"So, what now?" The question surprised Sarah more then it should have, and she was halfway through an impartial shrug before her mind caught up with her body. Walking beside her, concealed under a mop of blonde hair that would have looked outrageous on one of Manhattan's fashion parades, Jeremy Hunter patiently waited for an answer. Anywhere but the Zenarch, he would have stood out. With his ridiculous hair, and deliberately inconspicuous jeans, the deceptively young man wasn't anyone's idea of stealthy. She guessed that was what had made him so successful in the Order. Everyone looked for the suited guy crouching in corner with shades and an earpiece. Hiding in plain sight, or something equally mysterious.
With her stained shirt and battered cargo pants, Sarah had no pretensions of standing out. The only vaguely noticeable things about her were her height and deep auburn hair. Next to Jeremy, she may as well have been invisible. She told herself that it was a good thing, that, as a Free Captain - essentially a Mercenary -, anonymity was on her side. It had been years since she'd been anything approaching the centre of attention, and for a former Manhattan socialite, it stung. Though she'd never admit it, playing second fiddle, even to Jeremy, bugged her.
Malaclypse Freeport was small by the standards of space station, its domes unable to support the fledgling population. The local authorities, insofar as the Zoners recognized any sort of authority, had eventually turned to Freelance traders to supplement their supplies, though they maintained that they were perfectly capable of meeting demands themselves if they had to, thank you very much. Officially, at least, Sarah's ship was one of those transports, assisting in the shipping of various incidentals and the odd person between the new Freeport and the other installations in Baffin. Curiously, a review of the docking manifests would reveal that the Ex-Ocean Class Liner hadn't left the maintenance bay in the month since its arrival.
Gas hissed through the hallway as the bay airlock slid open, the artificial breeze playing across Sarah's face. It smelt of oil and singed metal. Sarah turned to her guest as the door opened, doffing a battered beret retrieved from one of her many pockets. "Mr Jeremy Hunter." Her voice slipped into a mock Bretonian accent. "You have travelled across Sirius, the dark spaces between stars, the tumultuous voids of the Omicrons, those barren regions where so-called civilized men fear to tread. The mysteries and horrors of space you have braved to be here tonight, I can only imagine!" She declared, leaning close, still playing the carnival master. "But fear not! Your journey has not been in vain! I present, for your viewing pleasure...
Home!" She stepped back from the door, finally revealing the room beyond. A wall of steel dominated the room, hovering a few feet off the ground. It was only after a moment's viewing that the windows dotting it became apparent, insignificant against the shear bulk of the starship. Plates easily twice Sarah's height stretched across the hull immediately ahead of the pair, what was slowly becoming recognizable as the liner's bow, spelling out the ship's name in a giant's script: MV-Contents May Differ. As the pair watched, a truck-sized drone dropped from the ship's belly, antigrav fields compressing the atmosphere around it, a matte-grey block the size of a small house cradled in its pincers. With the aid of the fields, the drone decelerated, hovering a few inches off the ground before it glided out of view, block and all. A series of smaller automatons followed in its wake, each carrying a similar block, albeit the size of a cramped room, rather than a home.
Sarah turned to Jeremy, pride radiating from her. "So? What do you think?"
Jeremy smiled a bit.
"Not bad. It's always good to have a home. Having your own bed is an amazing feeling sometimes."
Jeremy stuck his hands in his pockets, observing the Contents May Differ. While it didn't hold a candle to the Oathkeeper, it was something. And actually, it was pretty cool.
"Sometimes I wish I had my own private liner. Ya'know, a luxury liner, all that expensive stuff, leather and velvet and satin...You're closer to it then I am."
He laughed. "And a lot of cute girls."
Grinning at Sarah, he looked at her face. "You happy with it?" He asked.
"Leather, velvet, and girls, huh?" Sarah cocked her head to one side, for all the world looking like a slightly miffed, red-haired parrot. "I never had you pegged as that sort of person, Jeremy. You scare me sometimes, you really do."
Rubber boots squealed against the metal floor of the bay as she turned back to face the Liner, beaming like a parent who's eight-year-old had just won the cross country. "Yeah. I love her. The plates are as old as sin, but most of the internal systems are new enough. The cells even had Kishiro's new type four back-up reactors! No idea how they ended up on board, but they're worth a half-million credits each. Not too bad when there's three thousand of the things!"
She walked up to the liner, running a hand along the base of a ten foot high 'N' adorning the ship's bow. "But, I didn't drag you all the way across Sirius to admire my newest toy." She paused for a moment, gnawing at her lip, before finally relenting. "Well, maybe I did. It wasn't the only reason though."
She nodded toward the ship's nose, where a drone was busily welding a bulbous extension that stretched from the liner's base to the second story windows. Dark grey, and covered in radiation warnings, the addition was instantly familiar to anyone who kept up with the mechanics of spacecraft. "Ares parabola." Sarah said sagely, rattling off details as if from a textbook. "Best long range focused-transmission system you can get, short of the Lane Hackers. Got this one off an old Dreadnought the Junkies were towing out to break up. The Navy's teams must've missed it. Had to race the Junkers to get to it before their Salvagers did. Burnt out Mistake Not...'s last pair of drive units doing it." She raised a hand to tap the parabola, but relented on a second glance at the radiation warnings.
"Once it's up and running, I could put a call in from New Paris to the Deep Omicrons without a problem. It's not too shabby at picking transmissions up either, if it has to. Though I'm hoping to get some gear off a Hathor to do that, I heard your guys had all the toys for listening in to things you're not meant to." She turned back to Jeremy, leaning against the hovering Liner's side, arms folded. The starship's antigrav systems didn't even twitch at the additional weight. "I need to dial up Ageria as well, get them working on automating systems. By the time I'm done, Contents will be the only ship of her kind in Sirius." She smiled, that same fierce little grin that had once decorated her face chasing down transports in Liberty's border worlds.
"There's a reason for all that, Jeremy." The words came quietly now, barely audible over the rumble of the drone's AG. "While I was with the Zoners, I heard rumours. Rumours about the Nomads. Where they came from... I.. It's hard to explain, but I felt like I already knew. Like I'd always known. The rumours were always vague. Somewhere in Rheinland, somewhere near Rheinland... Always Rheinland, every time." She stepped out from the ship, arms dropping to her side, fists balled, any pretence of serenity vanishing.
"I need to know! Why Rheinland? Why? Everything I've seen says the Omicrons, but I know that Rheinland has something to do with it! Why the misinformation? Why the deception? Why convince the entire sector that's where they came from, that that's where they started? Why has no-one looked? Why is everything I hear rumours? Why does Edison damn Trent himself tell me to stop looking? Why, why, why, why, why!" The last word left her throat with a yell, echoing back off the cold steel of the bay walls. Why? Why? Why.... She paused for a ragged breath, hair hanging in dirtied strands. And why couldn't she shake the feeling that it was all her fault? For the first time that day, it was obvious how exhausted she was. Dark bags hung under her eyes, skin taut against her face. Her clothes hung too far from her body, despite the loose-fitting garments, it was evident she hadn't been eating. "It's all questions, Jeremy. All of it. Every last bit. I need to find some answers." She gazed up at the Contents, a starving traveller staring at the last meal on the continent. "And this ship is going to help me do it." She turned to look at him.
"You'll help too, right?" There was pleading in those blue eyes.
Jeremy chuckled.
"There I was hoping I'd interest you. I'm not big on scaring."
As she talked about her ship, Jeremy couldn't help but admire all the work and time she put into it. He knew the feeling of fixing up your own ship; he and his family had worked on the Oathkeeper themselves, created what was at one time to be scraped into a venerable warship that survived horrors unseen by the normal populace. He smiled a bit.
She was like a child.
As she mentioned Hathor and toys, he slightly stiffened. He wasn't going to exactly give her anything; he couldn't. That was beyond his power.
The grin though, kinda made him smile. It was actually fitting for her, showed she wasn't a scared mouse but merely a tiger that was just docile right now.
Not that tigers stayed docile, but one could hope.
Then the rumors.
Rheinland.
Jeremy walked up to her, placing a hand on her shoulder.
"I'll answer all your questions, Sarah. But you have to understand the price of my divulging of such things. If I get found out doing so, I can be killed. If I end up being discovered, my entire family could be in danger. So do not take what I say lightly. I will be truthful, but you have to understand - the truth can get me killed, get you killed...could kill me family."
He sighed. "Other terms are you eat. I've seen malnourished kids on LA. You're looking a tad worse. Eat Sarah. At least so you have the pleasure of shooting me down as I flirt with you, alright?" he added with a grin, trying to illicit a smile from her that wasn't that fierce grin or the loving of her ship.
"I will help. On those conditions."
A numb nod, her head resting on her chest. Did he know? Did he know what it felt like to live in a sea of uncertainties, caught between the rock of what you knew to be true, and what all other evidence said was real? It would have been easier to just give up. Lose faith in herself and let the tide of lies and claims carry her away, to become just another Mercenary in a sector already overflowing with blood. Another killer, out to earn wages paid for in the lives of whoever failed to keep up with the escalating bids. Some people said that such brutality was the way of things. Kill or be killed. Fight for your beliefs or die for someone else's. People said lots of things.
Finally, someone had said the opposite. The rest of Jeremy's speech rattled past her ears, little more than background noise. She barely blinked when his hand fell on her shoulder. He would help.
With each breath she took, the weight on her mind grew a little lighter. It wasn't completely gone. She knew it wouldn't ever really leave her, as long as she carried any doubt on the K'Hara, it would squat upon her consciousness. But it was lighter now. Bearable. It was something. She unclenched her fists, doing her best to ignore the indentations from her nails. They hadn't been cut in the weeks since she first step aboard Contents May Differ. Tiny crevices etched across her nail's edges, ending in jagged lines. She couldn't remember biting them, but that had been growing usual lately. More and more she found herself forgetting things that didn't relate directly to the Contents or its mission. Her mission. On introspection, it was worrying. Perhaps Jeremy was right.
"Alright." Another distracted half-nod. Surely she could take a few minutes. The exasperation that had colored her voice a few short seconds ago had all but departed, leaving her speech an exhausted drone. They would need somewhere to talk. She forced a fleeting smile. "Lead on, Captain."
She waved vaguely toward's the ship's open central bay, a patch of steel flooring beneath the ship where the first drone had landed. Almost invisible in the Content's shadow, the open cargo bay hovered a few feet above the ground. Ducking under the ship would be a stretch, but Sarah didn't seem unduly concerned.
"It's your boat, Sarah. You're the Captain."
He raised an eyebrow. She had pretty much ignored most of what he said.
Great. He'd have to force feed her. It wasn't even a contest, dammit.
He sighed. "And you promise you'll eat something right? You look terrible, now that I get a good look. Still a pretty gal, but you're looking...sick. And that's not something I will let a friend look. So lead the way. You're gonna get cleaned up, food in your stomach, and if I have to sponge bath you I will, so march." He finished, crossing his arms.
Hunter's sponge bath comment would have once earnt him a swift kick. Now, all Sarah could manage was a diminutive smile. The woman eyed Jeremy for a moment, as if considering arguing the point, but after a moment her shoulders rose in a half shrug as she turned and ducked under the alloy doors shielding Content's loading bay.
Rows of cells lined the ship's corridors, recognizable by the production-line beds molded to the walls. Mold lines stood out on the few pieces of furniture the pair passed, signs of the mass manufacturing that must have built the ship. Sarah led the way in silence, occasionally retreating into a cell to allow a smaller drone, copper wiring looped around its spindly limbs, to float past.
Finally, Sarah halted. Harsh electric light flooded the room, a product of two florescent strips hastily suspended from the roof. No doors barred their entrance. After all, why would there be? It was unlikely any one besides Sarah had access to the hangar bay. Though larger then any of the rooms the pair had thus passed, the room was unmistakably a cell. It shared the same cramped bed, nestled into the wall, the same mass-produced wash basin. A rail bolted to the far wall held a meager selection of T-shirts and jeans, most baring the outdated slogans of last year's popular bands. The majority of the clothes; however, lay in a heap beneath the rail. The rest of the room was in a similar state of chaos. The sole exception was a long red dress, folded with exacting care, resting in the corner. Sarah eyed the mess with muted surprise, as though noticing it for the first time.
"Sorry. It's not usually this bad. I just, er, I... I've been busy lately." She finished lamely. "Hang on a second. I'll be back in a blink." With that, the lanky Libertonian turned and darted from the room, leaving Jeremy alone among a tangled mess of sheets and more then a few magazines. Most were mechanical in nature, but a handful of new-age papers dotted the floor, headlines promising the latest in human psychic potential.
A steady tapping alerted Jeremy to Sarah's reappearance. She stepped through the door, one hand still absently tapping a rhythm on the starship's wall, the other clutching an unopened bag of what were, to her eternal shame, ration bars. She gave him an apologetic glance as she split the bag open on a protruding wall panel. "Came with the ship." She tossed him a vacuum-sealed packet that apparently contained some form of beef stew, raising her own pale green bar to her eyes in mock salute before taking a bite, wincing as her teeth closed on the bar. Back with the Zoners, Sarah's boss, an engineer who Sarah suspected was older then the sixty year old ship he served on, and probably twice as reliable, had made a point never to eat anything that came in green. Tasting the ration bar, she had to conclude that he may have had a point. It tasted like someone had taken the entire contents of their kitchen and dumped it in a blender without taking the time to check if anything was actually edible. Regardless, Sarah forced a grin. "There, eatngg." She managed, talking around the food. She nodded at his packet. "Come on, if I have to eat this, then you do too. You can tell me about Rheinland while we eat. If that's the right word for what we're doing." She punctuated the point with another pained gulp.
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