I forgot to post yesterday; sorry, gang! Got wrapped up in watching Show. OF COURSE. So here, have a big fat chapter! Enjoy!
Ellen waited until Crowley had finished transmitting the information, downloaded it into a file labeled 'RABBITS', and glanced up at the monitor again. The door to the engine room was securely shut, nary a dust bunny to be seen. Nor a daughter. Ellen yawned and stretched her arms to the extent the small cockpit would allow, fingers brushing the roof. The dull gray walls were still dull and gray, and although she loved Styx, her little Charon, sometimes she regretted that Jo was stuck inside it so much.
It was tough to let her out of her sight, though. Had there been a second child for Ellen and Bill, maybe Jo wouldn't be so … well, precious wasn't quite the right word. Neither was coddled. Not even close. The target of all of Ellen's admitted bossiness and mother henning? Maybe.
Ellen tapped the console thoughtfully. Might be time for a little break, a change of scenery. A mother-daughter 'weekend' would be nice. Get a manicure, even. Ellen's nails looked like Leviathans had been chewing on them.
She checked the quadrant for traffic and space garbage before setting the ship on auto-pilot and took the neat, narrow passages of Styx toward Jo's voice. Her daughter was chattering and there was a constant thump-thump-thump of something hitting the wall. Sounded like a palmball.
"I know, right? Those new Zephyris are so sweet. I'll bet they're faster than—"
Ellen peeked around Jo's open door and arched a brow. Jo was never in a million lightyears getting one of those high-speed deathtraps, no matter how cute.
"Hi, Mama." Jo was lying on her cot, and when she saw Ellen, she caught the palmball single-handedly before flipping her vidphone around. "Tamara, say hi to Mom."
"'Ello, Mrs. 'Arvelle," Tamara's broadcast face said brightly.
"Hi there, sweetie. Can I steal my daughter from you?"
"'Course. Call you later, Jo."
"Yep." Jo killed the connection and flopped the vidphone on her belly. "What's up?"
Ellen stepped in and leaned on the doorframe. "You ready for your quantum fluctuator certification next week?"
"It's next week, Mom," Jo said with an eye-roll. "I've got plenty of time. Besides, I can tear those puppies apart and put 'em back together again in my sleep. Easy."
"Hmm. So you can help me pick out the next bounty. Crowley called."
"Oh yeah? How's old Fergus McSlimey?"
"Still slimy, but he sent a couple of good cases. And I thought maybe we could start looking for them at, oh, Stardust City—"
Jo's face lit up.
"—and if we happen to get a little R 'n R in the process, who's gonna know? It's been ages since we went shopping, hit the gambling houses, get—"
"Laid," Jo cut in.
"Joanna Beth!" Ellen swatted the air in Jo's direction.
"Kidding." Jo sat up, her vidphone sliding onto her lap. "That'd be awesome, Mom. But I thought you hated Stardust City."
It wasn't that Ellen disliked the place; she liked it very much, in fact. Bill had taken her there for their honeymoon, and that was the problem. But it just seemed like the right thing to do now. Wouldn't be much longer before Jo would want to strike out on her own, and Ellen couldn't stop her. She was a Harvelle, and mule-headed to boot. Couldn't blame Bill for that one.
"Girls gotta have fun sometimes, don't they?" she said, watching Jo's smile grow wider.
"You gonna let me clean house at Blackjack?"
"In Stardust?" Ellen scoffed. "Sweetheart, you may be the best out here on the edge, but the best gamblers in the galaxies go to Stardust."
"I know, Mama. But you don't know how good I am."
"That a fact?"
Jo smirked, and bit down on the corner of her lip as she stood up and walked past Ellen out into the hall. "What's for dinner?"
Ellen turned to follow, but her eyes grazed over Jo's dresser and the small powder-blue box that sat on top of it. The music box Bill had given Jo for her seventh birthday. It played—it used to play the old song, Joanna but it had stopped working years ago. She still remembered how pitifully Jo had cried that night. They'd brought it to two different specialists to be repaired, but neither had been able to get it working again, short of replacing everything inside the box.
Ellen's heart pinched with the memory, but it made her pretty damned certain Stardust City was a good idea. Time to stop tap-dancing around the past.
oOo
Over a delightful dinner of reconstituted freeze-dried food-like substance and the last of the fresh fruit Ellen bartered for some of the Harvelles' home-brewed liquor, they discussed the bounties. The empath looked like easy pickin's, though sneaking up on the guy was going to be a bit of a trick. He seemed harmless enough—wanted for various minor fraud infractions—so Ellen would have Jo do the scouting. She was half-Nephilim and seemed to have tougher mental walls than the garden-variety human. Jo could also sense other Nephilim and spot Angels and Big Mouths, which was extraordinarily helpful in their line of work. But that was where her abilities stopped and Ellen was glad for it. Made her less of a target for the Firmament; she wouldn't get recruited for apotheosis. Had Ellen realized Bill was Nephilim before she fell in love with him …
Jo whistled. "Hotties," she said, skimming the Singer brothers' info.
"Don't let those pretty faces fool you," Ellen said dryly. "They got red-lined for a reason. Might look harmless, but so do baby rattlesnakes."
"Never seen a rattlesnake before." Jo twirled a hank of hair around her finger. "Wonder why they did what they did? Grave desecration? That's just nasty."
"That's none of our concern, Joanna Beth. You can't be thinkin' about the whys. For every crime they got caught doing, you can bet there's another dozen they got away with."
"I s'pose."
oOo
Though 'days' were relative, Ellen still preferred the old Earth way of chronicling time. Two days travel, she and Jo were pit-stopping at the port of Gaiman, a spit of a town that was little more than a fuel station and lay-over to more reputable places. They docked, and as soon as the gates opened, Ellen saw the damage. Big black scorch marks, dents the size of human heads, jagged shards of metal shoved to the safety of the edges and cul-de-sacs. But folks were roaming the narrow streets and though they snuck guarded glances at Jo and Ellen as they passed, there was no sound of blasterfire or the hum of frantic energy in the air, the hot smell of burning wires. Or the stink of blood.
"Looks like there was a recent skirmish," Jo said quietly, hand to the pocket where she stashed her mini tesla-ray.
Ellen nodded, smiled pleasantly at the passers-by. "Looks it."
"Awakening?"
"That'd be my guess."
"Who do'ya think won?"
Ellen sensed more than tasted a sort of bitterness on the back of her tongue. Judging from the graffiti, she could make a fair guess. "Grigori, I reckon. But you keep your eyes peeled, you hear me?"
They wandered unbothered until Ellen found what she was looking for: a crossroads drinking hole. The businesses that sat at intersections saw more traffic and were good places to glean tidbits of information, if not from the employees then maybe the patrons.
The bar had a retro vibe that Ellen would've liked under different circumstances—Lloyd's, it called itself, spelled out in LEDs fashioned to look like neon. Ellen paused just before heading inside, caught by a nearly invisible scribble of chalk on the corner of the building. She touched it, rubbed at it to see how fresh it was. The chalk came off easily on her fingertips.
"What is it?" Jo squinted down at the faint mark.
"Grigori sigil."
"Yeah? What's it mean?"
Ellen didn't like the tinge of interest in Jo's voice. "Means this establishment is sympathetic to the cause."
"Good."
She cut a glare at Jo, who shrugged and firmly set her jaw.
"Just sayin', Mama."
"Mmmhmm. That sort of talk will get you dead. Just sayin'."
Jo huffed but held her tongue.
The door creaked open noisily, but none of the patrons inside spared them a glance. Jo had to lean forward pretty far to get the bartender's attention. "Two beers." She slid a fifty-credit slip across the countertop. "And a question."
The bartender raised one bushy eyebrow. "What kind of question?"
"You seen any of these men around?" Ellen asked, pulling out her slim folder of data-sheets out from under her jacket.
The bartender looked down at the sheets, paging through them slowly. His mustache twitched slightly when he looked at the last one. "My memory ain't what it used to be," he said.
Jo scoffed and pulled out another fifty.
Ellen bit back a wince and said. "My temper ain't either."
That got a smirk out of the bartender. "Sad Eyes was here 'bout a week ago. Got really talkative after a few drinks. Said a junk-hauler picked up his dead ship from Rigel Nine. Towed it all the way here. Salvagers got a hell of a surprise when he jumped out at 'em." The old man laughed. "Wiry dude, but I liked him." His face shifted into confusion. "Not sure why I liked him, come to think of it. But I did."
"Think he's still here?" Jo asked.
"Honey, what do I look like, a blood-hound?" The bartender took the two bills and turned his back on them, chuckling to himself.
"Well, that was pointless," Jo said.
"Not entirely. Now we ask everyone else that looks like they might know something." She looked at Jo pointedly. "But maybe with a little less grease, next time?"
They inquired at a couple of other joints with just about as much luck, but they did find out the Grigori had, indeed, been in Gaiman last month and dragged out a handful of Firmament recruiters. Since then, the area had been quiet. Anyway, they'd likely have better results tracking the empath closer to Starlight City; what better place to find a doe-eyed kid with a talent for reading people than a gambling Mecca?
After grabbing a quick bite and a few provisions, they hopped back in the ship and set a course for the next podunk port on the way to the City. Ellen was getting dry-eyed and ready to call it a day, but another hour or two would put them that much closer. Jo didn't mind taking the helm; they could share the flying and then find someplace to drift for
some shut-eye.
Ellen was nodding off in the co-pilot seat when she heard Jo hum musingly. She dragged her eyes open again.
"What's that?" Jo asked, looking towards the scanner-sweep display.
Ellen turned to look at the green ring of light. It was empty. No indications of any other ships or space flotsam to be seen. "I don't see anything." She blinked, clearing her eyes and looked some more, but the image stayed the same.
"There!" Jo said again, pointing. "Right there!"
"There's nothing there, sweetie" Ellen repeated, scanning the monitor. "I'm not saying you're wrong—just, whatever you saw, must've been a glitch, that's all."
"Glitch?" Jo huffed, her eyes trained on the readout. "No way. This monitor's less than a year old. Might not be top of the line, but it's good." She folded her arms across her chest. "Ain't no glitch."
"Fine! It ain't, but then where is it?" Ellen asked exasperated. She gestured at the monitor, blipping normally to itself. "There's nothing. Not even a speck of dust. So then where—"
"There!" Jo yelled, pointing at the monitor as a red dot, signaling an unidentified, potentially hostile craft, came into view. It flickered out again a second later but came right back.
"What in the nine galaxies …" Ellen switched the view on the monitor, zooming in on the quadrant holding the blip. Whatever it was had been just outside the seldom-used jumpgate 24—it led to thirteen different inhospitable points in space, used mainly by miners and fueltankers, and to one oft-avoided jumpgate around Earth's orbit—smack in the center of Leviathan-patrolled-space.
"Leviathan?" Jo asked, frowning.
"Not sure. If it is, it's wounded. Let's just hang back, watch it for a few secs. But get ready to tear ass if this ain't nothing more than bait for an ambush."
"Yes, ma'am."
The gentle vibrations of the Charon filled the quiet, a sort of comforting background hum as they stared tensely at the monitor.
"That's not a Leviathan ship, Mom," Jo said, her eyes widening. "That thing's an antique."
Ellen narrowed her eyes. She'd seen something this time too, a black diamond. "Son of a gun, is that … an Impala?"
"They still make those?" Jo asked.
The ship on their monitor stuttered in and out of reality and then finally came into clear focus, as whatever cloak it'd had gave out completely.
They cautiously eased closer to it and a couple of things struck Ellen. One: the Impala—although 'vintage'—was well cared for. It wasn't banged up or dirty except for a sizeable and specific section, pockmarked by some sort of shrapnel having hit its hull. Two: bits of small dark somethings were drifting from the pockmarks like dandelion seeds, remembered from Ellen's childhood.
Jo let out a low whistle. "Those things are Leviathan-made," she said, referring to the floating crumbs. Jo could tell, since she had a touch of the Nephilim in her gene pool.
Ellen squinted and watched. One bit of shrapnel finally drifted close enough to get a good eye on it. "Urchins. Ate right through the metal. Damn, this poor old ship pissed off the Big Mouths, but good."
They'd been monitoring all the commonly-used emergency frequencies but heard no distress calls, nothing coming from the Impala. Ellen hadn't a clue which frequency it might even be transmitting on, as archaic as it was. She flipped a switch or three and made a quick viability scan of the vessel, mildly surprised to find that it wasn't quite as dead as it looked. A faint issuance of life force came from inside that thing. Hell, could've been vegetation for all they knew. The Charon wasn't a med ship; it didn't have capabilities nearly advanced enough to indicate what sort of heat and electrical impulses were being exuded by which sort of living matter. They were lucky to have the germ of information that they did.
Jo saw the results. "Someone might be alive in there."
Ellen drummed fingers on the arm of her seat, scowling at the read-out. One person would have to stay on Styx while the other donned the exo-wear and went exploring. "I'll suit up."
"It's my turn," Jo said stubbornly. Ellen was afraid of that.
She powerfully hated the idea of Jo on the ghost ship alone, but had to admit Jo was the wiser choice; she fit the suit better and had the sharper reflexes. And yes, it was her turn. Didn't make Ellen happy, not even a little. There hadn't been a peep from the old ship since they'd found it, though. Ellen chose to take that as a good sign.
"Ma?" Jo prodded.
Ellen exhaled. Hard. "All right. Go get dressed."