amberfocus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amberfocus) wrote2008-09-25 09:02 pm
amberfocus) wrote2008-09-25 09:02 pm
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Andromeda Rising: Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven: Pick a Destination
Procyon was confused. It wasn’t a state he was used to being in. He had managed to track the girl he’d picked as prey for quite awhile, but then her scent had ended in the middle of a wall. There were no doors, windows, service hatches or air vents. It simply stopped, as if the girl had disappeared into thin air.
The odds of two girls from the same family just being able to vanish like that were extremely unlikely. They must have had access to some kind of perception technology. He pressed forward against the wall in front of him, ignoring what his eyes and ears told him, ignoring even the most important of senses, scent. Instead he ran his hands over the wall. There. A handle or knob of some sort.
He opened his eyes and again he saw nothing. But the handle was there beneath his fingers. He rattled the knob but whatever was behind the hidden door was firmly locked away. He growled in frustration, his hair rising up from his head and the back of his neck. There were other scents near the door and he took a moment to focus on those that smelled of a similar DNA. There were three. He hit on the strongest and turned to follow it’s trail.
It did not take him long to find the owner of the scent. He skulked behind a potted plant as near to the woman as he dared. They were all there. All three scents coming strongly to his nostrils. He strained his ears forwards, hearing his second most acute of his remaining senses.
“Tegan’s safe,” the boy said. “As soon as I realized that pack member had scented on her I rushed her back to Philia. She’s agreed to stay inside for her own safety. She was very scared.”
“I think you should go back to the ship, Mars,” the man said to the boy. “Stay with Tegan and make sure she doesn’t get some notion into her head to try to come back out and help.”
“Dad, we can get more done with the three of us,” Mars said. The man remained unyielding. “Cassi?” the boy asked turning his eyes on the woman.
“Dare’s right,” she said. “Go back to the ship, Mars. Make sure Tegan is safe. Your father and I can handle this.”
“Then why did you bring me along?” Mars asked.
“Not to be bait!” snapped Cassi. Her hair rose from her shoulders just a bit as she tried to control the sudden onslaught of psychic energy that often came with the loss of her temper. Her voice softened. “Marsden, you need to go back to the ship and keep an eye on your aunt. She’s almost as headstrong as I am. Left to her own devices, she could easily get up to mischief.”
“Fine!” Mars said, shoving away from the table with so much force that when he stood up his chair fell over. He righted it and stalked away. Procyon watched him go, torn between following the boy to his prey or keeping an eye on what the man and woman were up to.
He ruthlessly forced down his hunting instinct to follow the youngster breaking off from the herd as he decided the most information for Acheron’s previous target would be obtained from following the man and woman. When they rose and left he slunk silently after them.
“We need to find a safe place to hack back into the mainframe,” said Dare. “Our previous hack has probably already been detected and repaired.”
“Subsidiary systems?” Cassi suggested. “They’d be down on the lowest levels somewhere.”
Dare nodded and when they found a data port, Dare pulled a data wand out of the long thin pocket of his cargo pants. He slipped it into the port and downloaded a ship’s map, then hooked the wand into a data reader. He studied the diagram and then gestured for his sister to follow him.
When they arrived at the nearest lift, Cassi stiffened and glanced around behind her. “What is it?” Dare asked noting the change in her body posture.
“I’m not sure. It feels like we’re being watched.” Casually Dare turned his body and leaned against the wall, looking as if he were just waiting for the lift to arrive. He glanced down the corridor. There were several people bustling around and his eyes did not find one suspicious character to focus on. Yet, he too felt something not quite right. It could be as simple as picking up on his sister's emotions as he always had done, but he didn't want to take that chance.
“Well, we won’t let anyone on the lift with us. If it’s shipboard security they won’t be able to track us if we push more than one button.”
As soon as the doors opened, they were inside and Dare’s multi-tool was out sonicing the control panel to shut the doors quickly in the face of three people hurrying to catch it. Quickly he zapped out the security camera. As the lift moved he used the multi-tool to randomly program the lift to stop at certain floors before the one they needed and then to continue a random ascent pattern when it rose again.
It took longer than they would have liked to get to the level they needed but anyone trying to discover their actions would have great difficulty following them around the bend. The level they finally disembarked on was deserted. The steady hum of engines and other machinery made a cacophony of noises around them.
Swiftly they made their way down the corridor to the room they needed. Dare zapped the door open and deadlock sealed it behind them. He pulled out a chair in front of an access terminal and put his skills to work, Cassi hovering over his shoulder.
It took him a while to get through the information but when he did he turned to his sister with a look on his face that she didn’t like. “When the Cutlass dropped out of hyperspace there was a report issued that they were hit by an asteroid strike. That’s the official report anyway. With enough digging I discovered that the compartment that was hit contained a ship. And that what really happened was that the ship took off out of the cargo bay.”
“It did what?” Cassi was shocked.
“It flew off a live flight.”
“That’s extremely dangerous. If the pilot didn’t know what he was doing, he could have taken out the entire Megaliner!” Cassi exclaimed. “Andromeda wouldn’t have anything to do with that! She’s not that irresponsible.”
“I know it seems unlikely. But she’s not on the ship and the records don’t show her making planetfall either. It appears this pilot did know what he was doing as only the cargo bay sustained damage and it seems minimal,” Dare reassured.
“Does it say who the ship in that compartment was registered to? Or give the name of the ship?” Cassi asked.
“Let’s see,” Dare said, scanning the files again. “Yes, the name of the ship was The Conquered Goddess. And the name of the pilot is…that’s odd, it won’t let me access…hold on a tic.” Dare typed madly for a few minutes and then looked up at his sister. “It’s registered to a corporation from Boeotia.” He turned back to the access port and typed in more codes.
“I’m calling up security now. They should have recordings of the corridor, seeing who went in there and who came out.” The pictures were fuzzy and they had to go back a couple of days to see the woman who entered the compartment. They could tell she was blond and from the back she did look like Andromeda but they couldn’t be sure.”
“Hold on, let me see if there’s audio.” Dare’s fingers flew over the keyboard.
The first part was garbled but then the ship’s computer spoke out clearly, in tandem with the woman’s hand hitting the palm reader. “Andromeda Suzette Harper, ship ident code 54327. Access granted with supervision of passenger 54391 only.”
“It’s her!” Cassi was so relieved. “Then she’s safely off the ship. She’s away from the pack.” Then she frowned. “But she’s run off with an older man.”
Dare typed quickly into the computer, covering his tracks. He stood up and grasped Cassi’s shoulder. “We know the name of the ship. We know what planet it’s registered out of. This morning we had nothing. We’ll track her down now.”
They made to leave the room and as the door opened they were greeted by the snarling face of a pack member leaping forward. Cassi was knocked to the ground and found teeth at her throat. Dare moved quickly, plunging his multi-tool into the base of the man’s neck and releasing a powerful sedative. The man’s body fell limp on top of his sister.
He pulled the pack member away and helped Cassi to her feet. She had one hand clamped against the side of her neck and he could see blood seeping through her fingers. He shrugged out of his jacket and took off his t-shirt, wadding it up and placing it against the bite on Cassi’s neck. He put his jacket back on and said, “I’m locking you in here. I’ll go get Philia and move her here. Keep the pressure on that wound.”
Dare dragged the body of the pack member into the hallway and then locked the door. He took off, racing to get back to his sister’s TARDIS as fast as he could.
Though Danzibar had been out of the question, the moon of the next planet in to the star of that system called out to Andromeda. “Can we go there?” Andromeda asked Jack, her finger hovering over the little moon on the navigational system.
“Terricohn?” Jack asked. “I don’t see why not. We’ll have to make a minute hyperspace jump to get there today. Otherwise it’s five days flight. Do you handle minute jumps okay? Some species can only stomach the mega jumps.”
“I’m fine with the little ones,” she said. “So what do you know about this Terrichon?” she asked Jack.
“It’s the most prominent moon in the heavens for this solar system. It’s an ocean world, complete with marine life from seven different systems that are extinct on their home worlds. It was a marine reserve back in the 24th century, though there are species that migrated here long before that. The ecosystem is extraordinarily balanced. We’ll be allowed to land on the surface because The Conquered Goddess doesn’t use heavy fuels or fuels that would contaminate the moon.”
“So there is land there? It’s not all ocean?” Andromeda asked.
“There are islands. It’s sort of like a small scale version of Divo, but it doesn’t support a large biped population. The islands are small and five of them are research stations. Two are resorts and several are simply deserted.”
Andromeda looked at him. “Where do you want to go?”
“We could do them all, really. The research stations offer tours. That’s often how they get their large donations to keep running. The resorts are fun, too. But the deserted islands offer sights you won’t see elsewhere,” Jack explained.
“Sounds lovely,” she said.
“I just need to program in a masking signature before we jump.”
“Why?”
“It’s a work habit. I’ve learned it’s better to be safe than followed,” Jack told her. She nodded, her lingering sense of foreboding vanishing as Jack programmed his flight computer. “There, that’s done. Come get strapped in again for the jump.”
Andromeda did so, then Jack tugged on it with a grin, before turning back and hitting the button to take them to Terricohn. The minute jump lasted five minutes and with the viewscreen in front of them, Andromeda was able to watch the strange swirls of colors that the ship was moving through. Usually on long jumps in hyperspace you couldn’t really see anything other than smears of white and black, but on the little jumps the colors were amazing.
When they shot back out into normal space the moon was in front of them. It took an hour to get permission to approach, two hours to wait in the line of ships wanting to make planetfall, and a further two hours to land on one of the resort islands. During all of the waiting Jack had called ahead and reserved a suite at one of the hotels.
As they left the ship Andromeda slipped her hand into Jack’s, staring around her in wide-eyed amazement. “The hotel looks like it’s built out of coral,” she said. She adjusted her carry sack then took a step closer to him.
“It is,” grinned Jack. “It’s living coral. It’s been specially adapted to live both above and below the surface of the ocean. This particular one has ancestry dating back to the 21st century on Earth. It started life as part of the Australian Great Barrier Reef. It migrated here with the great exodus of 2097, along with the dolphins and manatees.”
“Did…did any whales come?” Andromeda asked, knowing what had happened to that Earth species.
“No. They died out in the dural poisoning of 2095. If the rescuers had come just 30 months sooner they would have survived. But they do have a creature very similar to Earth whales that emigrated from Rigel,” Jack said.
They checked into the hotel, the man at the checkout desk raising an eye when Jack signed the register as Jack Harkness and guest. “And are you the young lady’s guardian?” The man asked.
“I am her protector,” Jack corrected. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Here on Terricohn, you’ll find we don’t consort with the sex trade. The girl looks underage,” he said.
“I’m of age for my species,” Andromeda said hotly. “And anyway, we aren’t sleeping together.”
“You didn’t need to tell him anything. He’s just being a busy body,” Jack said, glaring at the man.
“He thought I was a prostitute!” Andromeda was annoyed.
“Not a prostitute, my dear,” said the man. “A sex slave. There’s been a nasty ring running out of Danzibar and we’ve had to crack down. We don’t abide with illegal activity on Terricohn. I’m sorry if I’ve offended.” He slid their room keys over to them.
Jack nodded curtly in acceptance of the apology and pulled Andromeda to the lift. The lift was an amazing feat of engineering. When Jack pressed a button for the third floor they heard a whoosh of rumbling water. It shot up from beneath the clear glass platform they were standing on and they floated to the third floor. As soon as they stepped off the platform and the glass doors sealed behind them, it sank back down to the lobby as the water moved back out of the lift tube.
They entered their suite a moment later and Andromeda gasped in astonishment. “Can you afford this?” she asked bluntly.
“Oh, yes,” said Jack. “My…family is very old money. Don’t worry about it.”
Andromeda walked around the room staring at its natural beauty. The coral was a very pale green with twists of blue. In the middle of the room twirled pillars ran from floor to ceiling. They reminded Andromeda of stalactites and stalagmites that had met in the center and grown into one solid mass. When she reached out her hand to touch one of the pillars it sounded as if she’d run her fingers across the strings of a harp. She did it again, then stared wide-eyed at Jack, whose face was spread in an enormous grin.
The walls had beautiful shells imbedded in places. The purples and pinks shone with a pearlescent beauty. She walked further into the suite peering into one of the bedrooms. She was dazzled by the sight of the furniture, carved from weathered driftwood and rubbed with oil until it shone. On the bed itself lay a blanket that looked like it had been woven from pale blue sea grass but when she touched it, it felt like the softest cotton. The pillow appeared to be made out of inflatable green kelp, but again, was extraordinarily soft and inviting. Windows looked out on the ocean below and the brilliant blue sky above.
The second bedroom was similar to the first, but more masculine in appearance with deeper shades of color on the bed. She sat down on the surface of the bed and the gentle movement beneath her alerted her to the fact that it was a water bed. “So, do you like it?” Jack asked her standing in the doorway and watching her with dark eyes.
“It’s beautiful, Jack,” she said. She glanced up at him and bit her lip. It wasn’t with nerves, only a bit of uncertainty. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Of course.” He watched her for a moment longer before giving himself a little shake and holding out his hand to her. “Come on. Let’s go see what there is to do around here at this time of year.” She rose from the bed and joined him and they made their way out into the warm night.
Ch. 8: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/157411.html
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Is Dare's multi-tool a sonic screwdriver or something different?
Still snickering that everyone is freaking out while Andromeda and Jack are just out having a good ol' time. XD
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Dare's multi-tool is different from a sonic screwdriver but basically does most of the same things. His is just a more advanced version, an upgrade, and it looks more like a set of pliers with attachments that come out of the inside of the handle.
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