[OC] Searches (PRVerse B2 C7.1)
First Book2 (Prev) wiki (Next)
Gorfal. Stál Tennur snorted in contempt as he slammed the throttle control on his battlepod forward and hit his comms. “Request permission to board the ship, battlemaster. Half these stupid creatures are probably already dead of fright as it is! It is not like we will be at risk.”
Static met his request, and he grimaced. That request, in that tone, could land me in the fighting pits against the battlemaster, but those Gorfal have prime produce on their ships, and it would be nice to eat something besides fungus. I wonder what Gorfal meat tastes like?
After a few moments of silence he decided that his request had been ignored, and thumbled the controls to bring his micro-missles online.
Then his comms crackled to life in a broadcast to everyone, not just himself. “All pods hold off, mother ship full stop. Our young buck has requested permission to deal with these creatures by himself. Tennur, you are cleared to engage the prey at your discretion. Maybe you will get lucky and the Gorfal won’t have any Humans, Xaltans, or other high-index races on board as guards. If they do, you will probably be too tired after dealing with them to slaughter over a hundred rabbits yourself.”
A hard laughter spread through the line, but Stál didn’t care. Wrong, battlemaster. If I am lucky there will be a Human or two there for me to prove myself against. I would love to meet one of our old enemies face-to-face.
*
Two entire days with just my Aunt, Uncle, and my parents: No calls, no comms, no meetings. Just a little while to sit back and enjoy time with them… time that we have been hard-pressed to get to ourselves over the last two months. I’m glad that Mom and Dad opted to take the Space Elevator to orbit rather than a shuttle. Julia looked down at the all-to-quickly approaching ground. A chime sounded, followed by an announcement that the ‘diplomatic car’ would be de-coupling from the elevator cable in thirty minutes. Too bad it is over.
She felt a smallish hand on her shoulder and smelled the faint cinnamon of a Venter. The arm which belonged to the hand wrapped around her shoulder, and she leaned into her cousin Irana, who had been so helpful since she first arrived at the Embassy.
The special diplomatic ‘car’ which could be procured by Ambassadors if they wanted to take the ‘slow road’ to orbit was designed for comfort... and a view. It was smaller than most cars, at only two stories tall, but the ‘forward’ room went all the way the up those two floors, and boasted a window which went from floor to ceiling that looked out on the spectacular views that no other form of transport could, in Julia’s humble opinion, quite match. We are decelerating now, and it is so strange. There is still very little feeling of movement, and less appearance of it. Everything is relative, indeed.
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, then Uncle Kaz joined them. He laid a hand on each of their shoulders before he spoke. “I always enjoy watching the car come down into the terminal station… not that I get to ride these marvels of engineering and science very often: Living in the Royal Fishbowl, and now in the Fishbowl Of Office does that.”
Julia couldn’t help her laugh. “Well, I guess you should be used to the accommodations then. I have heard a number of other Ambassadors with agoraphobia issues refer to this thing as ‘The Fishbowl on a String.’ For myself, I don’t think I could get enough of this.”
Her Uncle chuckled a bit. “Oh, you could readily get enough of the fishbowl I have always been in, I assure you. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that our modern medical science has been able to give us the facial-disguise implants, and allow me to go out occasionally without instantly attracting a flock of followers.”
She could feel her cousin’s impish grin, even though the high-quality windows her eyes seemed glued to gave no reflection. “I don’t know, pop. If you are in a fishbowl, wouldn’t it be a school following you around?”
A mock glare came from Uncle Kaz. “You know, there are times I regret teaching you English.”
“Oh, Dad, but it is such a versatile language, with so many possibilities… and a fascinating subject, at that. Did you know it is actually a conglomerated language with three different root languages? That is why the grammar of it can be such a hash. Well, one of the reasons.” Irana waved a dismissive hand. “I could go on for a long time, it has actually become an interest of mine.
“Still, it is fascinating. There is a long-running joke that English is not a single language, but three different languages standing on one-another’s shoulders while wearing a long coat and chasing other languages into darkened alleys to rifle through their pockets for loose grammar and words. And, they are still doing it! Did you know that they have included several hundred words from various non-Human languages at this point?”
Uncle Kaz answered with a little surprise in his voice. “I didn’t know that, but should hardly be surprised. That trait of cross-pollination of Human languages isn’t unique to English, you know. It happens with a lot of their languages, and has through their history, particularly when any given language becomes the dominant one for a lot of cultures with different languages.”
A soft, thoughtful sound came from Uncle before he continued. “Come to think of it, I think I was aware of their use of non-Human languages on some level. I had heard the non-Human words – often badly mangled – a few times when I had my translators off, but never really thought about it. Probably just chalked it up to ‘Humans being Humans,’ I guess.”
Julia started to respond, but another announcement chimed and interrupted her. She settled back into her Uncle a little, and felt her cousin do the same. A contented silence fell over them, and none of them broke it as the elevator car lowered the last distance, settled into the terminal, unlocked from the elevator cable, and was shuttled off to the VIP disembarkation area.
Sadly, the moment of peace didn’t last past their departure. They made their way, flanked by the ever-present security for the Prime Minister, to the waiting air-shuttle. Uncle Kaz got in first, as standard protocol indicated. Something about minimizing the time the Prime Minister spent ‘out in the open.’
The shuttle seemed larger than the one which had brought them to the spaceport, Julia noticed, but dismissed the thought. Then her Uncle hesitated as he boarded and his head swiveled as if taking in the entire interior of the craft.
Something about his movements set alarm bells off in Julia’s head, though not the ones involved in immediate danger. Something, however, seemed off.
Julia, at the tail end of the line to board, watched each person hesitate and scan the interior of the vehicle. When she got up to the door she managed to brace herself and keep from hesitating, but did feel her eyebrows go up as she searched for a place to sit.
And, ‘search’ turned out to be the right word for it: This was, in fact, a larger vehicle than had carried them out here, and it had more people in it than it probably should have. She managed to squeeze herself into a spot, between Katja and someone she didn't recognize who wore an Admiral’s League Military uniform.
A slow look around the car showed a captain, a commander, Kessler, Ambassador Ballud – his greenish skin looking a bit dry – and the Gorfal Ambassador, of all people. Ok, something has happened, but why…”
The door shut and the Julia felt like the shuttle protested a bit at all the weight as it rose into the air, and Uncle Kaz interrupted her thoughts. “So, are we all here for this meeting because we want the privacy that an air shuttle can provide, or because this was urgent enough to need immediate attention but not urgent enough to interrupt one of my mini-vacations?”
The Admiral spoke. “Yes, to both of your questions, Prime Minister. There has been a development with the piracy situation on the fringe.”
Julia sat up a little straighter, and others did the same. Uncle Kaz motioned for the Admiral to continue. The woman responded by hitting some controls on a pad. The windows all brought down automatic shades, and a low-resolution, two-dimensional picture appeared on the forward wall of the shuttle. It showed a fuzzy image of what had to be the hallway of a Gorfal ship – Julia recognized the pattern – and the blurred image of a small, very white figure with a sword – of all things – in one hand and some sort of firearm in the other.
The figure had faced off against what appeared to be a Human, though it was hard to tell through the image’s low quality. If that is a Human of average height, then his opponent couldn’t be more than four feet tall. Four and a quarter at most: It is also, unless that is an artifact of the image, also awful pale.
“Our pirates attacked a Gorfal long-haul freighter carrying produce and seed to one of the smaller outer colonies. For the record, it is a mixed colony with over a dozen species integrating, including Human, Xaltan, and Arabso.
“The important thing is that this particular ship filed a proper flight plan – as Gorfal tend to do…” the Admiral made a respectful nod to Ambassador Evand, the Gorfal, who returned the nod with a small smile. “The ship also had a qcom on board, and took the sensible precaution of keeping a data-feed up with its home station. So, thanks to the Gorfal government’s timely reaction to the monitoring of the craft’s safety switch, when the pirates sent out an energy burst that decoupled the qcom we knew within minutes.
“Fortunately there was also a patrol ship only a couple of hours away. They laid hard into engines, in the hopes that the Gorfal ship could evade long enough for help to arrive. Sadly, the Gorfal had no such luck, and our patrol ship arrived just in time to watch the explosion and see the pirate mothership retreat.”
Golna held up a hand. “Wait, you said ‘mother ship.’ If all your people saw was the retreating ship, how did you come to the conclusion that it was a mother ship?”
The Admiral nodded. “The patrol ship – a Corvette – carried two shuttles for general purposes. The Captain launched them both to go pick through the debris, then went out a couple of light-hours and turned its best telescopes onto the location in question. But, we will get to those findings later, they are – we believe – less important than what the shuttles found… which culminated in the image before you.
“The enemy left behind a few nasty surprises for our shuttles, but League Navy Shuttle craft are not without a few defenses. They also left behind munitions that attempted to lock onto the ‘black box’ of the ship and obliterate it. When the black box responded to the shuttle’s ping those munitions fired up and went for it. They nearly succeeded, but the shuttle pilots reacted with commendable speed and competence. They managed to detonate the micro-missiles short of their target, though the box was still damaged – hence the lack of quality in the picture before you.
“The Corvette is still working its way back to the nearest starbase, but they were able to pull this one still image. So, ladies and gentlemen – and Prime Minister – I give you the shape of our enemy, if not his face.”