Chapter 2: Hunted

Chapter Rating: T (13+)

Rating Reason: Excessive Profanity.

Ozpin was just about to make camp, having found more than enough firewood for one night's cooking, when he felt the absence. That sudden, deep wrongness as the person he'd been sharing his head with for several weeks vanished rippled through him and made him gasp. He glanced every which way, as if somehow a physical clue might exist as to his missing hitch-hiker, when all of a sudden Thomas' voice echoed in his head, as if from a long distance.

'Well, this is… a stroke of luck and no mistake.' He sounded both perplexed and incredibly grateful.

'What is?' asked Ozpin, even more confused.

'You'll see… Hmm, no, that's no fun. What we camped underneath appears to have in fact been a ship. My ship, to be precise. I'm going to run a system diagnostic to see what's wrong, but if we are in as good a state as we seem from the interior, we might actually be alright to get moving tonight.'

Ozpin was suddenly elated. 'That's where that feeling of wrongness came from! You'd vanished because you're back in your body! I cannot wait to see a spaceship in action. An actual, real spaceship.' Rather off-balance, he added 'So how come this telepathic link bullsh – uh, stuff - is still working?'

'That's an excellent question and not one I'm in any way able to answer, I'm afraid. The link's still there – I could come back and inhabit your head again - but there's no point. We have what we came for. System diag under way, by the way. Are spaceships really that absolutely alien to your culture?'

Ozpin sighed and grimaced. 'Pretty much. Like I said, we can't go to space – our universal energy source, which we'd also use as a propellant, doesn't function beyond the middle layers of our atmosphere. We've tried it.'

'Hmmm-kay, but have you tried an alternative propellant?'

'Like what?' asked Ozpin, completely stumped.

'I mean, can't you think of a single other explosive liquid or gas?'

'Not really. I mean, we do make plastics, and some of the waste products of crude extraction and refinement are flammable, but apart from that I can't think of much. There's always hydrogen, I suppose…' he tailed off.

'You answered your own conundrum. Congratulations.'

Ozpin sighed as he assembled a fire, snapping smaller twigs and mashing up dried leaves for kindling and putting them at the centre of a teepee of larger sticks and parts of branches. 'You forget, hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, which makes it useless for space travel. We use Dust precisely because it doesn't. Before you ask, it's magic. Leftovers from when literal gods walked this earth. Our scientists don't know that, of course, so Dust has them fairly stumped, but I'm not telling.'

'An oxidiser would work.'

'Oxidiser?'

'I've said enough. If I speak any further on the matter I risk breaking the Sol Accords.'

Ozpin grimaced, but nodded. Shrugging off his bag and fumbling in it for a striker, he said 'Those are the ones that prevent you from handing out tech like sweets, yes?'

'Correct.'

They fell into companionable silence for a while, Tom presumably running diagnostics and Ozpin busy cooking food and relaxing, but after a little while he sensed a small amount of annoyance bleeding across the link he'd now noticed.

'Everything good up there?' he enquired quietly.

'Bleh, fuck no. Diagnostics aren't looking good. The beam that EMP was riding was powerful enough to completely shut down the energy shields, sure, but before they failed they put so much energy into trying to repel it that they burnt out the primary and secondary shield coils. There are supposed to be safeguards in place to prevent that, but I think it was probably too fast for them to react.

'Further, when the EMP hit it overloaded everything upstream of the primary and secondary power distributors. They did their job, fuses burning out and breakers tripping rather than letting downstream systems take the brunt, but unfortunately they don't protect the reactor itself. It's a fusion reactor, so no big explosions, but it's fucked all the superconductors we use to contain the plasma, and I've got red lights across the board. I can fix it – we carry spares – but it just turned a thirty minute job into a several hour one including a reactor overhaul. Forgetting the reactor, though, I'm not even sure if I have any spare fuses lying around for the distros. That's a problem we'll fix when we get there, I suppose.

'Forgetting the technical jargon, do you think you can fix it?' asked Ozpin still quietly.

'Yep, like I said. Don't worry, Oz, these ships are built like tanks. I might settle in if I were you, though, I'll be working on this for the long haul. I'd invite you to come aboard and get out of the gradually worsening storm I can see through my bridge windows, but I can't even open the doors until I can get emergency power online, and I can't do that while I'm working on the distros unless I have a death wish.'

[LB]

Ozpin couldn't sleep. That was rare, but all he could hear was the sound of rain all around the little patch of land he now recognised to be under the stern of Tom's ship. A distant howl put him further on edge. After the last few days, even with just how bad the weather was, the Grimm had got restless and were out on the prowl. There were some properly nasty ones this far from civilisation, too, ones that would require an entire armada of bullheads to subdue. If they found the ship while it was crippled like this, it would be the end of the line for both of them.

'Status update,' he demanded curtly. It had only been three or so hours, yes, but right now he cared less about politeness and more about getting off the ground.

'Chill, boss, I'm working as fast as I can. I've replaced all of the superconductors in the reactor, and I'm on the hunt for fresh fuses for the distros. If you're really uncomfortable out there, I can bring emergency power online for long enough to get you aboard, but I'll warn you; it's fucking cold in here. My suit's HUD is showing four degrees Celsius with a CA factor of negative two, bringing it down to just two Cee feel temp. If you'd rather that to your rather comfortable – if slightly damp – twelve Cee then I can do that.'

'No, I'm just complaining because I'm on edge. Sorry about that. Some of the Grimm out here can be rather nasty, though, so I'd rather get airborne ASAP.'

'Yeah, man, I understand that, but these things take time.'

Ozpin started, his response dying on his lips. He scrambled to his feet, grabbing Long Memory as he stood, and stared out into the mist and sheeting rain. He'd seen… something, a momentary flash of light in the sky two or three kilometres away. Another glint caught his eye, a little to the left of where he thought it had been. Then another, further to the left. It was moving. A flash of lightning in the clouds lit up the sky, and the mystery object stood out sharply against the suddenly white background.

It was a Bullhead. Carrying no markings, with no lights on save a searchlight. As Ozpin blinked quickly to get rid of the afterimage, he saw the glints turn and point straight down for a second before deviating again into a diagonal line. He followed it as it repeated this several times, before momentarily disappearing and reappearing further away, but more to the right. A standard search pattern, he realised. It wasn't a military Bullhead, which completely wrote off any possibility of it being friendly despite trying to conceal itself.

Salem. Somehow, she'd found out about this crash. Likely from the Grimm in the area. He could have kicked himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Little wonder the Grimm left the ship alone, if She herself was interested in it. She would want there to be more when her operatives got there than a twisted, Grimm-ravaged mess. This lit a fire under their proverbial arses, and he knew it.

'Oh, absolutely brilliant!' came Tom's sudden injunction into his thoughts.

'What?' he almost snapped back, before catching himself at the last second and modulating his tone.

'Found a veritable treasure trove of used-but-functional parts I never got around to scrapping. Iiiiincluding spare fuses for the distros. They've been used in the past and then replaced when they timed out, but they'll do the job until I can source or make fresh ones. Same with shield coils. Fitting the shield coils will take about two hours, but once that's done it'll take me, ohh, fifteen minutes to pop those fuses in and I'll be theoretically ready to begin the cold start sequence.'

'Hmmm, okay,' grumbled Ozpin. 'Be as quick as you can, please, I have eyes on an unknown Bullhead following a standard strip-type zoned search pattern. It's not carrying any identifying markings I can see, nor the required lights. I wouldn't have seen it at all if it wasn't for its searchlight catching the rain. If it follows its current search pattern without deviating, I give you maybe two hours until it sees us. Probably less.'

'You don't think it's friendly?'

'If it were friendly, it wouldn't be so concerned about not being seen. Grimm rely on negative emotion, not sight, so it won't be because of them.'

'I'll be as quick as I can without rushing. You don't want to rush when it comes to high-amperage high-voltage energy shield coils. Oh, and Oz?'

'Hmm?'

'If Grimm rely on… "negative emotions" or whatever the fuck, I might get that stick out of your arse. You seem really terse, and you're probably lit up like a beacon.'

'Noted,' Ozpin bit out.

The distant drone of aero engines reached his ears, modulated because of the rain, rising and falling with changing winds, but unmistakeable. Ozpin settled down to wait, watching like a hawk as that light slowly bore down on them, unyielding in its hunt.

I'm... not dead! That's right, I'm not dead!

Hope you enjoy. This is a short one, weighing in at just 1705 words, but that's because I don't like doing POV changes within the same chapter. I'll start work on the next one very soon; in fact, I might already be working on it. The remainder of this story will be mostly written from Tom's POV, because as interesting a character as Oz is, this is supposed to be Tom's story.

I'm not sure if I'm happy with how fast things are moving, but I want to get to the good stuff sooner than later.