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10-30-2020, 01:07 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-30-2020, 05:24 PM by greaterfrost.)
The field on her hip crackled wildly as the majority of the weight of an entire floor of the ancient tavern tested the limits of the photonic armor’s operating capacity, there were microns of space that separated the surging lethal energy from her tender bare skin. She looked up at the sky and saw someone flying away with her shuttle.
“By the hells” she swore as she finally managed to get her arm free of the partial building collapse.
She activated a stud hidden inside of her elbow and two drones appeared, Her ship The Amarie was in stationary orbit around the south pole to hide in the ionic interference of the unstable colony. It kept the authorities that were certainly looking for her from detecting her ship, but it also kept her crew from staying in contact with her. Her photonic field was beginning to fail as a seven-ton beam was in the process of buckling, seemingly eager to coat the ground in her innards as it drove through her body unimpeded. This wasn’t the intended use of photonic armor, but she was grateful for the protection.
Jada was lying unconscious only four or five meters away, she had fallen from the third level and it appeared her leg was broken. The drones did their magic, using plasma lances and phaser emitters the clear the debris trapping her in the building. Another crack above was the signal the rest of the building was coming down. After more of the non-loadbearing debris was cleared Shavi climbed out from her cocoon of rubble mere moments before the rest of the street was coated in dust and loose stone.
Shavi had a steel support frame through her mechanical arm, it caused her entire armor suite to act up giving her an almost demonic red electrical short to the rest of the active field. Without the pressure of the building on it, the fusion power source could sustain itself for months, but its emitter core was in her arm and damaged.
Shavi wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold out.
She noticed people moving in the debris. They were on the planet Corin a post-industrial technological world with no concrete evidence of aliens in the universe, Shavi and Jada had equipped implants and concealers to hide their distinctive markings, but no amount of makeup or prop work was going to make the red shimmering field around a green-skinned woman vanish from people’s minds. In the debris Shavi realized her best chance of not frightening indigenous people was to appear as innocent as possible so she disengaged the field, and covered her legs and chest, the only parts of her that had not been altered to suit the tan ruddy skin of the Jour’a the people in the eastern province of Yun’da.
Her universal translator was working fine when someone whom she assumed to be a magistrate waded through the dust in debris offering his hand out to her helping her to her feet.
“Vy Hana, are you unhurt, that building should have taken you to the gardens as real as I’m standing here!” the shorter balding man looked up at her with genuine concern in his eyes, nearly thirty people were in the streets now as Shavi pulled the steel bar out of her arm without thinking. The magistrate’s eyes went wide, and he dropped and fell backwards! “Dema!” He screamed as the people around him quickly got more excited.
“What, no.. I..” she looked down at her arm and the sparking hole in what looked like a pale red skin. “it’s nothing, just a minor… I mean… oww! What happened to me!” She feigned injury and dropped to the ground pretending to pass out from the ‘wound.’ The dust had cleared enough that the people started noticing her two drones flying high above their heads as she swore under her breath disengaging the robots with a trigger in her HUD.
Shavi hadn’t the best luck with indigenous people she made them nervous, no one that tall should smell that good. Jada tended to be far more capable at soothing these uneducated minds. Two large men… large for normal men, still slightly shorter than she came into the fray and places what Shavi could only assume were restraints and she along with Jada were taking to a holding cell.
She was biting her lip waiting on the crude bed they provided her and iron bars that wouldn’t endure even a casual blast from her hidden disruptor. Jada was in another room with a healer working on the broken leg. The entire town looked like it had been taken out of an old human American postcard, circa 1920, Shavi noticed as she was being escorted, they only just started having electric transmission lines going in, so this wasn’t a major commercial hub, and they wouldn’t have much in the way of electronics. At this moment, however, she had to make sure her sister was going to survive the barbarism they would using to cure her wound.
The drone that normally lived in her arm was flitting about outside with the photonic field of a local bird disguising it, it appeared to be making a nest along a gutter above the magistrate's office, but as it seemed random to the casual observer, it was making a series of circuits it could use to repair equipment damaged in the fall, and collapse. A short impeller drew in dust and silica and the fabricating arms in the internal mechanisms of the medical bot created the isolinear glass pathways one series of molecules at a time. Most of Jada and Shavi’s devices used to store information to activate the complicated but routine essential functions they expected. Shavi would have been extraordinarily lucky if they had discovered vacuum tubes on this planet yet, but they had plenty of raw materials unlike most of the developed worlds she traveled to.
It never hurt to be prepared, but this planet was supposed to be the first real vacation they had since the joining, they just wanted to lay in the sun unmolested by technology and competing mercenaries and enjoy a week. They were just starting to mass-produce repeater rifles; they didn’t even have a stable way of getting through the air yet so they couldn’t possibly have been an issue in this pristine and backwater absence of distractions.
Jada was carried gently to the holding cell while her leg appeared to be at least passably bandaged they applied burn salve to what they called the devil’s mark, a series of ‘burns’ moving down her lower legs to her ankles, Shavi’s bio-monitor did a basic diagnostic of her sister’s condition and she noticed the doctors hadn’t recognized the swelling in her head, of the lymph gathering around her neck, she could have a stroke almost any moment if Shavi did nothing. They laid her down gently and gave Shavi a rueful glare as they left the two of them alone at least Natyl was unharmed.
Shavi pulled hypospray from her leg pouch, they guard didn’t know how to detach them so they couldn’t confiscate the materials inside. The hypospray was loaded with an anticoagulant and cortical steroid to bring the swelling down. She also applied an osteosythetic to set the bone properly and ensure she could walk on it almost unimpeded after she had rested. She injected her sister as she visibly calmed, the bio-monitor HUD hidden behind her right eye gave Shavi some peace as she could already see the medications taking effect.
It was nighttime and the judge wouldn’t be here until the morning, or whatever they called a judge wouldn’t be here until then. Jada was resting comfortably and Shavi was almost finished repairing her cybernetic arm. By the time the sun broke over the horizon, Jada was coming too and Shavi was growing impatient.
“Oh, my head!” Jada cried as she sat up from the uncomfortable cot, looking over at her sister. “How long?” she asked as Shavi perked up.
“About eleven hours, you hit your head and knocked what little was left of your sense clean out of you.” Shavi teased as she looked up at the ceiling, she had already meditated twice, so she had essentially a full night’s sleep with only two hours of work.
“Last thing I remember we were getting something to eat and someone starting shooting at us, and the building exploded!” She recalled every moment of the experience before she had been knocked out by the concussion wave of the explosive. “No one could possibly have known we were here unless they were really good at tracking us, or cheated.”
Shavi smiled loving her sister’s memory and intuition, her deduction was the envy of nearly everyone who knew her including green-skinned sisters’. Shavi couldn’t piece the fact of the moment together there was no way anyone on this planet had any idea who they were or where they were from and they had kept anything with a long-range radio on it back on the Amarie still presumably cloaked on the south end of the planet.
“They said Dema when my shield went off, something tells me they’re going to think I’m a witch, and the marks on your body are a clear sign you’re the devil,” Shavi smirked as they were still alone in the cell. “I don’t think we’re going to make it through dinnertime if we play by the rules dear sister, may I please, please get us out of this mess?”
“I’ve been awake for a matter of seconds Shay, you wanna give me a second to ask someone what’s the misunderstanding?” Jada used to be nearly as reckless as Shavi, but since her implantation, she has been thinking more like Maru, she was still fun at parties, but her spontaneity was less than helpful when there wasn’t much information to give.
“Beta is up on the roof making a repair on our communicators," Shavi reported. "If the Amarie is still there and we can find a large enough concentration of iron to make antennae, I got the setup already picked out, but if they hang us, which is likely I think our inflated egos will be a little lopsided on our stretched necks.” She had sincerely just wanted a chance to get away from it all and she hadn’t brought more than her typical loadout with her. It had kept her anonymous on the most technically advanced systems but somehow, in this tech swamp of a planet, she gets recognized and nearly gets killed. At least now she had a face, and maybe a digital fingerprint. Since there wasn’t much more than radio, any kind of signal would probably lead her to the saboteur, and Shavi has consistent recordings from most of the things she did. Again, that couldn’t even be started until after they were away from here.
Jada shakily got to her feet and tested the stretch of the iron bars, she looked back to Shari and leaned again the bars. “I would like to get to know these people under normal circumstances but maybe it’s better we find out who tried to kill us, and I agree, this time, that it’s going to be much harder to do that if we are dead. So… just this once we’re going with your plan, but that’s only because I was unconscious, and you’ve had a hell of a head start on coming up with a plan. Don’t let his get to your head….” Her older sister answered with her typical smile and wink in her eye.
Shavi’s eye lit up like lanterns as she pressed a button on the interface and four of the bars simply fell off the jail cell. The remote drone came back in and landed on its charging station back on her arm while Shari pet the back of it like a small chipmunk that decides she was his new roost.
While still a little shaky, she was more than dexterous enough to recognize the sound the bars would make and caught them before they hit the floor, she looked back at Shavi with a glare in her eyes as her green-skinned wild one grinned like a schoolgirl back at her and shrugged.
The guards would have had the technical sense to check to edges of the bars and noticed that they had been treated with a fast-acting corrosive artificially concentrated from the air around it. They couldn’t have detected the minimal amount of ferric oxide that had formed inside the door to the cell making any lock essentially frozen, and they would have been centuries beyond their time if they could detect the subsonic pulse coming from a cloaked drone that had essentially made the holding cell entirely silent.
Jada was inside the bubble but even with her intellect, she couldn’t have assumed how much thought actually went into Shavi’s plan. She moved to the door and motioned for her sister to follow, Jada didn’t have a weapon but then again she wouldn’t need one in this kind of an environment, Shavi waited until the road was clear and opened the door to the magistrate's office already making her way back to the forest. Jada figured it would be harder than that but the benefit of being in the middle of nowhere was that no one expected anything quite like this to happen.
In the coming dawn, the last thing they needed was to be recognized in the middle of town, they needed to find a way to get out toward the mountains, it was likely the only place they could find enough of the raw materials they needed to make an antenna, a few moments of triangulation and Shavi had started a metallurgical survey the moment attention was off of her, and the results showed that there was a major untapped collection of copper and iron nearly 60 kilometers completely unaware by the townspeople, no one would likely be out there but it would likely take two days to walk to travel that distance without knowing the land. Someone would certainly be after them, so they needed some transportation the get there more quickly.
Looking out on the street there were mostly wagons and carts, no vehicles that she could recognize, and it wasn’t likely they get very far without one. Shavi was getting discouraged when she heard a horse-like neigh coming from behind her. She turned and noticed her sister holding the reigns of two handsome mares from a holding pen of their own attached to the magistrate’s office.
“So, they’re locking up animals now too, what kind of crime could they have committed?” Shavi asked frustratingly.
“I don’t think they’re prisoner’s shay, they’re work animals, I remember my time on earth seeing them on ranches in Texas and Oklahoma they’re remarkably responsive and smart for an animal that can’t talk,” Jada responded patting the neck of the horse she had chosen as her own, a silver and amber-colored proud matron of what must be impressive foaling. The other was a hand shorter with deep red hair and tufts of white and tawny yellow in her mane. This made both of them smile.
“Is there an instruction manual, or a learning tool?” Shavi asked.
“It’s called a saddle and reigns, I’ve never ridden a horse before, but I’ve been to plenty of rodeos on earth, and I can replicate the process I think.”
Shavi nodded and made sure no one was aware of their daring escape, although they were still standing literally outside the front door of the office, probably not their best escape plan so far.
Jada grabbed her saddle and reigns and equipment and showed Shavi how to do the same and they bolted off into the woods with their newfound friends. They waited until the sun was high in the air to do much more than wait, most of the excitement would be in the first two hours after their daring escape and there seems to be an assumption on the mind of law enforcement that their quarry had a clue as to what they were going to do next and on this planet they were not the exception, but the rule, Shavi had them watched as they formed a collection of other men traveling off in a similar direction carrying sticks that looks like a rifle but she couldn’t make out any power signature of any kind from them.
Jada finished putting the touches on the horses and came to investigate what Shavi was doing. She had a haptic display hovering a few centimeters on her arm with tactical data and topographic information scrolling along the bottom with a slowly building database of persons of interest including the image of a woman about their ages carrying what was certainly a bomb detonator, electrical readings from that moment identified all of the links to a series of spatial charges located around the tavern they were at and several other buildings around the town. This was quite impossible for the natives of this planet to have come up with it on their own so the woman must have been the one who attacked them and more so could trace them, Shavi had already decided she was going to have to do a full diagnostic check when she got back to the Amarie but at least they had a face to go with the hunter.
“Time to go?” Shavi smiled as her sister came up warmly behind her.
“The sun will be going down in the next five hours, if we leave now, we can make it there by nightfall and we might find some peace and quiet.
Shavi nodded pushing off from her knee. She turned around to see the saddle and trappings of the horse assembled, and smiled at her sister growth, she understood that Jada had never seen a horse in her life, but she was able to take the memories of a much older host and use it to accomplish what must have seemed an alien task with ease.
They both mounted their respective horses and smiled to one another, and then they waited a few more moments, but nothing happened.
“Is this supposed to happen?” Shavi looked down at her mare and patted her neck. “come on girl, let’s go…” The horse dipped its head to begin eating grass as Jada seemed to be just as confused and then she remembered.
“H’iyah!” she shouted at her horse and Shavi’s took off in a start, they were moving, not that they were going the right way, as Jada tried to get ahold of her horse she figured out where his flanks were and tried to smooth the animal as it ran haphazardly off and on the main path, this wasn’t going well.
Shavi was a quick study, she watched everything that Jada did without being quite so loud and coaxed the mare into a short cantor towards her flailing sister.
“You have to be gentler sis.” she smiled and slowly moved off down the path as the horse continued to give her sister trouble for startling it."
Eventually, Jada got control of her horse and followed after her sister, it took about an hour of Jada/Natyl’s memory to really make their movement steady in a single direction but over time they figured out how to get the horses to move in the direction of the hill they were looking for.
Two hours after nightfall Shavi’s overlay marked that they had arrived, her drone was acting as a light for Jada and scouting ahead for any kind of movement in the underbrush or tracking them. By the time they had dismounted, and main camp Shavi was complaining about saddle sore and legs that didn’t want to cooperate, Jada had the same problems as well but watching her sister in pain was entertainment enough to make the pain bearable.
Jada pulled out two atmospheric condensers as it collected ambient water vapor in the air and collected it as drinking water, she had her fill and then dispensed enough for the horses, Shavi had been sucking on hers for more than an hour up to this point and seemed to really dislike the great outdoors, and she swore the bugs enjoy copper blood far more than iron blood.
Shavi hauled a large stone in the middle of a firepit and used her hidden disruptor to cause it to glow giving off heat and light. The last thing they needed at this point was evidence of electronics for some trader passing by too see, so Jada surrounded the stone with wood as the stones inductive temperature caused the wood to light and seem normal.
Shavi did have some experience hunting and they had yet to eat all day, Jada would admit it but she was ravenous as well, she used a scanner she had been storing in her impossible to open side pouches as well as a pair of gloves to search for edible plants. The scanner traced edible chemistries in the environments around them and she used it to find some tasty mushrooms, some healthy tubers, and even some nuts growing in the trees.
By the time Shavi came back Jada had set up more than enough for them to eat. Shavi was carrying some rabbit and a very small boar looking creature, she had learned how adept she was when her training taught her to manipulate the way her pheromones acted in the wind, they could be controlled to pool close to a person or expand far more diffusively giving off almost no scent at all. She managed to kill each of the animals with only her dancers’ knife, Shavi returned beaming and holding up her catch before she dropped instantly to the ground hearing Jour’a moving together the opposite direction.
Shavi saw perfectly clearly in the dark and tracked them using the same black powder rifles as she had noticed in town, if they noticed her or her sister they might get one of two shots before they would have to reload. She moved closer through the reeds having learned how to close on prey long ago, she could hear them breathe as they were clearly tired and frustrated that they had been left behind.
Shavi typed out a message to her sister on her haptic display, the light was low enough that it wouldn’t have been detected unless someone were aware of what to look for and had been right on top of it. “Two of the posse got left behind, I’m just as content to let them wander here in the wilderness but it’s going to get awkward if they double back and we need at least 12 kg of pure copper and iron to make the antennas they would need to break through the interference from the southern ionic storms. Should we take them out just in case or do we just hope they don’t turn around?”
A few moments later a reply came over her viewscreen “let them be, we’ll hollow out a cave of sorts in the morning and seal it off while we work, even if they knew where we were they couldn’t get to us without charges.”
Shavi moved through the grass away from them without making a sound and lifted her two kills in one solid grasp before she moved invisibly back towards their meager camp.
Camping in 2410 was slightly less rustic than other eras, but the concentration on the basics were the same. Knowing what to eat and how to eat it was important and often forgotten. Shavi cleanly fileted the pork, and expertly dressed the rabbit, within a matter of minutes they were enjoying themselves with food impressively better than that of a replicator.
The entire time they were going back to nature Shavi’s drones were heard at work isolating veins of copper and iron, needed more than fifty kilograms of each to effectively build a nanoantenna that made up for its lack of height with its sheer power.
Shavi needed rest only twice a day, each for nearly 2 hours, but her meditation gave her a renewed sense of energy and purpose. Sleep in the traditional sense was only important if the client was human or Klingon, they seemed to be the only species Shavi was aware of that like to stay touching after coitus.
As the sun rose Jada was still sleeping soundly as Shavi was busy preparing breakfast, more of the fruit and starches Jada found and the roasted skin of the boar, she got the feeling she was being watched but even her keen skills in reconnaissance could decide if they were in danger or they were simply being watched by a curious person.
Under one of her aprons, her microfabricator was making the nano circuitry necessary to complete the radio, only another hour and they could break the interference. Her drones were busy and she couldn’t leave the radio unattended it wasn’t a feeling Shavi enjoyed, and she could feel it was getting closer.
The horses were getting spooked as well, their ears going back and their tails flickering and the were pulling against the reigns. The wind blew gently as Shavi pushed it out of her face sliding the dancer’s knife into her hand and charging the disruptor inside of her arm.
“PHOOM!” a mortar launched from the east within 100 meters of their position, the sonic wave hit after “Boom!” six cubic meters of dirt exploded as the mortar completely missed their location, but it was enough to get Jada up and in the defensive.
“Incoming!” Shavi dove over her sister as another mortar round hit well wide of their position.
After the dust settled Shavi stood up clearly to find out what the hell was going on as two solid projectiles flew by her head, they were not marksman, but her armor wasn’t designed for small scale impacts it might fracture after a dozen or so hits.
Jada moved into the grass quickly closing on the mortar tube, when she broke through the reeds, she saw seven men with repeating rifles shocked at their target running out of the reeds towards them. They quickly tried to correct but Jada moved like the wind and was on the first man within a few seconds.
Shavi somehow simply appeared behind the mortar using her knife to open the throats of three of the men and let her pheromones lose to confuse the men who were already surprisingly bad at their job. In less than 15 seconds all seven of them were subdued or dead.
“Shavi Nomada this is the Klingon Civilian Militia Vessel Amarie, Shavi Nomada, or Jada Natyl can you read me” Came in loud and clear over their communicators.
“We’ve run into trouble down here; we’re going to need to cut our vacation soon a little bit. Get us the hells out of here!” Jada shouted as she could see more farmers coming at them with smokeless powder rifles.
Shavi picked up one of the rifles and fired back, her skill with a firearm was almost as good as her skill with a knife but she was a little surprised at the kickback so her shot went wide from the target and hit the farmer in the neck, she was aiming for his heart. She reloaded and fired again with far more confident this time and took a farmer off his horse at full gallop at 300 meters with a shot clean through his forehead.
Jada grabbed a rifle as well and had some experience with cartridge weaponry, she cleared three people with subsequent shots, their pursuers slowed and stopped their advance as a man stood in the middle dressed in black carrying what appeared to be some kind of talisman to protect them.
“By the name of his holy word, strike down this Dema lord! Fulfill your promise to your faithful, and banish these devil’s back too-“ he was still in the middle of his monologue and Shavi was leveling her aim towards his mouth at 200 meters, it really wasn’t that hard of a shot for a trained marksman, she breathed and released, breathed and released, breathed…. The transporters activated around them as they both found themselves in the Amarie with their repeater rifles primed and ready to fire.
Pauc’ was in command as they were away and he was in the transporter room as they materialized. He put up his hands in surrender smiling with his infectious charm.
“It seems you two ladies have been through quite the party, what’s the line again: ‘no after parties involving gunfire.’ Maru made you promise that one.” He laughed as Jada dropped the rifle and moved to embrace Pauc giving him a fond kiss before punching him in the gut.
“Ow! What was that for.” He jested.
“Took you long enough! Did you enjoy watching crazy natives shoot at us!” Jada teased knowing they did everything they could given the time frame.”
“What can I say I love watching my girl in action.” He grinned and felt the impact of her hand on his diaphragm again.
“Transporter chief, track my drones and microcircuitry I have in the vicinity put it in cargo bay three and grab Jada’s horses, they’re running I dunno, somewhere back towards town, let call that a souvenir of Corin.” She looked at Pauc and smiled. “Permission to resume my command First Officer Mendin.” Shavi was exceptionally professional now that she had a crew, she had no issues being cavalier with her own life but the four hundred and sixty-three souls on board the cruiser weren’t there for target practice.
“Captain Nodama, the ship is at your disposal, and as always we are privileged to have our captain back in command,” Pauc responded and nodded to his captain.
“You’re dismissed for the rest of the evening, but I expect a full debrief at 0600 as we are likely to arrive at the Drozana, I have some interesting work I think I might just be able to capitalize on. It can wait Mendin…” she dropped her Captains’ bravado and hugged her friend closely along with her sister.
The next morning Commander Mendin reported that after they had seen Shavi’s personal shuttle makes its way into deep space they were away something was up but in your area, there was evidence of a large spatial disturbance with an ionized plasma trigger, we couldn’t penetrate it with our sensors with the accompanying interference from our orbit in the southern regions we tried to hail you many times over coded frequencies but nothing the person flying the ship would normally recognize as a signal of detection. As far as our instruments are aware, we were undetected by the ship and it took nearly twenty-two hours to pinpoint your location after we detected a large frigate decloaking and accepting the shuttle.
Shavi was very disappointed that her shuttle had been stolen but impressed at the diligence of her crew.
A call came through the intercom that they would be entering the Drozana security net in twenty minutes' time.
The rest of the briefing would have to wait.
“By the hells” she swore as she finally managed to get her arm free of the partial building collapse.
She activated a stud hidden inside of her elbow and two drones appeared, Her ship The Amarie was in stationary orbit around the south pole to hide in the ionic interference of the unstable colony. It kept the authorities that were certainly looking for her from detecting her ship, but it also kept her crew from staying in contact with her. Her photonic field was beginning to fail as a seven-ton beam was in the process of buckling, seemingly eager to coat the ground in her innards as it drove through her body unimpeded. This wasn’t the intended use of photonic armor, but she was grateful for the protection.
Jada was lying unconscious only four or five meters away, she had fallen from the third level and it appeared her leg was broken. The drones did their magic, using plasma lances and phaser emitters the clear the debris trapping her in the building. Another crack above was the signal the rest of the building was coming down. After more of the non-loadbearing debris was cleared Shavi climbed out from her cocoon of rubble mere moments before the rest of the street was coated in dust and loose stone.
Shavi had a steel support frame through her mechanical arm, it caused her entire armor suite to act up giving her an almost demonic red electrical short to the rest of the active field. Without the pressure of the building on it, the fusion power source could sustain itself for months, but its emitter core was in her arm and damaged.
Shavi wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold out.
She noticed people moving in the debris. They were on the planet Corin a post-industrial technological world with no concrete evidence of aliens in the universe, Shavi and Jada had equipped implants and concealers to hide their distinctive markings, but no amount of makeup or prop work was going to make the red shimmering field around a green-skinned woman vanish from people’s minds. In the debris Shavi realized her best chance of not frightening indigenous people was to appear as innocent as possible so she disengaged the field, and covered her legs and chest, the only parts of her that had not been altered to suit the tan ruddy skin of the Jour’a the people in the eastern province of Yun’da.
Her universal translator was working fine when someone whom she assumed to be a magistrate waded through the dust in debris offering his hand out to her helping her to her feet.
“Vy Hana, are you unhurt, that building should have taken you to the gardens as real as I’m standing here!” the shorter balding man looked up at her with genuine concern in his eyes, nearly thirty people were in the streets now as Shavi pulled the steel bar out of her arm without thinking. The magistrate’s eyes went wide, and he dropped and fell backwards! “Dema!” He screamed as the people around him quickly got more excited.
“What, no.. I..” she looked down at her arm and the sparking hole in what looked like a pale red skin. “it’s nothing, just a minor… I mean… oww! What happened to me!” She feigned injury and dropped to the ground pretending to pass out from the ‘wound.’ The dust had cleared enough that the people started noticing her two drones flying high above their heads as she swore under her breath disengaging the robots with a trigger in her HUD.
Shavi hadn’t the best luck with indigenous people she made them nervous, no one that tall should smell that good. Jada tended to be far more capable at soothing these uneducated minds. Two large men… large for normal men, still slightly shorter than she came into the fray and places what Shavi could only assume were restraints and she along with Jada were taking to a holding cell.
She was biting her lip waiting on the crude bed they provided her and iron bars that wouldn’t endure even a casual blast from her hidden disruptor. Jada was in another room with a healer working on the broken leg. The entire town looked like it had been taken out of an old human American postcard, circa 1920, Shavi noticed as she was being escorted, they only just started having electric transmission lines going in, so this wasn’t a major commercial hub, and they wouldn’t have much in the way of electronics. At this moment, however, she had to make sure her sister was going to survive the barbarism they would using to cure her wound.
The drone that normally lived in her arm was flitting about outside with the photonic field of a local bird disguising it, it appeared to be making a nest along a gutter above the magistrate's office, but as it seemed random to the casual observer, it was making a series of circuits it could use to repair equipment damaged in the fall, and collapse. A short impeller drew in dust and silica and the fabricating arms in the internal mechanisms of the medical bot created the isolinear glass pathways one series of molecules at a time. Most of Jada and Shavi’s devices used to store information to activate the complicated but routine essential functions they expected. Shavi would have been extraordinarily lucky if they had discovered vacuum tubes on this planet yet, but they had plenty of raw materials unlike most of the developed worlds she traveled to.
It never hurt to be prepared, but this planet was supposed to be the first real vacation they had since the joining, they just wanted to lay in the sun unmolested by technology and competing mercenaries and enjoy a week. They were just starting to mass-produce repeater rifles; they didn’t even have a stable way of getting through the air yet so they couldn’t possibly have been an issue in this pristine and backwater absence of distractions.
Jada was carried gently to the holding cell while her leg appeared to be at least passably bandaged they applied burn salve to what they called the devil’s mark, a series of ‘burns’ moving down her lower legs to her ankles, Shavi’s bio-monitor did a basic diagnostic of her sister’s condition and she noticed the doctors hadn’t recognized the swelling in her head, of the lymph gathering around her neck, she could have a stroke almost any moment if Shavi did nothing. They laid her down gently and gave Shavi a rueful glare as they left the two of them alone at least Natyl was unharmed.
Shavi pulled hypospray from her leg pouch, they guard didn’t know how to detach them so they couldn’t confiscate the materials inside. The hypospray was loaded with an anticoagulant and cortical steroid to bring the swelling down. She also applied an osteosythetic to set the bone properly and ensure she could walk on it almost unimpeded after she had rested. She injected her sister as she visibly calmed, the bio-monitor HUD hidden behind her right eye gave Shavi some peace as she could already see the medications taking effect.
It was nighttime and the judge wouldn’t be here until the morning, or whatever they called a judge wouldn’t be here until then. Jada was resting comfortably and Shavi was almost finished repairing her cybernetic arm. By the time the sun broke over the horizon, Jada was coming too and Shavi was growing impatient.
“Oh, my head!” Jada cried as she sat up from the uncomfortable cot, looking over at her sister. “How long?” she asked as Shavi perked up.
“About eleven hours, you hit your head and knocked what little was left of your sense clean out of you.” Shavi teased as she looked up at the ceiling, she had already meditated twice, so she had essentially a full night’s sleep with only two hours of work.
“Last thing I remember we were getting something to eat and someone starting shooting at us, and the building exploded!” She recalled every moment of the experience before she had been knocked out by the concussion wave of the explosive. “No one could possibly have known we were here unless they were really good at tracking us, or cheated.”
Shavi smiled loving her sister’s memory and intuition, her deduction was the envy of nearly everyone who knew her including green-skinned sisters’. Shavi couldn’t piece the fact of the moment together there was no way anyone on this planet had any idea who they were or where they were from and they had kept anything with a long-range radio on it back on the Amarie still presumably cloaked on the south end of the planet.
“They said Dema when my shield went off, something tells me they’re going to think I’m a witch, and the marks on your body are a clear sign you’re the devil,” Shavi smirked as they were still alone in the cell. “I don’t think we’re going to make it through dinnertime if we play by the rules dear sister, may I please, please get us out of this mess?”
“I’ve been awake for a matter of seconds Shay, you wanna give me a second to ask someone what’s the misunderstanding?” Jada used to be nearly as reckless as Shavi, but since her implantation, she has been thinking more like Maru, she was still fun at parties, but her spontaneity was less than helpful when there wasn’t much information to give.
“Beta is up on the roof making a repair on our communicators," Shavi reported. "If the Amarie is still there and we can find a large enough concentration of iron to make antennae, I got the setup already picked out, but if they hang us, which is likely I think our inflated egos will be a little lopsided on our stretched necks.” She had sincerely just wanted a chance to get away from it all and she hadn’t brought more than her typical loadout with her. It had kept her anonymous on the most technically advanced systems but somehow, in this tech swamp of a planet, she gets recognized and nearly gets killed. At least now she had a face, and maybe a digital fingerprint. Since there wasn’t much more than radio, any kind of signal would probably lead her to the saboteur, and Shavi has consistent recordings from most of the things she did. Again, that couldn’t even be started until after they were away from here.
Jada shakily got to her feet and tested the stretch of the iron bars, she looked back to Shari and leaned again the bars. “I would like to get to know these people under normal circumstances but maybe it’s better we find out who tried to kill us, and I agree, this time, that it’s going to be much harder to do that if we are dead. So… just this once we’re going with your plan, but that’s only because I was unconscious, and you’ve had a hell of a head start on coming up with a plan. Don’t let his get to your head….” Her older sister answered with her typical smile and wink in her eye.
Shavi’s eye lit up like lanterns as she pressed a button on the interface and four of the bars simply fell off the jail cell. The remote drone came back in and landed on its charging station back on her arm while Shari pet the back of it like a small chipmunk that decides she was his new roost.
While still a little shaky, she was more than dexterous enough to recognize the sound the bars would make and caught them before they hit the floor, she looked back at Shavi with a glare in her eyes as her green-skinned wild one grinned like a schoolgirl back at her and shrugged.
The guards would have had the technical sense to check to edges of the bars and noticed that they had been treated with a fast-acting corrosive artificially concentrated from the air around it. They couldn’t have detected the minimal amount of ferric oxide that had formed inside the door to the cell making any lock essentially frozen, and they would have been centuries beyond their time if they could detect the subsonic pulse coming from a cloaked drone that had essentially made the holding cell entirely silent.
Jada was inside the bubble but even with her intellect, she couldn’t have assumed how much thought actually went into Shavi’s plan. She moved to the door and motioned for her sister to follow, Jada didn’t have a weapon but then again she wouldn’t need one in this kind of an environment, Shavi waited until the road was clear and opened the door to the magistrate's office already making her way back to the forest. Jada figured it would be harder than that but the benefit of being in the middle of nowhere was that no one expected anything quite like this to happen.
In the coming dawn, the last thing they needed was to be recognized in the middle of town, they needed to find a way to get out toward the mountains, it was likely the only place they could find enough of the raw materials they needed to make an antenna, a few moments of triangulation and Shavi had started a metallurgical survey the moment attention was off of her, and the results showed that there was a major untapped collection of copper and iron nearly 60 kilometers completely unaware by the townspeople, no one would likely be out there but it would likely take two days to walk to travel that distance without knowing the land. Someone would certainly be after them, so they needed some transportation the get there more quickly.
Looking out on the street there were mostly wagons and carts, no vehicles that she could recognize, and it wasn’t likely they get very far without one. Shavi was getting discouraged when she heard a horse-like neigh coming from behind her. She turned and noticed her sister holding the reigns of two handsome mares from a holding pen of their own attached to the magistrate’s office.
“So, they’re locking up animals now too, what kind of crime could they have committed?” Shavi asked frustratingly.
“I don’t think they’re prisoner’s shay, they’re work animals, I remember my time on earth seeing them on ranches in Texas and Oklahoma they’re remarkably responsive and smart for an animal that can’t talk,” Jada responded patting the neck of the horse she had chosen as her own, a silver and amber-colored proud matron of what must be impressive foaling. The other was a hand shorter with deep red hair and tufts of white and tawny yellow in her mane. This made both of them smile.
“Is there an instruction manual, or a learning tool?” Shavi asked.
“It’s called a saddle and reigns, I’ve never ridden a horse before, but I’ve been to plenty of rodeos on earth, and I can replicate the process I think.”
Shavi nodded and made sure no one was aware of their daring escape, although they were still standing literally outside the front door of the office, probably not their best escape plan so far.
Jada grabbed her saddle and reigns and equipment and showed Shavi how to do the same and they bolted off into the woods with their newfound friends. They waited until the sun was high in the air to do much more than wait, most of the excitement would be in the first two hours after their daring escape and there seems to be an assumption on the mind of law enforcement that their quarry had a clue as to what they were going to do next and on this planet they were not the exception, but the rule, Shavi had them watched as they formed a collection of other men traveling off in a similar direction carrying sticks that looks like a rifle but she couldn’t make out any power signature of any kind from them.
Jada finished putting the touches on the horses and came to investigate what Shavi was doing. She had a haptic display hovering a few centimeters on her arm with tactical data and topographic information scrolling along the bottom with a slowly building database of persons of interest including the image of a woman about their ages carrying what was certainly a bomb detonator, electrical readings from that moment identified all of the links to a series of spatial charges located around the tavern they were at and several other buildings around the town. This was quite impossible for the natives of this planet to have come up with it on their own so the woman must have been the one who attacked them and more so could trace them, Shavi had already decided she was going to have to do a full diagnostic check when she got back to the Amarie but at least they had a face to go with the hunter.
“Time to go?” Shavi smiled as her sister came up warmly behind her.
“The sun will be going down in the next five hours, if we leave now, we can make it there by nightfall and we might find some peace and quiet.
Shavi nodded pushing off from her knee. She turned around to see the saddle and trappings of the horse assembled, and smiled at her sister growth, she understood that Jada had never seen a horse in her life, but she was able to take the memories of a much older host and use it to accomplish what must have seemed an alien task with ease.
They both mounted their respective horses and smiled to one another, and then they waited a few more moments, but nothing happened.
“Is this supposed to happen?” Shavi looked down at her mare and patted her neck. “come on girl, let’s go…” The horse dipped its head to begin eating grass as Jada seemed to be just as confused and then she remembered.
“H’iyah!” she shouted at her horse and Shavi’s took off in a start, they were moving, not that they were going the right way, as Jada tried to get ahold of her horse she figured out where his flanks were and tried to smooth the animal as it ran haphazardly off and on the main path, this wasn’t going well.
Shavi was a quick study, she watched everything that Jada did without being quite so loud and coaxed the mare into a short cantor towards her flailing sister.
“You have to be gentler sis.” she smiled and slowly moved off down the path as the horse continued to give her sister trouble for startling it."
Eventually, Jada got control of her horse and followed after her sister, it took about an hour of Jada/Natyl’s memory to really make their movement steady in a single direction but over time they figured out how to get the horses to move in the direction of the hill they were looking for.
Two hours after nightfall Shavi’s overlay marked that they had arrived, her drone was acting as a light for Jada and scouting ahead for any kind of movement in the underbrush or tracking them. By the time they had dismounted, and main camp Shavi was complaining about saddle sore and legs that didn’t want to cooperate, Jada had the same problems as well but watching her sister in pain was entertainment enough to make the pain bearable.
Jada pulled out two atmospheric condensers as it collected ambient water vapor in the air and collected it as drinking water, she had her fill and then dispensed enough for the horses, Shavi had been sucking on hers for more than an hour up to this point and seemed to really dislike the great outdoors, and she swore the bugs enjoy copper blood far more than iron blood.
Shavi hauled a large stone in the middle of a firepit and used her hidden disruptor to cause it to glow giving off heat and light. The last thing they needed at this point was evidence of electronics for some trader passing by too see, so Jada surrounded the stone with wood as the stones inductive temperature caused the wood to light and seem normal.
Shavi did have some experience hunting and they had yet to eat all day, Jada would admit it but she was ravenous as well, she used a scanner she had been storing in her impossible to open side pouches as well as a pair of gloves to search for edible plants. The scanner traced edible chemistries in the environments around them and she used it to find some tasty mushrooms, some healthy tubers, and even some nuts growing in the trees.
By the time Shavi came back Jada had set up more than enough for them to eat. Shavi was carrying some rabbit and a very small boar looking creature, she had learned how adept she was when her training taught her to manipulate the way her pheromones acted in the wind, they could be controlled to pool close to a person or expand far more diffusively giving off almost no scent at all. She managed to kill each of the animals with only her dancers’ knife, Shavi returned beaming and holding up her catch before she dropped instantly to the ground hearing Jour’a moving together the opposite direction.
Shavi saw perfectly clearly in the dark and tracked them using the same black powder rifles as she had noticed in town, if they noticed her or her sister they might get one of two shots before they would have to reload. She moved closer through the reeds having learned how to close on prey long ago, she could hear them breathe as they were clearly tired and frustrated that they had been left behind.
Shavi typed out a message to her sister on her haptic display, the light was low enough that it wouldn’t have been detected unless someone were aware of what to look for and had been right on top of it. “Two of the posse got left behind, I’m just as content to let them wander here in the wilderness but it’s going to get awkward if they double back and we need at least 12 kg of pure copper and iron to make the antennas they would need to break through the interference from the southern ionic storms. Should we take them out just in case or do we just hope they don’t turn around?”
A few moments later a reply came over her viewscreen “let them be, we’ll hollow out a cave of sorts in the morning and seal it off while we work, even if they knew where we were they couldn’t get to us without charges.”
Shavi moved through the grass away from them without making a sound and lifted her two kills in one solid grasp before she moved invisibly back towards their meager camp.
Camping in 2410 was slightly less rustic than other eras, but the concentration on the basics were the same. Knowing what to eat and how to eat it was important and often forgotten. Shavi cleanly fileted the pork, and expertly dressed the rabbit, within a matter of minutes they were enjoying themselves with food impressively better than that of a replicator.
The entire time they were going back to nature Shavi’s drones were heard at work isolating veins of copper and iron, needed more than fifty kilograms of each to effectively build a nanoantenna that made up for its lack of height with its sheer power.
Shavi needed rest only twice a day, each for nearly 2 hours, but her meditation gave her a renewed sense of energy and purpose. Sleep in the traditional sense was only important if the client was human or Klingon, they seemed to be the only species Shavi was aware of that like to stay touching after coitus.
As the sun rose Jada was still sleeping soundly as Shavi was busy preparing breakfast, more of the fruit and starches Jada found and the roasted skin of the boar, she got the feeling she was being watched but even her keen skills in reconnaissance could decide if they were in danger or they were simply being watched by a curious person.
Under one of her aprons, her microfabricator was making the nano circuitry necessary to complete the radio, only another hour and they could break the interference. Her drones were busy and she couldn’t leave the radio unattended it wasn’t a feeling Shavi enjoyed, and she could feel it was getting closer.
The horses were getting spooked as well, their ears going back and their tails flickering and the were pulling against the reigns. The wind blew gently as Shavi pushed it out of her face sliding the dancer’s knife into her hand and charging the disruptor inside of her arm.
“PHOOM!” a mortar launched from the east within 100 meters of their position, the sonic wave hit after “Boom!” six cubic meters of dirt exploded as the mortar completely missed their location, but it was enough to get Jada up and in the defensive.
“Incoming!” Shavi dove over her sister as another mortar round hit well wide of their position.
After the dust settled Shavi stood up clearly to find out what the hell was going on as two solid projectiles flew by her head, they were not marksman, but her armor wasn’t designed for small scale impacts it might fracture after a dozen or so hits.
Jada moved into the grass quickly closing on the mortar tube, when she broke through the reeds, she saw seven men with repeating rifles shocked at their target running out of the reeds towards them. They quickly tried to correct but Jada moved like the wind and was on the first man within a few seconds.
Shavi somehow simply appeared behind the mortar using her knife to open the throats of three of the men and let her pheromones lose to confuse the men who were already surprisingly bad at their job. In less than 15 seconds all seven of them were subdued or dead.
“Shavi Nomada this is the Klingon Civilian Militia Vessel Amarie, Shavi Nomada, or Jada Natyl can you read me” Came in loud and clear over their communicators.
“We’ve run into trouble down here; we’re going to need to cut our vacation soon a little bit. Get us the hells out of here!” Jada shouted as she could see more farmers coming at them with smokeless powder rifles.
Shavi picked up one of the rifles and fired back, her skill with a firearm was almost as good as her skill with a knife but she was a little surprised at the kickback so her shot went wide from the target and hit the farmer in the neck, she was aiming for his heart. She reloaded and fired again with far more confident this time and took a farmer off his horse at full gallop at 300 meters with a shot clean through his forehead.
Jada grabbed a rifle as well and had some experience with cartridge weaponry, she cleared three people with subsequent shots, their pursuers slowed and stopped their advance as a man stood in the middle dressed in black carrying what appeared to be some kind of talisman to protect them.
“By the name of his holy word, strike down this Dema lord! Fulfill your promise to your faithful, and banish these devil’s back too-“ he was still in the middle of his monologue and Shavi was leveling her aim towards his mouth at 200 meters, it really wasn’t that hard of a shot for a trained marksman, she breathed and released, breathed and released, breathed…. The transporters activated around them as they both found themselves in the Amarie with their repeater rifles primed and ready to fire.
Pauc’ was in command as they were away and he was in the transporter room as they materialized. He put up his hands in surrender smiling with his infectious charm.
“It seems you two ladies have been through quite the party, what’s the line again: ‘no after parties involving gunfire.’ Maru made you promise that one.” He laughed as Jada dropped the rifle and moved to embrace Pauc giving him a fond kiss before punching him in the gut.
“Ow! What was that for.” He jested.
“Took you long enough! Did you enjoy watching crazy natives shoot at us!” Jada teased knowing they did everything they could given the time frame.”
“What can I say I love watching my girl in action.” He grinned and felt the impact of her hand on his diaphragm again.
“Transporter chief, track my drones and microcircuitry I have in the vicinity put it in cargo bay three and grab Jada’s horses, they’re running I dunno, somewhere back towards town, let call that a souvenir of Corin.” She looked at Pauc and smiled. “Permission to resume my command First Officer Mendin.” Shavi was exceptionally professional now that she had a crew, she had no issues being cavalier with her own life but the four hundred and sixty-three souls on board the cruiser weren’t there for target practice.
“Captain Nodama, the ship is at your disposal, and as always we are privileged to have our captain back in command,” Pauc responded and nodded to his captain.
“You’re dismissed for the rest of the evening, but I expect a full debrief at 0600 as we are likely to arrive at the Drozana, I have some interesting work I think I might just be able to capitalize on. It can wait Mendin…” she dropped her Captains’ bravado and hugged her friend closely along with her sister.
The next morning Commander Mendin reported that after they had seen Shavi’s personal shuttle makes its way into deep space they were away something was up but in your area, there was evidence of a large spatial disturbance with an ionized plasma trigger, we couldn’t penetrate it with our sensors with the accompanying interference from our orbit in the southern regions we tried to hail you many times over coded frequencies but nothing the person flying the ship would normally recognize as a signal of detection. As far as our instruments are aware, we were undetected by the ship and it took nearly twenty-two hours to pinpoint your location after we detected a large frigate decloaking and accepting the shuttle.
Shavi was very disappointed that her shuttle had been stolen but impressed at the diligence of her crew.
A call came through the intercom that they would be entering the Drozana security net in twenty minutes' time.
The rest of the briefing would have to wait.
