Based on the following Suggestions:
Names: Scander, Latisha, Ashuria, Scarlet
Times: afternoon/early evening
Places: USO outpost on Vega 12, Unigivla
Objects: Numbers
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Inside the room, Ashuria sank gratefully onto the hanging sofa on one side of the room and pulled off her many baubles. She undid the clasp around her brow and let her long, dark hair fall loose about her face. She removed the chunky bracelets and slipped the tall shoes off her feet.
"Ahh," she sighed, "that's better!"
Scander was staring out the wall-sized window that displayed what Vega would look like once it was completely colonized. The holographic images of buildings, vehicles, and people shivered at his touch.
"What do you think?" he asked aloud.
"About what?" Ashuria didn't even bother to pick up her head from where it rested on the back of the sofa.
Scander sighed and walked back to the sofa bed directly across from hers. This one was already reclined in the flat position. He stretched out on it and kicked his boots off. Throwing an arm across his face, he said, "About this whole mess with Unigivla. About the Council just wanting the 'all-clear' to start colonizing again. About the little scientist who just wants to go out and see a ghost town—" He lifted his arm and peeked out toward her.
Ashuria found the knob that released the shape of her sofa into its bed so she could lie down too. "I really don't know, Corporal. Part of me wonders if this was such a good idea after all."
Scander snorted. "It's not like we had much choice, did we?"
Ashuria didn't answer.
Scander decided that now would be a good time to bring up the question that had piqued his curiosity for a long while now. "So," he began slowly, "tell me about the Knightwing." He figured a good story like that would at least give him insight into his strange traveling companion, if not lull him into the sleep he so badly needed.
Ashuria rolled to face him and propped herself on one elbow. "What is there to tell?" she snorted.
"Where did the name come from? Isn't there already a Knight class of spacecraft?"
The dark-haired woman picked at some embroidery on the cushion, "Ah yes, the Knights that were built to vanquish the Dragons. No—I admit, it's actually a bit of fangirl indulgence. Have you ever heard of Dr. Theodore Knight?"
Scander frowned, "The name sounds familiar... Some historical figure?"
Ashuria nodded. "He's actually the one who made the probe that discovered Taurus and this whole system. He pioneered the terraforming movement."
Scander felt the drowsiness weighing down on his eyelids. His plan was working. "That's nice," he murmured. In the comfort of the bed, and the silence that hung around them, Scander Hawke fell fast asleep quickly and easily. He did not wake till Ashuria accidentally dropped the fork she'd been eating breakfast with the next morning.
"Oops, sorry, Corporal," she said when he sat up quickly and looked at her as if the clang had been an explosion. "Good morning."
Scander shook his head and rubbed his face wearily. "Let's get going," he mumbled groggily. The sooner they could get out to Unigivla and back, the sooner they could leave Vega and the whole Taurean system behind.
The skimmer that would take them out to the abandoned, doomed settlement was a low-slung, sleek, grey vehicle. Scander noted that both sides had steering mechanisms; if Ashuria was still anxious about keeping her piloting skills a secret, he could handle the distance it would take them to be out of sight of everyone, then she could take over.
The dark-haired woman watched him load a select few of his arsenal into the rear hatch of the skimmer.
"What do you think we're going to find out there?" she asked. "An alien army?"
"You never know," was all he said.
Ruben's familiar shape loomed out of the hangar.
"May I be of some assistance?" he offered.
"No," Scander paused in loading a second crate of grenades; did he need both? Or perhaps just a few less than the full crate he'd already loaded...
"Are you certain the vast amount of weaponry is necessary on a reconnaissance mission, sir?"
Scander scowled as he shut the crate and turned to close the rear hatch. The last thing he needed was a robot questioning his choices! "I take what I choose," he reasoned, "It doesn't mean I'm going to use it... if it's any consolation to the Council!" he added for good measure. Surely they were monitoring the movements of their pet emissary.
Ashuria waited for him in the front seat of the skimmer.
"Ready?" she asked when he finally climbed into the other side.
Scander buckled his restraint and gripped the steering mechanism in front of him.
"Ready," he said.
The trip out to Unigivla was not unpleasant—it was boring. Nothing but red rocks and dirt as far as the eye could see. The only variation was the shape of the rock formations.
Scander knew immediately when they were nearing Unigivla. The silver-grey buildings contrasted sharply with the red terrain, not to mention the wide swaths of green astro-turf imported from the moon colonies to make this new planet seem more like the home the colonists left behind. Ashuria parked the speeder just outside the edge of where the settlement town started. Scander surveyed their surroundings; nothing stirred, but it didn't make the area any less threatening. He and Ashuria put on specialized protective hoods that covered their faces, in case of airborne particles that could bring them the same fate as the late colonists they would be investigating. Moving around to the rear of the skimmer, Scander opened the hatch to grab his rifle—and instead grabbed a leg. He jumped back with a rough expletive.
"What is it?" Ashuria called, and received her answer when she saw the corporal haul a familiar curly-haired redhead into the open.
"I'm sorry!" Latisha wailed.
"You slimy little starcatcher!" Corporal Hawke bellowed. "You dimwitted little snoop! What the galaxy did you think you were doing, hiding in the skimmer like that? We could have left you locked in there, and you would have starved to death! No protection, no way of communicating, no rations..." He looked just about ready to snap her neck and have done with it. "Why did you follow us? Did the Council send you?"
"It was my own choice!" Latisha shrieked. "I wanted to come! Don't you get it? The Council only cares about the fact that Unigivla did fail, and they think you'll come up with something they can fix, so that it doesn't happen again. I've always wanted to know why it failed, and I've always wanted to see what a colony would be like. The Moon of Earth was already a nation when I was born; I wanted to actually see what a first-time colony looked like and how it functioned! Is that so wrong?"
Scander glared daggers at her as he cocked his rifle. "You wanted your first look at a dead colony? Well, today's your lucky day!" He pointed to Ashuria, "You keep an eye on her."
"Me?" Ashuria whined, but Scander was already walking toward the outskirts of Unigivla. Ashuria scuffed the ground with her boot. "Whatever... come on," she told Latisha.
The ghost town was every bit as creepy as it should have been. All around them were non-biodegradable signs of life that had once been: strollers, leashes, umbrellas, vehicles, scooters, and the like—but the people who had been using them had apparently disintegrated.
"What was it," Scander muttered to himself, "a nuclear blast or something?" He kicked at a dropped cardboard box on the road. It rolled, and he bit back a cry.
"Ashuria! Come look at this!" he called.
When she joined him, he pointed toward the side of the box with his rifle. There on its side was a bloody handprint.
"Most likely whoever was carrying it dropped it when they died," Ashuria surmised quietly.
Latisha wordlessly bent down and produced a digital needle from her pocket. Inserting it into the middle of the handprint, she allowed the device to collect and record any harvestable data from it. She stood quickly, holding her arms tightly against her sides. "Let's keep going," she said.
They proceeded only a few paces more till they found a bloody footprint on the pavement. The closer they got to the middle of the main marketplace, the more of these marks they found: handprints, footprints, items dropped in piles or groups around the area. To Scander, it looked like a fair representation of a nuke-town in the middle of an enormous desert—with the exception of the vivid red dirt and rocks surrounding them, and the fact that the light now beaming down upon them was not their own Sun.
At the center of the lane on the right-hand side was a building far larger than the rest. Moving carefully, the trio made their way through the wide-open space at the front of the building.
Apparently, it was intended to have been a marketplace of some sort. Handprints and footprints littered the place, along with metal crates that more than likely once contained perishable items. There were crates that held non-perishable things that were still there, such as clothes and utensils and toys and the like. Ashuria found a crate of dolls that had been shipped between galaxies, just so the children from Earth would have something familiar to play with; she grimaced and dropped the ornate figurine with the glass eyes.
"Hey guys!" Latisha's voice came from some distance away.
"Latisha?" Scander called after her. "Where the heck are you?"
"Come quick!" Her squeaky voice sounded more panicked than usual. Scander grunted and tightened his grip on his rifle as he ran toward the sound of her voice. As he neared the sound of Latisha's cries, he could hear another voice talking—had she found someone alive? Was she even now being threatened by the being who had killed all the settlers?
"Latisha!" Ashuria called.
"I'm over here! Help me!"
Scander could distinguish the second voice now. It was that of a female, speaking steadily.
"...sixty... one hundred eleven...twelve times pi...fourteen point sixty-eight..."
What in the blazes?
Scander and Ashuria caught sight of Latisha bent double behind a pile of crates at the back of the building they were in; had she been wounded?
She raised her head and saw them. "Help!" she said again, grunting—but whether from exertion or pain they could not tell.
Scander was at her side in a moment. Her hands were buried in the pile past the wrist, but when he bent to ostensibly help her free them, she shook her head, "No, just help me pull it out."
"Pull what out?" Scander asked, and the crate gave a scraping shudder, just enough so he could see the object in Latisha's hand—it was another hand. He blinked.
"But I thought—"
"Just help me, okay?" Latisha hauled on the hand, trying to work her hands underneath the pile of discarded crates to get at the rest of the body without damaging it. Meanwhile, from somewhere deep within the mass, the calm female voice continued,
"Sixteen, twenty-four... thirty-eight divided by six...five hundred ninety-one...four, two, eight, five, four, seven..."
"Who or what is under there?" Scander asked the frantic lab tech.
Latisha kept pulling without answering.
Scander finally nudged Latisha out of the way. "Here, let me get that," he said, giving the whole pile of crates a mighty shove. The bulk of it came crashing down, leaving only a few for him to move in order to expose the android underneath. She was still rattling off strings of numbers.
"Eighty-eight... Sixty... Forty-nine..."
"What is it doing?" Scander asked.
Latisha pulled the platinum-blond droid to her feet and checked the serial number printed on the back of her neck. "SC4RL3T," she read.
Ashuria surveyed the tipsy robot. "Scarlet, huh?"
Instantly, the droid's head snapped around toward her, and a bit of her old programming came through.
"I am Scarlet, how may I serve—two, thirteen, twenty-seven, one hundred fifty..."
Scander blinked, "Hey!" he exclaimed, "Maybe if we ask it the right questions we can figure out what happened to Unigivla."
"Ten Unigivla Official Colonization Report thirty-four," Scarlet intoned. "Settlements none, population six hundred indeterminate. Decolonization of Vega twelve proceeding on twenty-two schedule."
The trio glanced at one another.
"Well that sounds familiar," Scander muttered. He instantly mistrusted the robot that could look so humanlike with flesh-toned silicon over her face and hands, but the body was a sleek brushed chromium in gray and blue plates. Her eyes glowed icy-blue, and he could practically hear the gears turning inside her face.
Latisha nodded, "Makes you wonder how long ago this really happened, and how many of those reports were given not by people but by androids on automatic programming."
Scander looked out over the empty streets and houses. "Let's keep moving," he said quietly.
They walked on, while Scarlet tottered along behind them, still spouting strings of numbers.
"Seventeen...two hundred sixty-one...ninety-four thousand, one hundred fifteen..."