8 - Mock-Trials and Misdemeanors
Udaev
Colonial Space
Midrim Desert
First Light
First light had come. Udeav's initial purple blaze formed along the bottom of the horizon as the subsequent wall of warm air pushed into the valley. It'd be bright here in a mere hour.
Cautiously, Ariane lifted her binoculars again. She pressed the rubber eye shields against her forehead and focused the expensive optics on her chief concern.
Six men had exited a ranger to the north about an hour ago. Two dogs wearing the familiar chocolate-chip battle-dress uniform of Vikr's private police force, four others in glinting red combat armor. Armed a little too aggressively to be Vikrmen regulars.
Her father's own hired retinue, no doubt.
KEI Hunters. The worst scum imaginable.
The fur on her short tail was involuntarily bristling outward. Ari tried to keep herself as low as possible, stuffing the binos back into her plastic hip pouch and latching the rubber gasket shut. The ferret then reverse-crawled back down the gulch she'd relocated to, using the mylar shroud to its best possible effect to mitigate detection. It took her a couple of minutes of squirming and writhing to get there.
She was winded. Ari didn't grow up appreciating filth, but fear made her quick friends with the small bits of rocks and the insects hiding among the surface. She collected herself.
How the hunters had found her, Ariane didn't really know. Satellite or recce craft orbits were a possibility, but Zeo had the expected flights mapped out very accurately and had early warning measures in place. The truck had been ditched seven kilometers away and even though their thermal signatures had likely been observed since, the armed interlopers shouldn't have encroached this early.
Twenty minutes for fighter craft, an hour for landborne parties were their expected response times; and certainly much slower for the loss of two measly drones and a scuffed-up janitor.
They weren't the only animals off schedule, either.
Ariane swept her PDA back to life again. It had been tied on an encrypted link-local connection directly to Zeouna's to prevent interception, detection or replay. Zeo had convinced Ari that the initial test, now a distant three years ago, had been strategic in its convenient choice of test subject. Ariane had known otherwise.
Zeo's one weakness, her desire to belong; mitigated.
There were no messages. There hadn't been for two hours. Zeo hadn't checked in at all.
It wasn't like Ariane's beloved to do this, but also not the first time Zeouna had left her alone in suspense. The thought that Zeo was already aware and was laying low had also incited additional indecision. And, while the ferret's thoughts naturally turned grim, Ari was able to eventually reason that the only way she'd be able to help Zeo was to wait for the search party's interest to fizzle out or make her way down the ropes solo.
That was thirty minutes ago, and the duo's grace period was running out: Vikr's dogs were doubling back south now.
The search party hadn't yet run across their belay points, lines or footprints near the abyssal maw in the surface. They were still too far north, but they grew closer by the minute. Ariane guessed they figured not even the infamous Ketumati scouts would be that foolhardy.
The six had divided into twos and had started combing the dirt in fifty meter increments. Standard cloverleaf search patterns; nothing fancy. But, they seemed to move with the confidence there was something to find here, and thus hadn't quit. Ariane Jean-Starkly had carved out further southward, simply deciding not to be found.
It caused her to shiver. Every part of Jean-Starkly's eight-hundred year refined sense of self-preservation instinct told her to run, crawl or otherwise abscond. Every tightly-wound nucleotide in her cells screamed at her to flee. It was rational, too. Leaving is what Zeouna would have done, assuming she was alone.
Ariane drew a deep breath.
But that's just the problem, isn't it? Ari thought. I'm not alone.
There was a path out. Slow and strenuous, sure, but available. Ari wasn't thinking about it anymore as she began to postulate a third option; distraction.
The hum and buzz of a second regrav vehicle approached from the south. Ariane flipped on her back, feeling naked without the weapon she insisted never to take. She wasn't a killer, but she was starting to feel the limits imposed by her moral compass.
This new ranger stopped about two klicks to the south east. She didn't even bother observing the occupant's dismount; her mind was made up.
The slender inheritess rotated back onto her stomach and ascended the hill. After a quick glance, she continued crawling, weaving herself in and out of small hills and terrain features to avoid being seen. One hand in front of the other. Her head in the dirt, keeping as low as possible; goal in sight. Her hands and feet grew cold with terror as she fought against her natural fight-or-flight reflexes. She lost track of time, it could have been five minutes or it may have been twenty.
When Ari snapped back to the present, she was two hundred meters from her target.
In a moment of weakness, she dropped her head into the ground as the question of self-doubt held her back.
What if she's hurt?
She shook herself loose, the sobriety of their situation forcing her to recall Zeouna's own hard lessons. In their combined resistance, there were going to be times where any action they made had consequences. There weren't any winning decisions, sometimes; just ones you had to make quick and now.
You can't help her with these monsters here. You need to hold up your end of the bargain.
The hunter's outlines were larger now, and they were using powerful beams of white light now. Ariane could hear them yelling amongst each other. Throwing caution to the wind.
Get moving. She's the only one that ever gave you a chance. That looked at you as more than an easy mark for credits.
Buy her some time. Ariane decided. Focus. She prepared you for this. She trusts you. Get them off of her. Make a scene. You won't be getting down there tonight. Give her time to escape on her own. Or time for you to come back!
Worst case? She waits, she sends a distress call to Timoteus later. They catch you, they arrest you, you go back to dad.
Mock trial and misdemeanors. Zeo doesn't have the same luxurious safety net
Ariane Jean-Starkly had finally reached her destination. A Macbeth Industries J-series light duty Ranger. No more than a canvas-topped, open-doored regrav truck. Military-grade, which in this case meant no key and no crew comforts other than a blase pleather seat; no headrest.
She lifted up on a knee, at the base of the driver's side and gracefully pulled herself up by the textured aluminum pylon into the seat. She sidled up to the control sticks as she searched for the master power.
Ari had rented something like it on her gap-year glam trek on Titania to ferry her and her harem of useless yuppie suck-ups across the dunes. Her driving experience was good enough, she thought. Though, committing regrav grandtheft would likely prove to be more perilous than zipping between luxury oases camps while sipping down one-hundred-forty year old cognac.
She found it. A toggle switch placed centrally on the dashboard, where the civilian versions kept their emergency blinkers. Ari flipped it on and the vehicle's four regrav generators sturred alive.
She heard whooping and hollering from the search mercenaries as the Ranger's lights flickered.
Ariane knew Zeouna would give up everything for her. It was Ari's chance to do the same.
She opened the gated throttle, placing the twisting knob on 'max' as the thrusters began to fire.
I'll make sure she's alone when she surfaces. Keep her alive.
Keep her alive. I'll find my way back.
It was a rash decision; but she was of impetuous stock.
She kicked the accelerator to the cabin floor.
Kybha System Slipstream
Colonial Space
SF Condottiere
0300 Ship Time
Why would she devote herself to something so hopeless?
After the initial shock wore off, James began to ask questions. Different questions, as well.
The hum of the Condottiere's slipdrive should have lulled James Into to a restful sleep, just as the Great Fox II's had when he was a baby. But, James tossed and turned, facing some uncomfortable realities during the witching hour.
A Jean-Starkly. No one has more of a guaranteed future than her.
James couldn't get Ariane'sregal features out of his mind. An old-world beauty with a twist. The charcoal-tinged ferret triggered an identity crisis within him; more so than the usual attractive silver-spoon usually did for him, at least.
It wasn't just her once-ample supply of money, nor was it her disarming looks, James was more than a little threatened by her motivations.
James could only assume she did it out of some misplaced, but generous, desire to help the colonies' most vulnerable people. Everyone knew how rough the Udeav system had been historically. Corporate death squads, mass-killings and starvations. It was so bad it was almost a joke in the central systems. What was left over was an ultraviolet mob of victims, more prone to murder outworlders on first contact rather than negotiate.
How could she be so gullible? He asked himself, turning on his side again.
The damsel heartthrob wasn't the only thing distressing him.
Trusting Zee-on-ah. Zay-on-ah? Whatever. 'Z'.
The revelation that a local pirate was present for his father's death wasn't as shocking as it could have been. Afterall, there were a lot of pirates on the Kismet with him; each with the primary motivation of surviving. Some could have escaped; even the ISS reports he'd obsessively read over the years admitted as much. It wouldn't have been impossible.
The evidence was fairly conclusive that she was there. The Kismet's blackbox manifest listed her by name, for one. She had been further divided as 'unaccompanied' with Zeouna as her only given name. Second, her DNA had been sequenced for, of all things, access to the vessel. Doorway, bulkheads and even the Kismet's docking tubes.
The addition of her DNA should have been conclusive, but all it did was provide more uncertainty. Her strands sequences telomeric-decay, a technique used for aging, placed her between twenty and thirty years old at the time. Which, given what little he'd seen of her, placed her at least over fifty years old. And while vulpes and their hybrids aged gracefully compared to other Lylation subspecies, they weren't that graceful looking at fifty.
Clarification was needed, and the briefing material Leinchs provided only made things stranger. A second sample, acquired more recently, provided the same results. Apparently, as scarce as sightings were, Z was a known quantity around Kivi's flotilla, and not just in an ideological sense.
The 'Immortal' Z. Exposed by a one-nighter in the wrong bed. James mused, a weak laugh finally accepting he was done sleeping for the morning.
Relatable, really.
It wasn't hard to accept that the initial sequencing had merely been flawed; the reports acknowledged that it was most likely the case. James could also accept the reality that the militant leader he'd grown obsessed with finding might not know anything about what happened.
At least he told himself he could.
His eyes were open now, studying the matte aluminum ceiling.
The questions didn't help with the worst part of space travel's disorientation and constant insomnia.
It often took spacers years to break free of their terrestrial reliance on natural light to wake themselves up. A trait that wasn't ever healthy for long term health. The multisystem time model revolved around the twenty-four hour Cornerian rotational period, but each local planet kept two clocks. Most ships, the Condottiere included, ran their operations to their Capitol's timing.
All this should have made it easier for James; who, besides living on Lylat's miraculous home planet full-time, only ever used standard Cornerian revolutions for measurement.
James completed a final revolution of his own, spinning on to his side for what felt like the hundredth time this morning. He felt the sheets pull, exposing his legs to the sixteen degree air. It was the last straw.
He lifted his head off the orthopedic pillow and stared at the green holographic numerals projecting over the top of his PDA left on the bolted-down nightstand. 0336 Ship time. I already forgot how to convert that to Lylat standard. James thought, rubbing his eyes.
There were at least ten hours left in their journey through the slipspace bubble they'd created, and they were apparently determined to drag out.
Now laying upright in the composite foam bed, he stretched his arms. Nothing had worked even the breathing meditation techniques he'd been reading about at the insistence of his personal trainer.
These quarters were James' old room from a few years back, before he'd left the team. A utilitarian space about four-by-three meters in floor space. It was like he never left. The bed was still made, the same black microfiber sheets and pillow cases on it as when he'd left. There were photos of him and an old girlfriend taped to the bulkhead over the fold out desk in the opposite end of the room.
He stood and opened his wall locker on the opposite end of the cube. He unzipped his two bags, still unpacked, and grabbed his toiletry bag. The vulpes didn't bother changing clothes before he left, a pair of designer trackies and a crimson fitted silk t-shirt. Deep V-neck, as was his tradition. He rounded out the outfit by inching into his favorite flip flops. This was James' own take on the refined 'I don't care' look celebrities often paid big money for. One that came naturally to him.
His door unlocked and slid open silently as he approached.
If he couldn't sleep, he'd at least get an early start on his morning routine. Well, his new morning routine.
James exited his private bunk and strolled into the Condottieri's crew compartment. A two level elongated trapezoid-shaped space located midship. Twelve crew cabins and four individual washrooms per level. Two meeting tables in the corner of each common-room, with a micro-galley in each for centralized access to food and quick snacks. In Jana's case, a quick drink, James thought.
The interior decorating left a lot to be desired and was decidedly a bit more spartan than both the late Great Foxes. Personal effects were limited to the bunks and bridge, as it didn't have the 'lived in' history of its predecessors; not even framed photographs or paintings. Decor was mostly limited to removable white plastic paneling in well-lit tubular hallways. Jana, being a savage hardass, rarely added touches of her own. There was the occasional potted plant; which ROB did his best to keep up with. All negative observations aside, the Condottieri was still fairly top-tier in accommodations as compared to military ships.
And if this pays as well as Jana thinks it will, it'll soon be a palace. James thought, mentally noting decor recommendations he'd make. More color, less harsh lighting. More plants. Maybe some accent chairs.
He tiptoed quietly, knowing well over half the crew was still asleep.
James traveled ten meters to the firepole in the corner of the crew compartment. The antiquated fixture was placed multilevel to enable a stream of pilots to quickly access their mounts. James' thought it was an unnecessary addition as the lifts had rapid programming enabled. Jana insisted upon it, indicating her old spacer's phobia of being trapped in a lift middeck. Still, while the crew quarters had a convenient lift at either end, he found the multilevel sliding pole to be much more whimsical.
James' arms and legs wrapped around the pole, his right hand gripping his bags as he slid. He slid, slowly of course, he wanted to see if anyone was up.
One down for galley, two for loading bay one, three for launch bay. He slid down one level.
The galley on crew level one was actually a bit more aft; the exit point for this level being an awkward afterthought, as it was placed in a corner between the stern-most personnel lift and galley-level head. Crew members not paying attention could be hit coming off the lift or walking into the latrines. James had almost collided with Tadd in this manner a few hours earlier, much to the stuck-up Toad's consternation.
After ensuring his footing on the deck was more stable than earlier, he walked his way over to the Galley's canteen for a glass of water. He dropped his toiletry bag on the sterile white plastic countertop, grabbed a mug from the 'clean' dishware pile and placed the glass by the dispenser.
Out of his peripheral vision, he noticed there were two other insomniacs with him, nestled in the little dinette fully aft on the galley.
He was still getting used to the new faces on the 'night' shift. There were relatively few of them, as ROB automated most tasks. Some tasks required a more organic mind to supervise; interstellar navigation and communication most importantly.
There was also the aspect of having staff on security. Jana always kept at least two pilots on standby; the 'hot squad'. Tonight's hot squad was Akach and the Hare girl; so James thought.
Akach was an acinonyx-variant felid; a 'cheetah' as they were prone to call themselves. Her golden coat mottled with dark brown spots that were considered desirable looking among felids.
The duo almost looked as though they were in a staring contest. It took a moment for James to properly assess the context. Akach had what looked like a textbook hologram projecting out of her PDA, while the Hare girl had physical notecards she was writing in.
"Answer," Akach challenged sternly.
"I know this one. I swear Aki," the young Hare spoke, looking flustered.
"You do not," the cat chided sternly. "Hesitation confirms it."
He'd met the mononymous Akach, callsign 'six', earlier during his walkthrough. She was an animal of few words, and even less patience. He hadn't read her file, but Dripp let him know that she was an active ISS Interceptor; two graduating classes ahead of Jana. There weren't many interceptors left, so she had to be among the best.
She noticed James standing behind the counter, five meters behind the young Hare's back. Her eyes frightened James. There was color in her irises but her gaze was merciless. She was a huntress through and through.
Akach said nothing, her tracking gaze the only acknowledgment of James' existence. Life of the party. James decided to break the ice with the youngest member of the team instead.
"Busy night?" he said, leaning over the counter.
Poppy Hare, James thought her name was, twisted her head back and left to look at him. Once he got a look at her gray and white furred face he knew it was her immediately.
Poppy was James' Dad's old mentor's granddaughter; a convoluted family connection to be sure.
Fate and history had been kind to the Hare name, and deservedly so! Peppy's name had become synonymous with the stable leadership qualities that won wars, plural. As the Cornerian Federation's influence began to sunset, the man's legacy had remained untarnished. Even the ascendant Cornerian Union acknowledged this, renaming the previously-nameless UCS-0232 colony system as "Hare."
He'd last seen her years ago at a StarFox 'alumni' party; just a teen at the time. Now she was the youngest member of the team, no more than twenty years of age. In a lime-green combat flight suit, no less.
"Mornin'," she sputtered, her mouth agape for a couple seconds before pursing her lips.
She continued to gawk a little bit. It was cute; just the ego boost James needed this morning. But, there was an awkward silence that followed.
"Sorry!" She said, abruptly shaking her head.
"No, you're fine," James said, taking his first sip of water and walking his way over to the booth.
"I'm not always this weird," she said, the words continuing to stumble out of her mouth. "Just a little starstruck, is all. Sorry."
She broke eye contact for a moment.
James noted she had a lovely twang in her accent, just like her mother's. He was glad she didn't lose that over the years.
"Why?" Akach asked, genuinely befuddled.
James' nostrils flared for a moment, but managed to wrangle his ego under partial control.
"Oh, I think it's either the multi-million credit record deals, or just the confidence, really." James replied flatly, plainly and without raising his eyes to meet her.
"But," He said, pausing for effect before the compliment. "Only one of us here has a habitable planet named after them."
The cat rolled her eyes and sighed. She stood up, bringing her own empty mug with her.
James thought about taking Akach's seat only for a moment before realizing she'd probably killed men for less. He sat in the lounge chair perpendicular to the booth instead, resting his feet on the adjacent coffee table.
"Poppy, right?" James finally confirmed.
"Good memory."
"It was more of a guess, really, it's been awhile," he admitted.
"Good guess, then. I met you when I was, like, what? Fifteen, I think? The last reunion thingy'," she said, ending her sentence in a lower tone. It was a half-party, half-memorial service for her grandfather.
"Well this team has always been prone to wild bouts of nepotism," James rattled off, seemingly ignorant of his own condition, "And with ears like that, you could only be a Hare."
James remembered her grandfather, Peppy, with vague warmness. Fox always kept a photo of him holding little Jana and James near the bridge of the Great Foxes. It was a tradition that was continued, with numerous photo albums secured on the walls along the corridor to the bridge. James supposed his father had to, Fox also knew what it was like to lose a father. Terrible thing to have in common.
Now? Peppy's granddaughter sat cross legged in front of him. Wearing that flight suit James pretended not to enjoy seeing her in; an awkward predicament to say the least.
"Is that why you think I'm here? Nepotism?" She cut at him, crossing her arms. Her expression soured.
Shit. James thought, realizing his err. Really started this conversation off on a good footing.
"Oh no! No, no, no, that's not what I meant! I'm sure you're an expert… Uh, whatever it is you are."
"Pilot," Poppy clarified, eyes glowering red.
The only sound to break the tension was the running of recycled and purified water through the taps as Akach rinsed her mug.
She softened a bit, after having made her point clear enough. Dimples appeared on the short fur around her light gray face as she emitted a friendly chuckle.
"Relax, James. I'm just kidding."
"I'm just breaking up my studies for a bit. Astrophysics. And, you're right about the nepotism bit. All I had to do was ask." She laughed, relieving the tension.
"What about you? What's someone like you doing here? You're already rich, why would you willingly get your hands dirty again?"
Someone like me? James thought, unable to understand what she meant. The identity crisis smacked him again, but the internal shock didn't last for long.
The alarms blared. Interrupting his moment of self-reflection and preventing any sort of introspective lesson from being learned.
From the first moments, James held out hope it was just another drill. But, Jana had run a few drills the day before. There's no way she'd do one ten hours from the destination. Right?
Akach wordlessly pulled herself out of the seat and immediately jogged toward the lift. Before the doors closed, she beckoned them with an eyebrow raise and a shoulder shrug.
Poppy and James shared a glance between each other for a few seconds, their combined lack of experience delaying their reaction time.
They soon leapt after their considerably more seasoned comrade.