beginning to regret every decision he had ever made that lead up to this moment. This is why humans are supposed to stay on the ground! The nice, hard, stable, usually doesn't kill you – GROUND.
"You said this was supposed to be controlled!" His voice bordered on the hysterical as he flung an accusing stare at Angel's back.
"I said semi-controlled!" Angel shouted back over the blare of the system's warning klaxon.
Timothy risked a glance around the cockpit at the chaos happening all around him. Angel's attempt to cut the fuel line had worked better than anticipated. In fact, it had worked so well, that the engines had died completely. Their rapid descent into the atmosphere had superheated the ship's outer hull so much that chunks of it had been breaking off for the last couple of minutes. What wasn't anchored down, now ratted rattled freely around the cockpit, adding to the din of sounds made by half a dozen different warning alarms. Steam vented from the over pressured pipes, making it difficult to see more than a few feet in front of his face. Not that there was much to see at the moment being that the viewscreens had flickered off awhile ago.
His only indication that Angel was doing anything at all was the amount of sweat trailing down the back of her neck and into her collar. Or maybe that was just because the steam and rising temperature had turned the cockpit into a sauna. It would almost be enjoyable, were it not for the thoughts of certain death at the forefront of his mind.
"You call this semi-controlled!" He was pretty sure there was blood underneath his fingernails from how long he'd been tightly gripping the armrests of the chair.
"SHUTUPDAD!" Came Angel's near hysterical reply. Through the haze of steam and sparks, the glow of her arm brightened up the cockpit. "I'm trying to get the retrorockets to fire and you are not helping!"
This didn't exactly improve Timothy's outlook however, and he resigned himself to the fact that they were almost certainly going to die... probably. Surprisingly, this revelation actually calmed him down a bit. His life now hung in the hands of the girl not three feet away from him in a ship that was coming apart at the seams; and there was nothing he could do about it. At least he could take comfort in the fact that dying would get him out of explaining things to Angel. Yeaaah, that woulda sucked.
Suddenly, the ship gave a massive heave that sent Timothy straining against the straps securing him to the chair. The loose objects that had been tumbling around the cockpit all crashed into the monitors as the crafts' sudden deceleration pulled everything forward. Glass and sparks showered down on them and Angel tried to shield herself from the cloud of projectiles.
"We're still coming in too fast, brace for impact!" Angel warned and Timothy tried to keep himself from hyperventilating. He shut his eyes tightly as his hands curled around the straps, waiting for the eventual crash. When the impact finally came, he barely had time to register the force of it before he blacked out.
Timothy awoke to the sensation of wind blowing through his hair. He cracked his eyes open, and immediately winced against the blinding light. Wait, light? Sunlight – or wind for that matter – had no place in a spaceship and his mind struggled to comprehend how this could be the case. Squinting his eyes open once more, he quickly realized the answer to this conundrum.
A gash ran along the side of the ship where the hull had ripped open on impact and sunlight was streaming into the wreck from above. False shadows played over the interior as the light filtered through the smoke billowing from the destroyed walls around them. The rising smoke stung at his eyes and closed his throat. Coughing heavily, Timothy stirred in his seat as he turned his attention to the pilot's chair.
The only thing Timothy could tell from his seat is that she was definitely in one piece. Her body hung limply from her chair, her hair lightly swaying in the breeze. He sluggishly fumbled at the release for his straps. Finding the catch, he had about half a second to realize the stupidity of this action before he plummeted several feet to the wall that had become the ground. He groaned at the impact as it suddenly brought attention to the many aches and pains lancing through his body.
"A-Angel?" He coughed. "Angel, you okay?"
Her lack of response urged him to scramble up the wall, hissing at every movement that jostled his ribs. "Guess I'll have to come up and getcha," he growled.
After what felt like an age, he finally reached her chair. Fighting gravity and the exhaustion of his climb, Timothy braced himself between her seat and what was left of the monitor. Angel's arms sported dozens of small cuts from when she had shielded herself from the shattering monitors. They didn't look too deep, but the blood was making it hard to tell if she had any more serious injuries. Worried, he checked for a pulse at the side of her neck. When he failed to find one, he decided to resort to a more primitive method.
Angel choked awake. "W-what are you doing?"
Timothy ceased pinching her nose. "Well, we're not dead. I'd say that's a plus."
Angel brought a hand up to shade her eyes from the offending sunlight and groaned. "Everything hurts."
"Yeeeup. C'mon, let's get you outta that chair." This time, he was a little more careful about removing the straps. Once Angel had been freed from the confines of the pilot seat, the two climbed down to the spaceship's new floor.
With the cockpits only exit now a smoldering hole in the ceiling, Timothy decided to try their luck in a different area of the ship. Half-carrying and half-pulling Angel along beside him, the two of them made their way back down the darkened hallway towards the storage compartment. The dim glow of sunlight ahead was their only guide as they stumbled once again towards the cavernous empty room. Entering the cargo hold, sunlight filtered through the ragged metal tears in the outer hull. Sizing up a reasonable enough hole to squeeze through, Timothy lead Angel out of the wreckage and into the blazing Pandoran sands.
Squinting his eyes against the winds and sunlight, Timothy surveyed their surroundings and found… nothing. The dunes rolled out in front of them for as far as he could see. No rocks. No buildings. No discernible landmarks whatsoever. Just a huge sandbox full of nothing. But we're still alive, so at least we have that going for us.
"Well, it's a desert," Timothy's sigh carried across the wind. "Sooo, where are we Angel?"
Angel gave a less than enthusiastic shrug and winced. "The navigational equipment referred to this place as The Dust."
"Well it definitely lives up to the name. So, how do we get outta here?"
Angel sunk to the ground and idly trailed her fingertips through the sand, "You're the one with the ECHO device."
Duh. "Oh yeah. Let's get patched up a bit first."
Removing their bags from from his storage deck, Timothy crouched down at her side and dug around for something suitable to sacrifice for some bandages. Drawing out a shirt at random, Timothy got to work at tearing it apart at the seams. Satisfied he had enough, he reached out to offer the strips of fabric to Angel, only to find her quite entertained by drawing pictures in the sand.
"You uh, having fun there? Y'know playing in the sand is gonna get it everywhere."
"It's so coarse and… grainy," Angel observed, only half-listening.
"Yeah, and it's a pain in the ass when you have to get it off," Timothy agreed and motioned for her to take the bandages. "Try to keep it out of your cuts."
Angel accepted them finally with a solemn expression. "You remember the time the three of us went to the beach? The sand there was so different."
Like a punch to the gut, Timothy was stopped short by her words. How the hell am I supposed to respond to that? He might be drawing thin on a few details, but what little he knew about Jack's relationship with his daughter was not something to be looked back on fondly. For that matter, who was this third person she was referencing? Mother? Sibling? Whatever the case, Timothy didn't feel like taking a trip down memory lane at the moment.
Timothy took a seat at her side beneath the ship's shadow. "Let's not talk about that right now."
"You never want to talk about it," she sighed. Wiping the sand off her pants, she gritted her teeth against the sting as she wrapped the makeshift bandage around her right forearm.
Timothy knew what he was going to do as he reached down to help her tie off the second bandage. Of course, that didn't make it any easier to get the words out of his mouth. "Well, you see, the thing is… okay, so here's the thing. I, uhhh…" Angel looked up expectantly at him, and Timothy wished she would fix her eyes on anything else besides him. Suddenly on edge, he scooted a couple of feet away from her before standing up again.
"What is it, Dad?" Angel's voice cut through his hesitant pacing.
Okay, now or never. "He's the thing Angel…" he began again with a deep breath. "I'm not your dad."
The silence hung heavily in the air after her father's confession as Angel tried to process his words.
"I don't understand," she said at last.
Her father stared down at his sand dusted shoes. "I mean, I'm not your father."
A dozen thoughts ran through Angel's mind and it was hard to focus on just one. Did this mean she was adopted? Did her mother have another husband? Had he always known, and why bring it up now? Her fingers plucked at the bandages on her arm as she mulled this over, trying to figure out how she felt about this new revelation.
"So who is my real father? Am I adopted?"
Her muttered something she couldn't catch under his breath as his hand came up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "No. At least, I don't think so. What I meant was: I'm. Not. Jack."
This did nothing to help Angel's confusion. "What do you mean?"
"I'm not Jack. I'm not your father. I was never in charge of Helios Station. I'm just some guy paid to look like him."
Nothing about any of this made sense. Given the Darwinian method of advancement within Hyperion, she guessed it certainly wasn't impossible that her father might have tried something this drastic. But if that was the case, why wasn't he here? "Did my dad send you to get me because of what happened at the station? Are we going to meet up with him later? Where is he?"
"Jack's dead."
All activity in Angel's head ground to a halt at those two words. For a long moment, nothing was said as she focused on everything else going on around her. The wind drifting over the sand and climbing over her fingertips, the slow heat rising up through the air. The beads of sweat running down the back of her neck. A mix of conflicting emotions struggled to break through the stillness of her thoughts and she couldn't tell which one she should focus on. A single thought finally managed to make its way to the forefront of her mind.
"How?" She managed to get out.
"Well, the whole thing with Tassiter kinda… actually, no." The double ran a hand through his sweat slicked hair. "It wasn't Tassiter; it was me. I killed Jack."
Angel had to get this straight in her head before this whole situation threatened to overwhelm her. "You… killed my father?"
"I killed an asshole," he clarified.
Angel slowly got up to her feet. The sting of her injuries didn't even register as she quietly closed the distance between them and attempted to sock him in the jaw. The blow glanced off his shield, turning her wrist painfully away, but that didn't stop her from trying to land another punch.
"YOU'RE THE ASSHOLE!" She punctuated each word with another wild swing. "You're the biggest asshole ever!"
The impostor struggled to grab her arms, but to no avail. "Stop it. You're only going to hurt yourself."
"No, I'm going to hurt you!"
The fraud's expression turned to worry as he glanced down to the white glow brightening around her arm. "H-hey, calm down! Let's just talk this through."
"I'm done talking!" With one last swing, his shield glowed brightly as her fist made contact before it erupted backwards. The force of the blast sent him sprawling in the sand several feet away.
Breathing heavily, Angel turned away from his disheveled body. Picking a direction at random, she started walking out into the desert heat. "Just stay away from me."
"Y'know, dehydration can be a killer in this heat!"
Angel ignored this latest comment. He had been trailing behind her for the better part of the day, always staying about ten yards away. His persistence was a constant annoyance, his commentary even more so. At this point, she wasn't sure if he was speaking to her, or just for his own benefit.
The sun was slowly starting to dip towards the horizon and she was no closer to finding a way out of this desert than she was hours ago. The glare of the sand and suffocating heat had built up a dull throb behind her eyes. The cuts on her arms still stung and purple bruises had formed where the harness had dug into her skin when they crashed. Actually, her entire body just felt sore. With a glare back at her less-than-silent stalker, Angel noted he didn't look nearly as affected. Of course he wasn't; it wasn't like this was the longest walk he'd ever had to take in his entire life.
"Do you even know where you're going?" He called out again and Angel wished he'd leave her alone. Of course, it didn't help any that she knew he was right. Angel had no idea where she was going. At the time, she had just wanted to get as far away from him as possible, but now, with nothing but the rolling sand dunes and distant mountains on the horizon, she was keenly aware of how unprepared she actually was. She hadn't even bothered to grab her bag when she stormed off, and there was no way she about to ask him for it.
Hearing her father's voice calling out to her this whole time wasn't exactly helping. It was impossible to grieve over the loss of her father when his exact likeness kept trailing behind her like some kind of ghost. It did nothing to ease the regret she'd been nursing this whole time either. Just when things were starting to get better between them, this murderer had to ruin everything. Things had been so much better between them ever since she had arrived on the station… wait.
Angel stopped short in her tracks and turned around. "You."
The double stumbled to a halt and the long stretch of sand between them stayed the same. "Yes?"
"How long?"
"It's been about…" he squinted against the glare on his watch. "...six hours."
"No, I mean how ago did you kill my dad?"
"Does it really matter?" He replied after a pause.
"Yes."
The man who wasn't her father awkwardly shifted his weight from foot to foot in a way that he never would have. "Uh, I suppose it's been about three weeks," he sighed.
It was a lie. Everything that had happened was a lie. Angel swallowed back the bitterness rising up from her throat and turned away. First this man had taken away her father, and now he had taken away her hope. Her father had never changed, maybe he never could.
"Stop following me, you ruined my life enough," Angel groaned.
"Y'know, your life wasn't exactly sunshine and rainbows before I came along," he called after her. "I would hardly call growing up in a cage much of a life, I've seen pets with more freedom than you."
Angel faltered in her steps as her stomach churned at his words. How much did he know? "Shut up, you don't understand anything."
"I think I understood Jack a little better than you did."
Choosing to ignore this comment, Angel willed herself to keep walking. Maybe he'd eventually take the hint.
Apparently, he didn't.
For the umpteenth time, Angel glanced back over her shoulder into the surrounding twilight. As the hours wore on and her energy continued to wane, the distance between Angel and her stalker had shortened. Now less than ten feet away, Angel could clearly hear his ragged breathing and took satisfaction in the fact that he was finally starting to tire.
However, her stalker's breathing wasn't the only sound that had begun to fill the evening air. The howls and yelps of distant skags and other things of a less identifiable nature echoed across the dunes. With the heat of the day fading into evening, Pandora was coming alive for the night – a prospect that was horrifying to Angel. It had been one thing to watch the chaos that consumed Pandora from a satellite feed, but it was an entirely different thing to actually be here in person. Angel was keenly aware that her flimsy outfit and the jacket wrapped over her head weren't exactly a deterrent to the predators that roamed its surface.
On the other hand, the Jerk behind her had a perfectly serviceable gun to rectify that. It was becoming increasingly apparent to Angel that she was going to need him to survive the night. Angel halted her march and he nearly bumped into her before slumping down onto the sand with a sigh of relief.
"Oh, thank god," he huffed. "Y'know, you went a lot longer than I expected for someone that doesn't get out much."
Given that this was the longest distance she had ever walked in her life, Angel internally agreed. The shaking in her legs could attest to that. It was will alone had kept her moving – well, either that or anger. Mostly the latter, and her anger has long since run dry. Her father was dead, and if she didn't want to end up the same way she needed this man's help.
Angel flopped down onto the sand across from him and tried to ignore the fact that she was willingly going to speak to her father's killer. "So what's your name?"
"Timothy."
"Take off the mask."
"Uh, I don't think you want me to do that," he said with some reluctance.
"Yes, I do. Now take it off." If she was going to be around him, the last thing she wanted to do was look at the face of her dead father all the time.
"Okay, you asked for it." Timothy dusted off his hands before reaching up to hit the releases on the latches that held the mask in place. The mask peeled away and Angel found herself face to face with… her father. "Ta-da…"
That just wasn't right. Disbelieving, Angel stared back at Timothy. "Why were you wearing the mask if you already look just like him?"
"I told you before, your father fucked up his face and decided that wearing a mask was better than getting reconstructive surgery," he waved this off like it wasn't the real issue. "I'm a body double, remember. If his appearance changed: mine did too."
"So that wasn't a lie," she clarified.
"Technically, I never lied to you."
"You pretended to be my father."
"No, I did my job. You assumed I was your father and I never corrected you."
"That's a lie by omission-" Angel kicked sand at him. "-and you said you had amnesia."
"Okay, you got me with that one," he wiped the sand off his face. "So are you looking for some more ammunition for the hate, or is this going anywhere?"
"I was getting to that," Angel took a deep breath, "Since you're the one that got me into this mess, you're going to help me get out of it."
"What do you have in mind?"
What did she have in mind? She hadn't planned any further than the immediate future of not being eaten tonight. Her father was the only connection she had with Hyperion, and now that was gone. There was no one else that really knew of her existence and there was no one she could trust on Pandora. Except for…
"You're going to take me to the Vault Hunters."
"Uh, yeah. Jack and the Vault Hunters didn't exactly see eye to eye," Timothy snorted in amusement. "I don't think we're gonna be the best of pals. Who d'you think fucked up his face?"
"That's your problem, not mine."
Timothy locked eyes with her, "You do realize that New Haven is half a continent away, right? Once Tassiter figures out that we've escaped, all of Hyperion is going to be on our asses."
"All the more reason to find the Vault Hunters. If what you say is true, then New Haven is the safest place to be."
"I wouldn't be so sure," Timothy mumbled.
"Why is that?"
He shrugged. "Nothing to worry about now."
"What do you mean, 'now'?"
"As in now, we have to worry about more important things: like how we're going to get out of this desert alive." Timothy pulled a pocket watch out of a breast pocket and set it on the sand. At a touch, a holographic map shimmered into existence between them. "While you were wandering aimlessly in the desert, I was doing something a little more productive."
Another kick of her foot sent sand flying through the display and into his face. "Would you stop that!"
"Just get on with it."
"Alright, so. It looks like we're somewhere around… here," Timothy prodded his finger through a blinking yellow marker on the map. "As you can see, it's the middle of goddamn nowhere. There's no way we can survive just walking out of the desert."
Angel rolled her eyes. "You call this productive? I know that already."
"Yeah, but what you didn't know, is that your aimless wandering brought us closer to an old Dahl way-station. The place is abandoned, but we might still be able to scavenge some supplies there and find some shelter."
"How far off is that?"
"Not for another fifteen miles," he grimaced. "Let's rest for now and we'll get going again in a few hours when the sun goes down."
Traveling at night wasn't something Angel was particularly looking forward to. "Isn't it dangerous to travel at night?"
"Yeah, but it's cooler. That, and I don't want whatever's at the station to see us coming."
Angel narrowed her eyes. "You said it was abandoned."
"By Dahl, yeah," he shrugged. "But with shelter and supplies in the middle of the desert, something's bound to be squatting there."
A/N: Not much to say this time, guys. No changes to speak of since they'll be addressed later. Hope you all enjoyed and we'll see you all again soon.
