Chapter 2: Shards of Half-Lit Images
Royce, Kristoff and Ishigami stood side by side in a large hanger.
The object before them reminded Royce of some kind of abstract art. No angles, only curves. Its fragile wings, long and slender. Its cockpit the color of amber shaped into a hollow teardrop.
"That's it?" He asked the old man.
"The Valor Crane. The craft U.N.F. command sent you here to fly."
They didn't send me. I asked. There are questions I still need answered.
"What's the cargo?"
"Not what- who." Ishigami replied. "And that's a question I don't have an answer to. Our most promising candidate – suffered an accident. We were going to send her to Ash Cloud, but we can't risk putting her in a Tracer. She's too unstable. I'm not sure who will take her place. Tomorrow you two will test its systems, make a brief rendezvous with Ash Cloud, and return."
The quickening blows of rain drops on thin sheet metal caught his ear.
"Shit- I was hoping to check out the night life."
"Who says we can't? Little rain won't hurt anything. There's a bar in the Midori district." Kristoff flipped over a small business card in his hand. "Ishigami recommended it."
He heard an iron gate clang shut behind them, followed by rhythmic footsteps of a guard returning to his post. The footsteps faded behind a deluge of raindrops.
He looked over at Kristoff still clad in his tan flight-jacket. "You lead the way."
Kristoff and Royce stared out at a gleaming city road lit by orange and blue streetlights. Bright neon signs flanked a causeway that reflected prisms off wet asphalt.
Royce hailed a white cab that rolled to a stop in front of them.
"Where to?" the driver asked through an open window.
"Midori district." Royce shrugged, then pulled himself inside the small cab.
The rhythm of water falling on the cab's roof lulled him to half to sleep as they drove along familiar streets toward an unfamiliar destination. Out the window he saw shards of half lit images in the falling rain that reminded him of sights long forgotten in a haze of memory.
They bubble back to the surface. He thought, like crude oil that's been buried for too long. As soon as the well is tapped, it all gushes back out again. Those disjointed fragments, all falling away in time, toward some arbitrary destination we can't yet grasp.
A flash of pink in the window of a train car caught his eye briefly before passing behind a skyscraper.
The cab driver dropped them off next to a poured concrete slab the size of a supermarket stood up on end. A green neon sign stood above a black Victorian door: The Lone Pine.
Kristoff shot him a quizzical look and he grabbed the door's handle, collapsing his umbrella.
Inside was a small seating area flooded with warm light, synthetic ivy and creeping foliage. Against the far wall stood a bartender wearing a crisp black suit and tie. The bar itself was half of a felled tree trunk, smoothed with resin and suspended from the ceiling with black iron chains that swung lazily like a giant's swing-set.
A few other individuals sat at the bar. He recognized them as other Serilonan pilots. He stepped forward and leaned on the wooden trunk.
He caught the bartender's eye. "What you got?"
A blond man pointed to an unusually bare chalkboard above his head:
Spirulager
Soybean Stout
Peroxidase Pale
Argentea Ale
Cytochrome Porter
"Uh- just give me the house special." He massaged his forehead with a half open palm. The bartender winked at him and grabbed a mug and the center tap, then slid the cold amber liquid across the log to him.
Kristoff ordered some greenish concoction. The "Spirulager."
They clinked glasses in the air. Some of the green liquid spilled into his own, staining his brew a dirty lime green.
He sipped the concoction. It tasted both earthy and synthetic. Smooth, rich, and fresh.
One of the pilots, bald and serious looked over and grunted.
"So you're the guys who flew in to babysit the Widow?" The man's face was hard and serious. A glimmer of incandescent light reflected off his scalp. He placed his beer gently back on the log and chuckled.
Kristoff shot back, "what are you talking about?"
"The one with the pink hair- who has a habit of killing her co-pilots."
He remembered Ishigami's warning: Our most promising candidate – suffered an accident. We can't risk putting her in a Tracer.
"Who is she?" Royce asked. The man's face shifted to uneasiness.
"Diana Zhen." A glob of liquid slid down onto his gray coat. "The pink-haired girl. Flew with Kono today. Now he's dead. Punched out. Probably G-locked. She killed Myozaki two weeks ago. Hypoxia at flight level eight forty."
"She's a Sunbird pilot?" Royce asked again.
"Yeah. Some genetic experiment gone wrong. A human weapon with no safety. If you can even call her human."
"Optos?"
"Ha! Even I got Optos. Half the Serilonan military's got 'em. But she's got a hell of a lot more than that. Who knows what they did to her. They say she's got a death wish, and a taste for revenge. Which is a dangerous combo. You couldn't pay me enough to get in a bird with her."
Royce adjusted his barstool anxiously.
"You look like you've seen a ghost!" he drained the last ounce of liquid from his brackish pint.
"I think I know her," Royce said. "From a long time ago."
"Oh? She spend some time with the U.N.F. killing you guys for a change?"
"No. I knew her, before she was a pilot." Again he reached back and felt the lump on the back of his head.
"What? Who are you guys anyway?" The man asked.
"I'm Royce. This is Kristoff, my co-pilot. We flew in on the Mammoth today."
"Oh, that was you guys?"
"I'm Victor," one of the men announced. Then he nodded at his bald serious friend. "That's Cho. We're on Sunbird Six-Two."
"I see. And you're going for Tracers too?" Royce asked.
"Yeah. Gonna be a long wait though. Crane can only take one at a time. Unlike like the U.N. Federation shuttle."
Royce took a sip. "Yeah I know. It's too bad you guys are stuck with outdated tech. Well, except those." He nodded at the bulge in the bald man's jacket resting on the back of his chair.
"Did it hurt - getting the Optos?" Kristoff asked.
Cho lowered his head a bit and touched the horseshoe-shaped white band in his pocket where the outline of a transceiver was plainly visible. "When you know your thoughts aren't private anymore- it just- changes you."
Royce scooted his chair backwards.
Screw that shit. I'm glad I never got it.
"You said you knew the widow?" Cho looked up at him. "Where'd you know her from?"
The bartender looked up from his rhythmic wiping of the dark tap handles.
Royce sighed. "When I was a kid, I lived with my dad in the Mistiltein district. It was- a rough place."
"Still is," Cho interrupted.
"I don't remember much from back then. One day I woke up in the hospital with no memory of how I got there. They showed me a book I brought with me, a book written in a strange language. And they showed me my school notebooks from before the accident. They were filled with color sketches of a girl with pink hair and strange green eyes, and that big looming tree in the Mistletinn park, the one with pink blossoms."
"The Nimbus tree?"
"Yeah, that's the one. After I woke up, the doctors said I had some sort of brain damage and I've had this bump on my head ever since. They said I was kidnapped by Khanians. Some covert research facility they were running. My pops was an officer in the U.N.F., after that he pulled me out of school and took me back home. That's about all I remember. When I got a little older, I decided to join the U.N.F. Air Force - but they wouldn't put me in a Skiff. I got transports instead."
He continued to gaze into the chalkboard, "Sometimes I think about the girl from my sketchbook – whether she was real, who she might have been, and how I might have known her. But it sounds like you guys might know her all too well." He smiled.
Like a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces. She's got the other half. I don't care if she's dangerous. I have to know what happened to me- to us.
"So that's why-" Kristoff stared at him.
"Yup."
"The Nimbus tree incident," Cho muttered.
"What?" Royce asked.
"That's what they called it on the news. Fifteen years ago. The son of a U.N.F. Colonel and a little girl were kidnapped at the Nimbus tree in Mistiltein." Cho glared at him, "They never found the kids. Or at least I never heard about them again. I can't believe it was you. And that girl was-"
"I guess so." He scratched his chin gently, "but it's curious why they wouldn't announce our rescue."
"Curious indeed."
"Elder Nana?" Ishigami spoke slowly into a projection screen on the wall. The black silhouette of an elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair breathed gently and sighed.
"The time has come, Ishigami. We need to stop the Khanians- one way or another."
"Please- excuse me- but, brokering a deal with the U.N.F. could… complicate matters."
"They are beginning to discover secrets that threaten the safety of all mankind. And there's another thing. Two of your pilots remind me a lot of two young parasites I knew a very long time ago. It makes me suspect that one of our old agreements may have been broken. Nevertheless, if you can get them to Ash Cloud, they might prove useful."
"But don't you think Diana's a bit- unstable?"
"Yes. That's exactly why she's the one."
"And Royce- you know he has a medical condition. Subjecting him to the kind of stresses-"
"Even with his injuries, you'll find his aptitude far exceeds your standards. The U.N.F. wasted his talents by putting him in transport. They kept him safe. His father kept him safe. We'd be wasting his talents if we didn't give him a chance. This is a matter of destiny."
"You say he's so valuable and yet you're willing to risk his life?"
The old woman sighed. "Yes. Mortality is a precondition for heroism. And he deserves the chance to be the hero we need. I have a feeling he'll rise to the occasion." The woman's silhouette pared back her hair, "Please do not fail me."