Desert solitaire A fan Fic Based on the TV series Otherworld By Chip Bell
Nuvean Kroll made his way down one more gully, the sun was hot in the desert, he had long since stuffed his jacket in his back pack. He had followed the band of rebels here on a small gravity chassis with a flat bed in the back and a convertible top. This Kroll had managed to wreck about 6 miles back by grazing it on a rock formation while tormenting a group of red ryacks. The furry creatures were in a clearing in the sparse dry brush and Kroll couldn't resist. He swung the chassis around and gripped the steering wheel while standing up as if he were steering a boat at sea, the ryacks panicked and ran for the rocks where they lived Kroll was shooting in among them with his biorupter with sadistic glee when the vehicle jolted wildly and began losing altitude coming to rest on the far side of the rock outcrop. Sparks were coming from the console and smoke was pouring from underneath. Kroll grabbed his back pack containing his synthesizer and some dehydrated food and took off on foot. For the first mile or so he plotted how he would get out of this without his superiors finding out what he had done. Gravity chassis were easy to replace or repair but he had compromised his mission just to torment some animals. Kroll formulated the story in his head, the rebels had ambushed him and shot his chassis from the sky, yes, that was what happened , no, that wouldn't work the chassis was back there laying in the desert and it clearly was wrecked not shot up. The rebels had taken the chassis! Yes, but no he had to figure out a heroic scenario that would make him look good and not incompetent. The rebels had caught him on the ground and fired on him, separating him from the little vehicle, he had ran behind some rocks and returned fire with such deadly accuracy that they had fled from him using the chassis to make their escape! Kroll laughed and patted himself on the back. He thought back to his youth when he had ran with 5 other young boys, they had been bullies terrorizing other children, not doing very well in school. Kroll had a yellow notice waiting for him back at school but when the zone troopers came for him they found him in the in the back of one of their vans already headed for the training camp, for Kroll had already been conscripted for a scam selling faulty equipment on cyber. One group of zone troopers had tracked him down and arrested him, conscripted him into the troopers for petty crime while the other group was heading for his school with his yellow notice ready to grab him there. The two officers had laughed at Kroll the one throwing the wadded up yellow notice at him in the back of the van.
They were hard on Kroll at first at the training center, bullying him working him just that much more and while Kroll was a trouble maker he just happened to take to the zone troopers brand of trouble making, when he listened to the officers brag about what they had done to citizens he had laughed when they screamed at him and pushed him he just took that as life in one more gang of thugs and expected no different ,Kroll cynically applied himself understanding the mentality and knowing that reward was forthcoming. Soon he began to get the officers attention, they began to see themselves in him, the attitude, the taste for sadism and power the expert way he lied and covered up every failure, not making them believe him exactly but spinning and covering things where even they could not decide whether he was incompetent, or a genius, or both. When they sat around the officers aria Kroll had often been the topic of conversations as they marveled at his exploits It was not long before he was promoted up in the ranks for a certain military talent, but also for his uncanny way of coning his superiors into believing he was twice as talented as he actually was Of course, at the top there were those who knew they were being snowed by Kroll but they never ceased to be impressed by the sheer talent he had in doing it. To those in the know, Kroll was not valued so much for his abilities as a soldier but for his abilities as a politician; as far as they were concerned Kroll as good as had a seat in Imar assuming he didn't get himself killed first.
Kroll was now about a mile and a half from the gully. He would eventually call in and report that his gravity chassis had been taken, that is as soon as he was far enough from the smoking wreck to make sure they wouldn't find it, and that was going to be a long, long way.
Kroll detached the small bottle from the synthesizer and polished it off. He replaced it and grabbed a hand full of sand, pouring it into the top of the device than resealing the jar like lid, the little device switched on , humming as it began breaking down the molecules of sand splitting off hydrogen, and oxygen, recombining them stripping other atoms apart and rearranging there structure, water and a mix of electrolytes flowed into the little bottle, filling it to the top. If Kroll chose to he could switch on the other side and it would synthesize protean in one inch cubes but Kroll had plenty to eat, for now. The protein cubes were good though and came indifferent flavors that you could adjust on the screen either picking from a menu or selecting "more flavors" and selecting from a color coded chart that represented salty, sweet, bitter, spicy, sour in various degrees as you moved around on the colored screen. Sometimes you could get really, really good stuff this way and sometimes slop, depending on how good you were at it. If you were good at it you had not only food but valuable trade goods should you find yourself in need of such.
Kroll walked down a hill and onto an almost flat aria where the soil was fluffed up and crusted with alkali crystals. He kicked up a cloud of white dust wondering what kind of mineral it was that he was standing on. As he stood there Kroll began to feel uneasy as if someone was out there in the desert, watching him he scanned the horizon but no one was there, and how could anyone hide in sparse dry brush only 3 or 4 feet tall? Kroll kept walking, he wanted to listen to some music but he still had that uneasy feeling, it had been with him for the last 3 miles, always out there following, Kroll was an expert hiker, having been on long marches in the past, and it was impossible to get sore feet when you had boots with nanotech material constantly sensing your feet and adjusting pressure here and there, cooling, heating, absorbing shock. He knew this gave him an advantage in outpacing whoever was out there, they would wear out long before he would, assuming they didn't have the same experience and technology on their side.
Kroll noticed a slight rise in the ground and that the course sand had shifted in color from the brownish purple to a tan color, hear and their tall pale purple gaktalk trees stood , skeletal, leafless with sharp spines here and there, they wouldn't even offer much shade but they could be used to build shelters if a person wanted, they were at least a foot and a half at the base and did not narrow much till the very top. There were very few branches and those were only a couple of feet long, mostly they were all trunk, ready make poles if a little crooked. Sometimes the trees had been infested with glimes, a long thin worm that reached half way up the tree just under the purple bark, the glime would leach copper and zink out of the tree over the years and concentrate it in it's body eventually the glime would accumulate so much of the metal that it died leaving a casting that amounted to a long metal wire just under the bark, this could also be very useful for a good many things such as fasting things or even as a conductor, some of them were rough enough to make a kind of wire saw out of , they didn't last long because of the softness of the metal but it would still saw some. Kroll ended his musing about his desert training as he saw a bright glint on the horizon. As vehicle! If the rebels were here he was dead, if it was someone else he had a ride, he just had to figure out which. Kroll pulled out his binoculars from his back pack tossing the pack on the ground. He zeroed in on the glint and it came up clearly. A pickup truck, but it was abandon, apparently for years considering the growth around it. An hour later Kroll approached the truck. He was sure it ran as such things simply did not wear out or corrode, so why was it here? He looked at the front of the machine, the windshield came from about the middle of the roof and sloped down to the bumper. There were two flood lights mounted behind whatever clear material it was made of. He could see the floor board clearly a steering column came up out of the floor and bent toward the driver's seat. There was no dash to speak of but a small frame with a shallow canvas trough hung on in front of the passenger's seat. All the instrument readings etc were probably holographic and came on when you switched on the power. Kroll eyed the vehicles tracks one of the gacktalk trees had sprouted a couple of feet behind the passengers track right in the middle of where the vehicle must have been driven. So why abandon it? Did the driver wonder off and meet with misfortune on the desert? Kroll knew there were sucker horses out there on the flats , maybe one of them had caught the driver in it's front legs and simply sucked the liquid out of his body, and scraped him to a pile of bones with its toothy radula swallowing down the nutritious mush. Kroll was glad he had his biorupter handy, the sucker horses were large and thus few, but they were out there. Kroll stood in front of the pickups nose and peered into the windscreen. It afforded a good view of an old jacket laying on the floor, but there was something else. Something was under the jacket. Kroll could see that the jacket was laid with the edges outward and waded up in such as way as perhaps to mask the fact that there was indeed something under it. There wasn't much way to hid anything in a forward control pickup with a windshield that came clear to the floor. The sun lit the interior brightly and you could see every detail. Kroll began to realize why the truck was there. This was meant for the zone troopers to find. It wasn't a truck it was a booby trap. The Jacket no doubt contained a bomb. Kroll bet the doors weren't even locked, as soon as someone pulled on the latch the whole thing would either explode or be engulfed in a disintegrating field of some sort. Kroll looked in the window again at the jacket and was overcome with sadistic giggles at the thought of someone opening the door, the shocked look, bit's of flesh flying, he giggled even moor unable to stop himself. Had anyone important been around he would have forced himself not to have the laughing come over him but it was hard when it happened. Kroll wiped tears from his face and went around to inspect the truck some more. He got to the bed walked around it found a control panel right behind the driver's door and brushed some dirt off that had accumulated with rain. It had a small screen and some touch controls. Kroll pressed one of the little moss green squares on the brown panel, the tail gate lowered, he pressed another and it raised, There were two others, one with an arrow pointing up and one with an arrow pointing down. Suddenly it struck Kroll, "of course" the truck was a dump bed he pressed the up square and the bed silently raised , a few loose tools falling back against the tail gate. Kroll was now looking at the back of the cab. A flat metal surface greeted him with a square panel in the middle just above the trucks chassis. Kroll examined it. It was some sort of access to the cab for something, but how to get it open? There were no fasteners so it had to be magnetic. Kroll grasped an orange knob in the middle of the panel and twisted left than right, the knob had no grip on it for twisting so he pushed on it, nothing. Kroll pulled on the knob but again, nothing. Frustrated now he pulled harder, the knob gave and the panel came loose from the truck. Kroll cold now see inside the cab between the seats. He crawled half way in and studied the jacket. He pulled up on it gently and there under it was the device he expected. A black rectangle with one green light on the end, Kroll crawled back out of the truck and dug in his back pack for his scanner. He pulled the little device out and crawled back inside. He flicked through the menu on the touch screen scrolling past hyperspace positioning system, cyber wave browser, communication, data storage, video player, his sound files containing all his music, interrogation recordings sneak recordings he had made of women while sleeping with them. There it was tech diagnostic program. He opened the program and held the scanner over the bomb as the computer analyzed it. It wasn't an explosive it was a destabilization pulse weapon. If it pulsed the molecules of everything within 500 yards or so would simply fly apart. Kroll examined the inner workings. He couldn't move the device as that would set it off. If he had opened a door the same thing would have happened. Kroll studied the transparency video of the device. He could see the quantum pulse coil and a switch but he couldn't get at the switch as it was in the box. Kroll had to kill the power source. He begin scanning and saw no zero point chip in the device or singularity or any power storage device. He switched views and the screen showed a picture of energy fields in the aria. The truck was full of them, as he expected, than he saw a crackling thread going into the device, it was drawing its power from the truck. Kroll let out a frusterated huff, and crawled back out the opening. He had to remove the trucks power supply. Probably a singularity located under the cab. He walked around the truck with the scanner. There under the cab just behind the middle of the bumper he could see the image of the trucks torque rod and the glow of the power source. He crawled under and saw a long green box with a detachable section in the front. The back half would contain the spinning torque rod that drove the differential and the front would be the power supply. There was a door and a recessed latch which Kroll fought with for a while before he got it open. Inside was a smaller version of the orange knob on the cabin access. Kroll pulled hard on the knob and it popped out, the box fell into his hands. Kroll squirmed out from under the pickup with the box and began hiking, he had to carry it far enough that the device could no longer draw power from it. Kroll hiked about a hundred yards and sat the box down. Back at the truck his scanner indicated the pulse bomb was dead Kroll took it and began prying the black box open. He did not want this thing going off even far out in the desert, he just was not sure of it's range. The cove sprung off and Kroll pulled out the coil. He had to destroy it but if he used his biorupter he could end up feeding power to it and setting it off. Kroll took the coil over to a rock and set it down, he hefted another rock up and threw it down hard on the coil flattening it. Satisfied he went to fetch the power source.
Kroll bent over the box and almost had it when a bright energy beam punched a molten black hole in the sand right in front of him. Kroll jumped back and started to run but another beam bored into the ground behind him. He looked up and then he finally saw her, Kroll was sure he recognized the woman in front of him but he wasn't quite sure, it was two years ago, yes the young terrorist, Harding or Sterling or whatever his name was, he was involved with this girl. The android, surly she wasn't still mad about that? Kroll was not surprised he couldn't see her, she had probably been only yards away many times. She wore a skin tight unitard that even now was shifting color to match the desert around her. Only her head and hands would have been visible, it just wasn't enough. Even her calf high boots and utility belt had the camouflage ability. Kroll had never seen this technology before but it did not surprise him, it was easy to do with simple technology. Nova, so you joined the rebels than, we'll get you eventually, when you join up with terrorists you are as good as dead. Nova laughed, that's crap Kroll, I know rebels that are over a hundred years old but I never joined, I came out her to the desert to contemplate, to think. Nova had become a hermit? It didn't make sense to Kroll but despite her pixyish looks she was not a human female no matter how much her people had obsessed about human culture and human psychology etc. Her passion for Sterling it was as intense as a human female would feel, but was it a little too intense, a little less intense? Kroll wasn't sure but it was not human emotion. Of course Kroll would not call it that if it was off by one nanometer, such was his bigotry. He had driven by some of the androids in an open truck last year and hurled racial slurs.
So what do you want? "Well" said Nova at first following you was just something to do, something to puzzle over. For instance what were you doing out here, and why on foot. Than you found that truck, well, that's a nice truck, I want it for myself, that's all. Kroll resisted the urge to make a smart sexual remark about Nova and the truck looking at the rounded end of her snipers rod. It's my truck, I found it first. I know that Kroll and if it was any one else I could see that but it's just you, Nuvean Kroll, liar, sadist, racist, torturer I could go on for an hour. Kroll looked at her astonished genuinely not getting her point. Yes, so? What's that got to do with anything? What are you talking about? Nova was somewhat taken aback by this but then it didn't surprise her, Kroll was basically a pirate and he lived and worked with same, never being exposed to any different for any length of time. She wasn't sure if he was a sociopath or if the zone troopers, so brainwashed there members as to mimic sociopathy. Turn around Kroll, Nova snatched his biorupter from his belt and stuck it in a spare elastic loop on hers. Now walk back to the truck. When they arrived at the truck Kroll turned to face her. What are you going to do with the truck any way? You don't need it you can just walk. I like the truck Kroll I can carry some stuff maybe. Some clothing or whatever else I find. Kroll swore to himself, she was going to leave him out in the desert, take his gun to. I need my gun, there are sucker horses! I know Kroll, I've been right up to them, even petted them, they have no fear of me and no interest. No food value you know. They can sense electromagnetic fields it gives them some idea what your made of.
Kroll knew he had to hike at least another five miles before he was far enough from the mess he had made but what if he actually did run in to a sucker horse. They could smell you for miles and their six long legs could outrun almost anything on the desert. He could go up a gaktalk tree if he could avoid the thorns but how long would a sucker horse wait for him to come down? If he had to he could call in but would his people get to him before the sucker horse? Kroll heard the door of the truck slam and heard it's tracks scraping on the sand as Nova pivoted it around in a tight circle to head west. A blyach flew over , it must have ran out of water, if no rain came they broke loose from their roots and their wings unfolded than they took off to fill their bulbious bodys with fresh water from the sea about 400 miles to the west, than they made their way back to the relative safety of the desert. If Kroll had found the thing on the ground he might have gotten some fruit off of it, sticky and sweet. Kroll cursed the creature as it flew over the disappearing pickup taking whatever fruit it bore with it.
As night fell Kroll pulled his jacket out of his pack and lay in a sandy wash, pushing the sand around till it conformed to the shape of his body. He was soon fast asleep. Kroll was dreaming about something or other when he felt something warm and wet drip down the side of his face. Then he noticed the smell. A strange pleasant smell, he had never smelled it before but he had been told about it. The fur was aromatic and had a pleasant smell. He opened his eyes and realized he was staring right into the drooling muzzle of a sucker horse it's round sucker mouth inches from his face! Kroll did not move hoping the creature wouldn't notice him, his breathing was shallow and his body ridged. The creatures 6 beady eyes were fixed on him and it sniffed loudly. It raised on of it's clawed front legs up and pawed him with the two short fingers, than, for whatever reason, it turned and galloped off into the desert. Kroll let out a long sigh of relief. He no longer cared about he mess he made, he was probably far enough away that they would never find the wreck in this empty desert so far away from anything. He grabbed his transmitter and began calling to be picked up. Kroll was sitting on a large rock taking a drink of water when he spotted his ride coming. One trooper on a floating stick transport, he hoisted himself up behind her and put his hands around her waist as she spun the stick around and they shot off into the sky, back to safety, Kroll would live to see another day.