Blasted Futures, Secret Histories (SciFi Smackdown)

Round Five - The Woman from Mars, Pt. 4

We Christened the new ship Rán. It was a small, slick yacht of Titanic design, fit for a small compliment of very rich passengers, two of whom lay in messy pieces all over the observation deck. The ship was a beauty, and had the tantilizing quality of being entirely tanked up on fuel.

"Scramble your signature. Make it look like you're almost drained," the woman from Mars told Three-Fifty once she'd gotten over the long moment of silence she fell into after seeing the remains of the original crew, "Or someone from the fleets will want to syphon your H-II. Now, keep on track towards 50, 330, 21. I'll let you know when we're close."

The Titan and Vesuvian fleets had become more organized over the last 36 hours, regrouping and gathering ships to them as they built in strength. The good news for us was, they no longer cared about single rogue ships. We were beneath their notice; unthreatening so long as we looked like we didn't have a tank's H-II to syphon off.

"Which doesn't mean we won't have to move fast when we get there," the woman from Mars was telling us, "It will be a matter of hours, maybe even minutes before they detect the harvester when it unpacks. We have to be ready to commandeer it and hide it immediately."

BigRod nodded, thinking tactically ahead of the woman anyway. That he wasn't demanding to know how one hides gigatonnes of H-II from military scanners meant he already had an idea of his own. I noticed he also wasn't interested in knowing why the woman wanted the ship either. Which meant it didn't matter to him. He'd already written her out of his calculations.

I pulled the woman aside, begging her to inspect the onboard media library with me as an excuse. 

"I think he's going to kill you," I told her. I wasn't very happy about that. Going back to the way things were, just the crew of the Basilisk - Rán - alone through the endless centuries was not appealing. I really, really wanted her to live. But she just nodded, apparently unconcerned.

"I know," she looked out one of the viewports at the array of moons shining over the black ice of the surface. I followed her gaze to see what she could be looking at - but it was just the empty, starry night of summer on Europa. We couldn't even see any settlements from this altitude. "Archie, you can fly this ship, can't you?"

"I - what?" The question was confusing. I thought about it. "I have the manual." I shrugged, finding it. "But Three-Fifty is built for nav."

"But if you had to, you could fly this thing. Alone." She turned and looked me in the eye like it was the most important question in the world. I could only shrug.

"I guess."

"Let's get back to nav." she smiled and looked reassured, which seemed strange to me since I'd basically just told her she was going to die. "We're almost there."

"This is the place?" BigRod demanded as we re-entered the room and Three-Fifty started the landing procedure near a middling-sized Europan village barely a step up from Gamdreng. The woman from Mars looked at him warily, as if every muscle in her body was primed and ready to go.

"I'm not sure," she answered. "I haven't watched the tree launch a capsule. There might be some drift. It might ricochet someplace nearby. If it doesn't turn up, I'll check the tree again." Smart. Now BigRod had to keep her as a contingency. "We don't have long before we'll know."

We landed, and waited. The distant sun rose over the endless sea of ice and with it, the people of the nearby village emerged from their huts and started doing all those little things humans do. BigRod and Three-Fifty went to wait outside, ready to jump on the harvester and do whatever it was they planned to do to it, leaving Clickett and I to stand guard over the woman from Mars. Clickett had all six of his shiny monofilament axes out. They gave me a gauntlet-cannon which fit my hand pretty well. The way Clickett hovered near the woman, I got the sense he had orders about her that I didn't have. Whatever that meant.