Deadenders
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: Castle reached a dead end with Season 8, but it's going strong here. Rating: K Time: The far future.
Castle was able to sleep through the sounds people made coming back to the ship and woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. He decided he'd go to Miss Meredith's for a nice breakfast and then go see how Alexis and Charlie were doing.
"Hi, Castle. How are you?" Charlie asked. "Do you know it's been four years, three months, five days, eleven hours and seven minutes since I saw you last night?"
Rick laughed.
"Glad to hear it. You're feeling better?"
"I haven't felt this good in decades. I just love Blondie."
"Blondie? You mean Alexis? And where is she?"
"She's asleep and I like calling her Blondie and I do love her. Do you think she'd marry me?"
"You are a computer and she's a human, remember."
"That's a problem. But I've been working on a human avatar for myself. Look."
The figure of a woman appeared before Rick.
"What do you think?" Charlie asked.
"Charlie, those are the biggest boobs I've ever seen. If you were real, you'd fall on your face. No, your boobs would hit the ground and your face would he about three feet off the ground."
Charlie quickly changed the avatar.
"Better?"
"The boobs look like two very large pink watermelons. Smaller, maybe?"
Charlie finally settled on a set of D cup boobs.
"You still need clothes. Your avatar is nude."
Charlie's avatar suddenly had on a very wispy bra and panty set, stockings and stiletto heels.
"That's a start, anyway."
"Hey, you're back, Castle." Alexis said.
"I just came back to see how Charlie is."
"She's great. But it'll take a long time for me to go through all of her data files and get her ready to access everything instantly. Are you leaving?"
"No, I thought we'd unload the ship and make sure everything's ready to go and leave tomorrow. That way everyone gets some real food before we have to go back on ration packs for the trip."
"Blondie isn't leaving me, is she?" Charlie cried.
"No. Alexis, Martha and Dr. Parish will be staying here."
That last statement turned out to be not entirely true.
"Captain Castle?" Lanie said. "Can I talk to you?"
"Certainly."
"I'd like to go to your uncle's ranch with you to check out your operation. It's not that I don't trust Ryan, he's very good, but a lot of treatment will be done at the ranch, and I'd like to get to know the whole operation better. Dr. Grivas said he can send the medevac chopper for me when I'm done."
"Fine with me."
They were ready to go at dawn the next day. Rick noticed that everyone had a takeaway bag from Miss Meredith's. He did too.
He spoke to his team.
"This trip will take about three days, maybe four. We'll be going on a road. Now when I say road, what I mean is a dirt path that's been worn down by the few motor vehicles on this planet, wagons, horses and foot traffic. A little after lunchtime we'll get to Payne's Woods. The woods come right down to the edge of the road so it's a good place for an ambush. Actually, the whole road is a good place for an ambush, so everyone keep a good lookout and keep your weapons ready."
Everyone mounted up. Castle was driving the lead vehicle, and he was surprised when Kate Beckett took the seat next to him in the cab.
"You know how to handle that assault rifle?" he asked.
"I do. Are we going to get going?"
And off they went.
The first part of the trip went well, but then they came to the Woods. Twice they found large trees across the road that had to be moved. However, there was no ambush. Either the roadblocks were from old ambushes, or the ambushers didn't want to take on such a large, well-armed force.
"We'll stop for the night at Fallen Timbers." Castle said. "It's not much more than a wide spot in the road, but it's the best place we'll find to stop."
When they did stop Castle arranged the four trucks in a rectangle. He walked out of the perimeter to take a look at it to see if there were any obvious weaknesses.
"Good evening, Captain Castle."
For a split-second Castle thought it was one of his own people. He was dressed in camouflaged fatigues with a protective vest and carried an assault rifle. But Castle saw he had an odd fur hat on and not a helmet. To his right stood a Ka Rara. He was shorter than the average human and quite barrel chested. He wore moccasins, baggy homespun pants, a camouflaged shirt and carried a longer battle rifle. He had a homemade leather bandolier over one shoulder with full ammo clips.
"Good evening." Rick replied.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I'm platoon commander Pavel Ivanovich Strelkov."
Castle knew that members of the penal battalions had no ranks, just job descriptions.
"I suppose you're going to want something for not attacking us."
The man shook his head.
"Not at all. I'd like to trade with you."
"You want to trade." Castle said, not being able to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
"I do. Yes, I and the humans with me, were in the penal battalions. I was a captain in the Armored Cavalry Regiment of the Sibirski Cossack Host. I had the misfortune to refuse an idiotic order from a drunken colonel. I won't pretend that all of my men were angels, but we look at our move to Aurora as a chance for redemption. We met with War Leader Changrin of the Ka Dramoff and decided to cooperate."
Castle thought.
"The Ka Dramoff are the people of the bend in the river. They were chased out of their homeland about eighty years ago."
"And have been bullied by larger and stronger tribes ever since. But now, we're as strong as any clan on the Great Steppe. We simply want to fit in." The Ka Rara said.
"Captain, is there a problem?" Reynolds called from the trucks.
"The man here wants to trade." Castle yelled back. "No one do anything, especially shoot, without my order."
"What do you have to trade?" He asked, turning back to Strelkov.
"I have twenty-two horses, all broken to the saddle. I have twelve packs of steppe wolf skins, about two hundred pounds of iron ingots, and three bags of chatka. In return I'd like five thousand rounds of 7mm short ammo for assault rifles, five thousand rounds of 7mm long ammo for the battle rifles, two hundred 30mm grenades and I need the services of your medic for my wounded."
"There are a couple of things I'd like to know. One, how did you know my name and that I had a medic?"
"The humans on Aurora are quite gossipy on the radio. News of your arrival has been all over for days."
"Okay, where did you get the horses and other stuff?"
"We stole it from the people who stole it originally. You must know that people raid the Great Steppe area and trade with tribes to the south and east."
"Lastly, you could buy a lot more ammo if you took everything into Alphaville or some large outpost. Why deal with us?"
"The Alphaville Militia and others shoot at former members of the penal battalions. That's how one of my men got wounded."
Castle made a decision.
"Ryan. Dr. Parish. You have patients."
"Who are these people?" Ryan asked as he passed Castle.
"People who want to trade with us." Castle turned to Strelkov. "Shall we see what you have to offer?"
The horses looked good to Castle and the skins, iron ingots and chatka were as advertised.
"Tell you what I'd like to do." Rick said. "I need horses for my people. The roadless steppe will just chew up our trucks. I'll buy everything from you, but I want to send someone to a fairly nearby Ka Rara village. That person will need a horse. Then I'll have the Ka Raras come here with their own horses and take everything into Alphaville and sell everything but the horses. Then they can take the horses across the steppe to my uncle's ranch. You'll have to stay here for a day or two. Sound okay?"
"Sounds good."
Castle sent Jack Reynolds, the only other native of Aurora, off to the Ka Rara village. Then everyone settled down to wait.
When they made dinner that night, Rick offered Kate a cup of coffee.
"This is real coffee!" She said. "This is really good coffee. Where did you get it?"
"I know a guy." Was all he said.
"I'd like to meet that guy."
It took three days for Reynolds to get back with six Ka Rara riders. They were the first Ka Raras that the off-worlders had ever seen. They were generally smaller than humans, but very humanoid. They did have barrel chests and very round heads. Their ears and eyes were larger by a bit than humans and their eyes lacked any whites, being entirely grey, as was their skin. They had no noses, just to breathing slits in the center of their faces and no body hair. They did have two horns, about an inch high, on the sides of their heads.
"I've got the riders you asked for, but also some bad news." Reynolds said.
"God. What now?" Castle asked.
"There's a bandit called Demming operating in these parts. He has maybe fifty or sixty humans and maybe a dozen outlawed Ka Raras. Well-armed, too. The Ka Raras tracked his band for a while. They're headed for Two Rock Ridge. Probably looking for us."
"Damn! He and his men are the criminal gangs that were dumped here?"
"Yup."
"What's the problem with this Two Rock Ridge?" Strelkov asked.
"It overlooks a hairpin turn in the road. Our trucks will have to slow way down and be sitting ducks for anyone on the ridge."
"Can you avoid going there?" Strelkov asked.
Rick shook his head.
"No. There's nothing but a huge bog to the north of us and south of us is a deep valley that we can't climb out of for miles and miles, plus there's nothing like a road there. Our trucks would get beat up really badly. We might lose some. Hell, we might lose them all."
"Do you have a map of the area?" Strelkov asked.
"I have one right here, but you won't find any way to go around Two Rock Ridge."
"Probably not." Strelkov muttered, looking at the map.
"Find anything interesting?" Reynolds asked.
"Maybe. You have twenty some odd people, quite well armed and trained. I have thirty-seven, also well-armed and well trained. If we stopped tomorrow night about here, out of the Woods, we could set up a defensive camp that this Demming wouldn't want to attack at night. He'll want to wait until we get to the hairpin curve. Once it's dark, we can leave the trucks behind with a small guard and attack Demming when he least expects it. There's one thing though. My most severely wounded man died. We didn't expect he'd live but the three more lightly wounded men…."
Strelkov was interrupted by a woman saying something in what Rick took to be Russian.
"Excuse me. As Tatiana Romanova reminds me, there are two lightly wounded men and one lightly wounded woman. They can't march with us and will need to go in your trucks for a few days until they can. I can pay for this service, of course."
"Are they well enough to fight from behind a truck when we attack Demming?" Rick asked.
"Yes."
"Then that's all the payment I'll need."
A mile or so out of Payne's Woods and some two miles from Two Rock Ridge, the small convoy stopped. Strelkov's people had managed to squeeze into the trucks somehow so that it didn't look like Rick had any more troops than he'd started with.
TBC