Broken Homecoming

[Unseelie]

Catalina A Jovem shook her head, untying a too tight ribbon right out of the jump. She switched off the autopilot, all the holes into Gamma were surrounded by asteroids, too tight for the jumped up AI on her Praetorian bomber, and began to slice through the mines. Close enough to scrape the hull, but barely outside of the alarms, Nearly getting caught, without getting caught.

Out of the rocks, she could almost see Crete...home. Cat flipped on the autopilot, and hailed Crete.
"Crete, this is pilot blue-43-cat, call-sign Enyo, requesting permission to approach and land, from the Kappa hole."
"Si, Permission granted, oh, and, could you bring it in gentle? Big brother ain't smoothing over damages."
"He says that every time...sides, I could land this on a pin."
"Heh...oh, dear...Crete out, girlie"
"Enyo out"

She touched down gracefully, more or less...just a few scratches. After climbing out of her cockpit, she noticed the port was buzzing with activity, and Ivan Voronov walking in her general direction, rather preoccupied.

---

[Unseelie]

The Coalition Officer's Club was deserted...windows broken, the stools removed, graffiti sprawled across the walls...Middle of the morning, so the lack of patronage wasn't out of place...the damage was. Looked like a street gang's haunt...Ma would know.

Home, empty as well. After Adrian left, only ma had been around, reading old books or teasing stalks out of the gravel...Well, things were definitely out of sorts. Ma wasn't around, anyone she could talk to was probably offworld looking for artifacts by now, and Adrian wasn't answering her calls....where could she go?

---

[Unseelie]

The old Jovem Estate was a sprawling expanse about 50 klicks south of crete's equatorial line, kept throughout the family's good times because not even a beggar would take it, and fallen back onto whenever things got bad. Most estates had some sort of well in their centers, this one had an automated mine and solar moisture-traps. What would be a hovel if not for the sheer size, the place was a warren of mines, stone walls, corrugated metal piping, all built around the original mine shaft, now home to a single orange tree, back-lit by a careful arrangement of mirrors so that the leaves glowed as if with their own light, a light gently reflecting off of moisture pearls and beads, the thin trails leading down the fruit's oiled skin shining in the glow of dusk.

The hovercars were locked down, and her palmprint wouldn't open them. Wouldn't open anything. Her datapad was cut off, too....nobody'd paid the zoners while she was away...and apparently...apparently if you dissappeared from their accounts...so does your identity.

Cat tried to palm into her personal hoversloop once more before giving up. Nothing remembered here, none of the doors, none of the appliances. Her family was gone, and the sun was coming up. She settled into a shaded nook and bit into an orange, tears flowing from her eyes.

Eventually she would have to head north, and try and fix her life...somehow.

---

[McNeo]

Montoya was sitting, feet up on the table, in his villa on the furthermost outskirts of the largest city on Crete. Ahh, it had been a hectic and stressful few weeks, but all had ended satisfactorily so far.

He had started to dose off while the sun had begun to set, orange hue darkened by the window blinds in the villa. It was a relaxing atmosphere, a place where he could think for himself and rest peacefully after some hard days at work.

On the brink of sleep, he heard a small beep and a light flicker to life on the table. This table was where Juan conducted some of his work, indirectly concerning the brotherhood. It was a nifty little device, interactive and directly linked to the HQ of the Brotherhood. It had been one of the spoils of war that Juan had personally acquired on a raid into Bretonia. It was probably destined for Cambridge Research Station or the Planet it orbited, but it never got to its destination.

Lazily and without haste, Juan picked himself up from his position of rest and rubbed his eyes, clearing them quickly of the haze that he saw. He tapped the side of the table where the light was blinking and the logo of the Brotherhood recruitment complex came up. This was soon followed by a picture of a dark room with a woman waiting. A yellow emergency light was flickering out of the view of the camera.

The womans features were not clear in the darkness until the light passed over her every second or so, for an instant. Juan stared into the picture to try and find out what had triggered the alarm. He found nothing of this suspected attack that the computer in the table was warning him about, so after a few minutes, he turned off the alarm and remotely returned light to the room.

It wasn't instant, but gradual. He had seen the woman before, somewhere, a long long time ago. He couldn't quite place where she was from, but he had definitely seen her before. She was very young and had long beautiful black hair, arranged in locks and curling at the end. Many women of Crete had similar hair, but not many had the grey-ish green eyes that she possessed...

"Hmmm" Juan said out loud, cupping his right hand around his chin and mouth.

He reviewed the error again, and started to wonder why she apparently had no identity. She had definitely existed in earlier times...

With that, he rose from the seated position he had been in, and walked to the exit of his villa. On his way out, he grabbed his jacket from the coat stand and put it on as he walked.

It was quite far, on the other side of the city, so Juan made a bee-line for his small hangar. Inside was his Arwing, sheathed in a thin layer of dust. He opened the cockpit manually and begun to start up the ship, and set course for the other side of the city. It would most likely take about fifteen minutes to get there.

"That girl should have the patience, confronted by a few iron doors... heh." he said out loud to no one in particular.