Chapter 6: Handled with Care

A/N: The storm gets worse, the kids need to relocate, and just what is it with the life forms on Mira?

Swears, full-on spoilers and sorrow (but not as bad as 3). Plus, your headcannon of Repenta Diner on a bad night will never be the same. All the glorious stuff belongs to the geniuses of MONOLITHSOFT. Putting this up in a bunch because school is out and the kids will be claiming the internet soon.

"Alexa."

Somebody was shaking her, not particularly hard but very insistently. Alexa gave a sleepy grumble.

"Shhhh!" Doug was still shaking her, but she realized he must be practically whispering into her ear.

"Wh…"

"Shh!" he hissed, more urgently and if possible more quietly. "You need to wake up, but don't move, got it?"

Alexa opened her eyes, a painful and gritty experience. She hadn't considered the amount of sand blowing around that night. Dumb. She was curled up, under Speedy, same as before, but Doug was crouching over her. She reached a hand out from the blanket to try and scrape some grit from her eyes.

"We need to move away from here," Doug whispered. "Quietly and slowly. I'm praying slowly will work. You think you can roll to the other side of Speedy?"

Through her still bleary gaze and dimmed by the considerable amount of dust blowing past, she saw feet. Big feet, clawed and shuffling softly, not more than 2 meters from them. Saltat. Big bellied, sparkling, powerful saltat. Make that two saltats. Oh jeez, why had they come over here?

Doug was scooting her over to the other side of the skell, putting it between them and the killer honk-hoo birds. She half rolled, half commando crawled around Speedy's feet, the blanket dragging off her as she went. Not that Speedy made much of a barricade.

Doug was peering around the skell. She heard the saltat shuffle a little closer, and one made a short clap with its wings. She could barely see over Speedy's tiny feet from her flattened position, but she felt the sharp rush of air. Not good. Then she brightened. It was obvious.

"We just need to hop into Speedy."

"I tried that. One of them rushed me."

"You'd have left me?!"

"Shhhh! Not exactly. I was going to lug you in if necessary. I was just testing. It didn't work. As soon as I started to stand up, it got aggravated."

"So is this safer?"

"No."

"Where're your weapons?"

Doug looked down from his crouch, misery in every line of his face. "I left them in the skell. Yours too."

Alexa couldn't even choose the right words to respond to this extreme case of fail Fail FAIL! But, then, she'd left them inside too. So she kept her mouth shut and unknowingly mimicked his misery.

She scanned the area. There was a smallish door shaped opening in the wall behind them. About 30 meters, straight on, flat sand, no rocks to dodge. She tapped Doug's shoulder and pointed. He nodded, raised three fingers, counted down on them, and they made a dash for it.

Why did indigen insist on chasing you, even when they knew they couldn't get you? Was it a pride thing? Or maybe they counted on getting the 1 out of a hundred that was stupid enough to slow down before it was really safe? Alexa and Doug would have ranked 96 and 95 in how not stupid they were, getting into that cave or crevice or whatever it was. More like a corridor. One more weird not-quite natural area provided by Mira.

The birds honked and hooed and pecked at the entrance. If a saltat could clap angrily, these suckers were doing just that. Then they stopped, very suddenly, and retreated from the entrance.

"What are they doing?" asked Alexa. It just didn't seem right.

Doug scooted towards the opening, crouched low. Oh no, not that. She pulled him back.

"You asked. I was going to find out."

"Doug! Have you lost it?"

"If they've moved away, that's because something else has caught their attention. I want to find out what."

"How would you know?"

Doug managed to look both embarrassed and grim. "I've been watching them. Saltat in general, I mean. I like them. Kind of. They're kind of cute, if they don't attack you."

He was sneaking back towards the entrance, and Alexa, after a moment, followed. She figured he might need a yank back suddenly. Or a shove forward, if he said anything annoying or stupid. She still wasn't completely at peace with his grabby hands having been all over Speedy's controls.

He stopped, not quite even with the doorway. Alexa was right behind him, and only popped up a little out of her crouch to peer over his shoulders. The saltat were circling Speedy.

"If they peck my skell, I swear I will fricassee them!" she hissed.

"Shhh. Wait for it…" whispered Doug, a note of hysteria in his voice. Or was it laughter?

The birds bobbed left, in unison, gave a clap, and then a deep bow. Not just in front of Speedy. They were bowing directly to the skell itself. Their wingtips swept arcs in the moss in front of the motionless machine. Then they raised their wings high. Honk. Hooooooooo. Bobbing, clap, bow, repeat. Honk. Hooooooo.

"Oh my sweet 3/8ths crimper," whispered Alexa. She covered her mouth, hard, to keep from giggling and drawing the saltats' attention.

Doug was scooting back, quickly. "Let's give them some privacy. This could take a while." He slumped down against a convenient wall. The ground was more sandy than mossy in the corridor. Still dim from the storm, but mercifully not as blowy as outside. His face reflected none of the humor that had been in his voice moments earlier. "You know, Alexa, we may need to send for help after all. Once saltat choose an, um, object of affection, they can be hard to shift without a lot of firepower."

Alexa gaped at him. "This was not supposed to be in the plan. This was supposed to be all fun, all…"

"…the time. I know, I've been listening. Maybe they'll move once the storm is over," he offered.

"Didn't you say it would be over fast?"

"Yeah, well, about that, this thing is a little bigger than usual. Maybe I'm wrong about that."

Alexa took a deep, slightly dusty breath, and settled in comfortably against the wall directly across from Doug. "So we wait? I do not like this at all, just to be clear about it."

"Not my first choice, either."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Alexa wrote up some reports in her head, trying various explanations for Speedy's predicament. The skell just had a naturally high level of animal magnetism, no augments required. Oh lord, let Candid and Credible never think of developing that augment, because she wouldn't put it past those little freaky geniuses to succeed in some fashion. That would be an unholy mess. Repenta on a Friday with ? You'd have to hose the place down with bleach solution afterwards. Ewww, barf.

Might as well record her ideas, except for that last one. Doug was still quiet, drawing something in the sand with his finger. Alexa pulled out her comm device and rattled off a quick and quiet list of problems, points, and hypotheses. She crawled to the corridor entrance, snapped a few pictures, and then crawled back to Doug. Once again, she settled in, back to the wall, legs stretched out, toes almost to Doug's hip. He'd managed to draw an impressive collection of eights, or race tracks, or really bad burgler masks.

"When did you take up bird watching?" she asked cheerfully.

"Oh, uh, it was one of those things…"

"Let me guess. You had binoculars and a pocket Audubon book and everything back home, only here the book's no good and you really really do not need magnification." She didn't think this was likely, but it was a start.

The lure worked. "Naw, I don't really care about birds. Just saltat." Doug sighed. "They were one of the first things I went up against, on Mira. Big fat mama of a saltat, just as Noctilum opens up. You'd think you were in for it, but she was a push-over. Bust her apart, walk away."

"So you impressed on her. Baby's first tyrant."

Doug glared for a second, then looked glum again. "Don't be nasty."

Alexa frowned. She wasn't nasty, was she? Well, actually, yes, yes she was. Damn straight. Her cool adventure was over, ruined by these overgrown turkeys and a whole lot of sand. But it wasn't Doug's fault. Much. She rephrased her statement. "Yeah, well, so you met Mrs. Saltat and decided to study the kids."

"Something like that. Except these guys would eat her for lunch." He shrugged.

Alexa considered what he'd said for a bit. Then she shook her head and smacked his foot, not lightly. "Nope. Not buying it. What's the real reason?"

"That is the real reason."

"No. You fought in the Battle of the Life Hold." He winced at the overblown but well-earned title. "There were things there that would scrub any mere saltat from its honored position. So, what's the real real reason?"

Doug looked down at the stacks of loops beside him. "Lao."

Well, shoot. Nothing's going to scrub that, thought Alexa. She waited, but Doug didn't continue. She huffed and said, "Okay, I'll bite. What's the connection?"

"It was his team that ran up against Aria. They weren't prepared, so my guys jumped in to help out. This was early days, remember. We were so bad at this thing. It's embarrassing to think how weak we were."

More tracing. Doug's voice dropped. "It became a running joke, especially when we realized what a nothing threat it was. Lao started it. Two days after, I got a picture of a random saltat. The note said: 'Oh noes itz big!' He sent me a shot of every saltat he found. Morning, sunset, asleep. He'd be standing closer and closer, selfies mimicking the damn things.

"Well, I wasn't going to be shown up by some damn Pathfinder. I found bigger and badder ones. One of the perks of my job. I sent my pix, and it just snowballed. And they got weirder the farther we explored. I got to know them pretty well. I've probably watched those stupid birds in every corner of Mira. Even when there wasn't any threat, I'd spend some time, watching what they got up to."

"I can't believe you miss him." Alexa couldn't quite keep the amazement out of her voice, because of how utterly trash Lao had proved to be.

"I knew him a long time, okay? I was in his wedding, not best man or anything, but there. I got to go to all of Chenshi's birthdays. She even gave me a special tiara, for random tea parties. I looked like the biggest, stupidest pushover with that damn thing on, and I wish like hell I still had it.

"And now I can't think about him without remembering how he tried to kill us all. It's just like when my old man died, all over again. I went home to see to his affairs, get the body all settled. Hadn't been home in years. Everybody at his funeral had to tell me just how much he owed them, how he'd cheated them, what he'd taken them for. Sometimes they'd wait to give their condolences first, but a bunch didn't even bother. I didn't miss my dad much, but I missed not being given the chance. Hated that." Doug stopped. He grabbed at the figure eights, scraping them up and crushing them in his fist.

"When I got back, Lao got me drunk, told me to screw them all, never mind what they said. But I couldn't then, can't now. He's gone and killed himself and I got nothing left I can even bear to think about. Except I still miss the bastard." Doug raised his fist full of sand up, almost as if to slam it into the ground, but then he just laid it gently into the wreckage of figures, opened it slowly, and let the contents spill out. He wiped the space smooth, and started drawing infinities again.