The Trinity Sitch - Book 4: Heart of the Fury
Chapter 25
"This is not going to be as easy as I thought." Wade whispered as the black starship glided slowly past the holographic asteroid they had hidden their ship in.
"Are you certain they can't see us?" Drakken said, sweat beading on his brow. If anyone on their small ship could tell just by looking how well armed the battleship was, it was him and that was just the externally mounted beam weapons they could actually see. If Trinity's last encounter with one of these was any indication, it also carried missile weapons.
"Well, they should be able to see the asteroid just fine. The trick is knowing if their sensors can penetrate our own electronic countermeasures." He whispered back.
"Um, Wade, why are we whispering?" Drakken asked, raising an edge of his unibrow at the younger scientist. "There's plenty of vacuum between us and that ship. They can't possibly hear us."
"I, uh, I guess it just seems appropriate." He answered.
"Must be a guy thing." Sherry said in her normal speaking voice. "You've been watching too many old submarine movies or something. I was about to ask the same thing."
"Run Silent, Run Deep." Wade supplied, still whispering.
"Oy, he even knows the name of one." She said, rolling her eyes and sitting back down behind her husband.
"I still don't understand why if we've got the superior anti-detection equipment why we just simply don't fly right in and land somewhere." Drakken said, pointing at the blue/white globe shining in the distance.
"Because none of that stuff is any good if somebody just happens to look out the window and sees us with their own eyes. Besides, you managed to pick up a ship with an even more advanced countermeasures suite than this one has and you're five hundred years behind it."
"Oh, that's right. I did. Well, I doubt anyone down there would have thought of that." He grunted.
"There's an unknown number of billions of people down there on that world and none of them are as smart as you?" Sherry asked, propping her feet up on the back of Drakken's seat.
"Nggggh. Just for that, none of the special treats for you tonight."
"Ewwwww, okay, nobody's talking about special treats right now." Wade said, finally breaking out of his whisper.
"Like that's any kind of threat." Sherry said, popping the back of her husband's head with her toe.
"Well, it is." He muttered, rubbing his scalp. "You get more from me now than you ever did before."
"Oh, please, dear God take me now." Wade said, pounding his head on the control yoke.
"Hel-lo, Dr. D. Are you forgetting something? When you came crawling back to me I was pregnant. Don't you think that kind of says I was getting some? If anybody should be running scared of getting cut off it should be you."
"I was getting plenty, thank you very much." He groused.
"The Bebe robots don't count."
"Please, you two. If you don't knock this off I'm either going to hurl or I'm going to turn the hologram off and go moon that battleship, just to shut you two up!" Wade said.
"Well, Shego started it." Drakken said petulantly.
"I don't care, it's enough. This is why I quit reading Kim's diary when she started dating Ron."
A couple moments later Wade noticed the entire ship had gone dead quiet. Both Sherry and Drakken were staring straight at him. Even Yori and Joss, who had been quietly chatting toward the back of the bridge had gone silent, though they might not know why the older couple were just looking at him.
Sherry was the first to speak. "You mean you were reading her diary? Man, I know she never caught you 'cause she would have hung your guts from one side of Middleton to the other. Load, that was so wrong!"
"She never put anything real private until she was with Ron, so it wasn't that bad."
"It doesn't matter. She was probably putting stuff in there that went right over your guy's head but she should still have been pissed if she found out."
"Well, she did find out." He tried defending himself, only to receive another raised eyebrow.
"Look, I was eight when I met her online. I didn't know any better and I was lonely and she seemed so nice."
Sherry shook her head. "Load, there's bound to have been stuff in there about her starting and all other kinds of female stuff. You had no right to do that."
"Okay, okay I get it. I stopped a long time ago and all that's water under the bridge with me and Kim now. I said I was eight and if she said anything weird about female stuff it just went over my head anyway since I don't remember any of it. Can we drop this now?"
"Should I be concerned about you looking over my files?" Trin said, chiming in for the first time in over an hour. For the last two days she had been extremely quiet, only speaking when she had something critical to report. Her silence was bothering Wade, though he wasn't in a position to do a complete diagnostic on her systems.
"There's not going to be anything in there that's embarrassing." He said, arching an eyebrow at the computer generated face.
"Isn't that for me to decide?" She said, doing her best to execute a digital puppy-dog-pout.
"Trin, you're a computer, you don't have embarrassing body functions like a real woman and you don't have boys to pine over and write all kinds of gushy stuff about." He said, shrugging.
"Then why did you boot me up with a female personality." She said, almost growling before winking back off.
"What was that about?" Drakken asked, staring at the now-blank screen.
"I dunno." He said, staring at it as well. "She's been acting kinda freaky for a few days now, since right after we made out jump. Maybe I really do need to run a diagnostic on her."
"I don't think now is the time. Is that ship far enough away from us yet?" He eyed the point in space it has disappeared to.
"Just about. I'll give it a few more minutes, then I'll power up the engines again."
"I was a lot more worried he'd take a pot-shot at us." Joss said, leaning on the console, careful not to touch anything critical. Apparently she had come a long way to overcoming her space-sickness, though this was the first time she had been on the bridge since the jump.
"That shouldn't have been a real problem. A ship that size probably has some high-ranking officers on board. They'd, so to speak, be running a pretty tight ship and that sort of thing wouldn't be allowed with that kind of discipline. Now if that had been a patrol ship or maybe even a destroyer, I'd have been sweating it a lot more, but even that ships probably have to account for their ammunition, even if it's in the form of directed energy weapons."
"Awful lot of words there to say they ain't gonna be shooting at stray rocks." Joss said, raising an eyebrow and smiling at him.
"Um, yeah." He said, rubbing his neck slightly.
"I still say we should make a run for the surface. I'd feel a lot safer on solid ground than just floating around out here." Drakken said.
Wade just shook his head. "If they spot us out here, we can always turn tail and warp out of here. They may outgun us, but Trin still assures me she can out-strip anything we've gotten a scan of so far. If nothing else we can always pull an emergency telewarp. I've had Trin run a few plots so we can do that safely. Well, relatively safely. If we're on the ground, well, let's just say we have to get on the ground without being spotted. That's going to be the real trick."
"I don't think we'll be spotted." Drakken complained.
"Like I said before, they could have something like you used. Say, how did that work anyway?"
"Eh? Oh, it was a computer algorithm that worked on the principal of 'not there.'"
"Er, what?" Wade said, his eyebrow going up once more.
"'Not there, as in if something is in full stealth mode it's like it's not even there. The computer compiled data from several types of sensors and basically looked for too much 'not there.' Basically it was looking for holes and would make an educated guess if there was definitely nothing there and there should be something there then it tells you that something is most certainly there."
"That is so dumb it just might work." Wade said, scratching his head.
"Well, it did work. At least that once. Seems that current stealth vehicles aren't that good yet, so they didn't generate quite enough 'not there.' But that ship was that good, so it set it off."
"Well, I'm still not taking my chances down there until we've got a clear window." He said, crossing his arms and getting ready to invoke his status as mission leader if he had to.
"So, what about contacting Kim and Ron?" Joss said, taking the seat behind Wade.
"I've thought about it, but it's still too risky. I can't even pick up a trace on her Kimmunicator or her tracking chip, even if it's still active."
"What about Ron's."
"Uh, Joss, remember, he got his tracking chip removed by these people and as near as we can tell, he left the house with the clothes on his back, which, according to Kim before she disappeared too, was probably a pair of boxers."
"Yeah, right. I'm just so used to having you able to home in on us in the field."
"Well, I should be able to do that when we get in closer. I made the mistake once of giving them chips that only worked when an active signal hit them. Turned out that was too hard to block. Then only thing now is getting close enough to read them without having to broadcast such a powerful signal since I don't know for certain if they can detect that band down there. There's just too many variables."
"Well, it's frustrating, sitting up here like this. I'm with Drakken, I'd rather be on the ground."
"So would I." Wade agreed. "So would I. Okay, I'm going to drop the holo and fire up the engines. Sher, might want to go check on Ammie, I don't want her freaking out when the engine start."
"I think she'll be okay." She said as she got up. "Thanks anyway for thinking about her." She went aft. The little girl should have still been in the main parlor.
"We're cool." She said over the intercom.
The sound wasn't very frightening, it was just a distant hum as the engines cycled up, channeling ions to generate thrust.
Hopefully, in a couple hours, they would be on the surface and hopefully by then they would know where Kim and Ron were.
If they were even on the planet at all.
It seemed like it had been decades since they were there, not just a year and a half. For the most part, the great crater looked just the same only now it was somewhat colder. They didn't know if that was due to a change of the season or they had simply forgotten what it felt like there, though the former was probably the more likely. The only real feeling they remembered was being doused in the freezing water of the river as the land fell away beneath their feet.
Great powers or no, Kim wasn't about to go anywhere near that ledge, though it was entirely likely the ground was far more solid now than it had been in eons.
"Don't you think they should have been here by now?" Ron shouted over the din of the rushing water.
If the Trinity was there, they certainly couldn't see it. By their best guess, at least Trin would have made the suggestion they land as close to the old fortress as possible, being the only location they were familiar with.
Kim tapped her ears, indicating she couldn't hear what he was asking. He pointed toward the fortress and made like he was walking that way. She nodded, following after him as he set off in that direction for real.
The low-light in the shadow of the crater made it hard to see, especially since the ever-present cloud over the whirlpool cast its shadow over it even at the local high noon. The entrance of the underground complex where the Blessed Mother and her followers had lived seemed only to be a gaping rectangular maw in the side of the crater wall. So much of the false fascia had crumbled away it now looked much more like a cave than anything else.
There was little hope that any of those people remained there. When Arcus Uri betrayed them he brought modern soldiers, first to attempt to capture them. It didn't look likely that any of them survived the collapse but certainly more came later to round up any stragglers left behind. It simply would not do for the totalitarian leaders of the planet to leave a rebel group like that functioning.
Hopefully, they had all gotten away.
If the people appearing on Earth were any indication, it seemed likely that some must have. That made Kim wonder again about the young woman who spirited her to the planet Troxxite.
Ron stepped into the darkness first. When he had first been given his armor, it was old, abused and much of the modern systems it had been built with had been stripped away, leaving it mostly a battered shell that would simply make do for the arena. When the armorer on the Herald's starship had set to repairing it, he had done a first-class job, restoring most of its intended capabilities. It was only too bad he never had a helmet with it, since it would have contained night-vision systems. Instead he had to settle for the more prosaic functions. Touching a control on his gauntlet, a pair of high-intensity lights sprang up, lighting their way inside.
It didn't take them long to find their way into the main chamber. The steps leading down to the central alter were clean and clear. They half-expected to see signs of some kind of battle being fought, perhaps even a body left to molder. Instead it had become just a large, empty chamber. The banners were gone as were the sconces where flaming braziers had been lit, casting an orange glow in the dome shaped space.
Ron cast his beams upward. Now all they could see above their heads was simply more rock that had been carved away by means unknown. Before there had been a sort of skylight there, showing the great thunderhead hovering over the whirlpool. That had almost certainly been some kind of hologram or illusion. Considering the nature of the powers they had seen in use there, they strongly suspected the latter.
Relying on memory and a little luck, they found what certainly looked like the passage leading to their quarters. It could have been any one of several chambers, they simply did not remember exactly which one it had been. All that remained to indicate these had been living quarters were the central pits in the back room of each. Traditional Arkonian beds were not built up above the floor, but cut down into them.
Ron played his lights over one such 'pit-bed,' pointing out a particular flaw in that design, especially in stone. About a foot of water had accumulated there.
"So much for the site of our first wedding." Kim said sadly, standing over the edge of what was now a stagnant pool instead of what was possibly one of the first places they had ever made love.
As far as they were concerned, it wasn't really a wedding. The Blessed Mother had performed an ancient rite that was supposed to merge their souls. It was done for the benefit of her followers since she knew the two of them had already joined their souls of their own accord. Still, from a legal standpoint, they had been married legally on this planet more than a year longer than they had been on Earth. That's why they made such a special distinction that it wasn't a true marriage.
Especially since they didn't get a say in the matter at the time.
"No bodies anywhere." Ron said hopefully.
"I'm almost afraid to go any deeper into these catacombs." Kim said, wishing her more 'ceremonial' armor had nice gadgets like Ron's.
"Probably not a real good idea anyway. Remember how lost we got when we found out about Uri?"
"Yeah. You're right, but if anything happened, they might have gotten trapped back in there. Unless…"
"What?" He asked, trying to see her expression without shining the bright beams directly in her face.
"Sensei said the Blessed Mother came to him. It didn't occur to me at the time, but that means she has some way of getting from here, all the way to Earth, and somehow I don't think she's got her own starship. From what I understand, these people didn't even have real ships until just a few years ago."
Ron found himself lost in thought. Something was tickling the back of his mind. Something he had seen years ago and only just now it was bubbling back to the surface. He just couldn't quite place it.
Something to do with traveling great distances, something that tied in with this place.
He shook his head, not quite able to piece it together. Too much clutter in there. All he could see in his minds eye was an old woman holding something. Every time he tried to think what that might be all he saw was the Blessed Mother's blind face, laughing softly.
Another memory bubbled up in his mind.
"KP, do you remember, way back that first summer we were going together?" They had long stopped calling that time of their lives mere dating, relying on a term their parents had used when they were younger to describe an even closer relationship than that implied.
"Well, yes I do, but I think you need to be a little more specific."
"Vacation, down in Florida. Remember that day we got sunburned so bad?"
She shuddered. "Yeah. We've still got to be on the lookout for skin cancer from that."
"Well, remember when we went to the indoor pool so we could stay out of the sun and cool off some?"
"Vaguely. Ronnie, that was over five years ago and as far as I'm concerned, a whole other life."
"Well, I know this is going to sound weird, but do you remember the blind lady? The one who wanted to be helped to the hot tub?"
Kim just shook her head. From her perspective, those five years might as well have been a lifetime. She remembered those early, seemingly innocent days with fondness, but she did not often dwell on them. Then a sliver of a memory came back to her.
"Surely you don't think that was her, do you?"
"I'm thinking it was. She might have been spying on us even then. Oh, and don't call me 'Shirley.'"
"Ron, quit playing around." She griped, having walked into the old movie line. What was it about men and stupid comedies?
I heard that he said to her through their connection.
We really should have been doing this outside instead of shouting at each other she said back.
"I didn't think of it." He said sheepishly.
"Well, we'll have to remember that in the future. Might come in handy, especially if we're in a tight spot."
"Yeah."
He was still puzzling over the mystery of how the Blessed Mother was apparently able to reach Earth. They were now checking the third room. None of the other beds had filled up with water, but they remained bare stone bowls, just waiting for some leak to turn them into more stagnant pools. At least the door remained intact.
Kim looked about the room, her eyes growing accustomed to the fainter light outside of his main beam. "I don't think we're going to find anything useful here. I guess they got away after all. At least I hope."
Ron wasn't listening to her. He was focused on something on the wall, or more specifically, carved into it.
A set of three triangles, stacked so they created a fourth, larger triangle, were carved into the wall directly across from the room. At first he was thinking that he would remember this if it were just outside the quarters they had been provided that night, but they had pretty much decided it was the first room they had examined, the one with the flooded pit-bed.
No, this drew his eyes for another reason. It made him think of an old woman holding a stone.
It was a triangular stone.
The triple-triangle design was ringed in strange characters. Whatever allowed them to speak and understand Arkonian obviously did not extend to the written language, or at least to this particular language. He had no way of knowing if this was the planet's current script or something far older.
Then his hand shot to his mouth. He knew what the Blessed Mother had been using to reach Earth. He had seen it with his own eyes.
He looked over at Kim, a cold chill going over him. He wasn't about speak about what he knew, not now, not knowing what other memories it would bring back for her. Some wounds never truly heal and he was not about to open this particular one.
It wasn't the Blessed Mother, but Nooni, the Master Lunch Lady of Yamanuchi who had used a triangular stone, etched in these very symbols. She used it to send him from the school to a warehouse in Middleton in order to save Kim. He succeeded, though he didn't know then the true nature of the danger she had been in. It took her a long time to get over that, or at least to put it behind her to the degree she could live normally again. It could have been worse, much worse, especially if he hadn't been able to help her.
"Ron?" Kim asked, puzzled by his uncharacteristic silence.
"Huh? Oh, just thinking. I don't know, that could have been any old lady. Maybe it wasn't her after all."
Kim shook her head. "Knowing our luck with freaky coincidences, who knows. It probably was."
"You know." He said. "A thought just occurred to me."
"What's that, Honey?" She said, surveying the carving that had previously captured his attention.
"What if the Trinity lands while we're in here. You don't think they'd give up and leave if we're not waiting for them."
"Good call." She said. Her finger hovered over the call button of her Kimmunicator. It had been more than three days since she got the message from Wade. So strange he would be able to send it, considering the device was actually designed to tie into a satellite network, not act as a distant receiver. It just wasn't meant to be that sensitive without a repeater of some sort.
"We need to get out in the open and try calling him. Maybe that's what they're waiting for. If they're in orbit, then they're safer. If they're on the ground, then they run the chance of being spotted."
"Makes sense." He pointed his beams back toward the large chamber. They had found nothing of interest, so there wasn't anything to gather. They simply turned back the way they had come.
Only now the cavern wasn't empty as it had been before. Dozens of lights came to life as they stepped out into the open. Many of them were bright, high-intensity beams just like Ron's. Only, they were not mounted on the wrists of their holders.
They were mounted on dozens of rifles, all of them trained right on them. More than one weapon sported a laser, painting little red dots on their heads and chests.
"I didn't think it would be this easy." Somebody said from the darkness. Cold chills went down their spines as they recognized the voice.
It was Wade's.
However, it wasn't their tech guru and expected savior who stepped out into the open.
The sight of him almost made Ron scream. He was the one who had seen him before, though that was only a dream, a nightmare he had right before he discovered he was the supposed keeper of the Blade of the Effurien.
He was almost seven feet tall, not counting the spikes on his helmet. The sides of the great mask were like upswept eagle's wings, the face itself like a stylized grinning demon. A black cloak swirled around him like a malevolent mist.
The Podondrin, the Master of Arkonia spoke again. This time his voice was not of their friend, but something darker, something that chilled both of them right down to their cores.
"I was beginning to think that all of my preparations had been for nothing once Arcus Corrin failed, once my doppelgangers were lost to me but as I told my minions, there must be faith. Now you have come to me of your own accord…
…and my plans can come to their fruition." He laughed, a sound even more chilling than his speaking voice.
Ron's eyes narrowed as he noticed the sword hanging from the towering apparition's waist.
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