You Must (Not) Let Go

Part 12

The boy swallowed the rather large bite of food he had in his mouth. He was bracketed on either side by Mr Ressais and Mr Xak’kis, the old man Seiliu, with the hidden scars on his chest, leaning across from the head of the table to give the boy his full attention. Weillith sat in a rocking chair angled away from the table, but the stick he was whittling hung loose from his fingers, and he twisted in his seat to focus on the newcomer. Even Dareel sat intently forward, although it was difficult to tell how much he was actually taking in.

The boy had been glancing between them all the while, Bastila noticed, spending particular time flicking over Sera from head to toe. He opened his mouth.

“It seems we don’t even need you to help advertise,” Mr Ressais said jauntily. “Guests are just falling out of the sky, ha-ha!”

“We might even break even at this rate,” Mr Xak’kis said with a laugh.

“Yes, we’ve been very busy the past few days,” Dareel said, much louder than he needed to.

The boy snapped his mouth shut, a line forming on his brow.

“Uh, it seems to have been,” Sera said, pulling up a chair and sitting down facing the boy. “You’re a long way from home, Mitri. I’m impressed you managed to find this place on your own.”

Mitri blushed pink. “We knew what direction you’d been. I just had to keep going until I found you.”

“You were the one that did it and not anybody else,” Sera said, threading her fingers through Bastila’s as she sat down next to her. “That’s something to be proud of.”

The boy’s eyes darted to their joined hands.

“What brings you here?” Sera continued, with a pleasant smile. She drew thoughtless circles on Bastila’s thumb, as she often did. “Looking to be the first diplomat on a new planet?”

He sat up straight. “The King has imprisoned Meat Head in the storage room. The King’s council has goaded him into accelerating his plans about dealing with our village to a permanent end. Meat Head tried to slow him down and sent me to find you to get help. They got him right as I was leaving and I had to run.”

“Did they follow you, boy?” Weillith demanded, after this had been translated.

“I don’t see how it would matter if they did,” Sera replied.

“Does the individual have the capacity to carry out their threat?” Ran said.

Everyone swivelled to look at her. Ran blushed and turned her head away.

“Um…” Mitri blinked a little bit, seemingly thrown by the sudden drama. “I…”

“Well,” Sera said, picking up the thread for him, “their base of operation, so to speak, is a conglomeration of mass collected around a derelict ship orbiting relatively low above the planet that can, with force, be separated from the whole and can and has,” she said, with a nod in Bastila’s direction, “be dropped from above if you get the timing right and the gravity takes it and pulls it the rest of the way. Or if you had a way to accelerate it. Oh.” She closed her eye and rubbed at her forehead. “Right.”

“We better get going then!” Mission said. She turned to Mitri. “How long do we have before things go terminal?”

“Uh, a couple days? A day? I don’t know! I don’t even know if I’m too late already!”

“No, no. We’re going to do what we can to fix this,” Sera said calmly.

“What about the debris field?” Bastila said. “It’s going to be particularly difficult to navigate with a ship The Galactic Star’s size, not to mention time-consuming. Do you know of a secret way through the field?” she asked Mitri. “You must be more familiar with it than any of us here.”

“It moves around too much for there to be any pathway. Axxx says he knows a trick to get through it in under ten minutes, but I think he’s full of it.”

“I think I might have a plan on how to deal with all that,” Sera said. She tapped her fingers on the tabletop, momentarily lost in thought. “Shall we get started then?”

~~~

Sera slept peacefully beside her. Bastila stared at the ceiling, brain hallucinating patterns in the darkness rather than switching off. She thought about checking the time, but decided against it. Time lost all meaning in the night and it would only wake her up further.

She got up. Grabbing a light dressing gown, she padded restlessly through the halls of the ship, missing the ability to go for a late night walk through slumbering streets.

A light was on in the common dining room. Bastila poked her head through, seeing Mitri sitting hunched over at the table, staring at nothing in the table cloth.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

He started, blushing beneath his fur. “No, um. It’s still early evening where I’m from. So I wasn’t really sleepy.”

“Of course, I’m sorry. I completely forgot.” Bastila pulled back a chair and sat down. “Would you like anything? You’re welcome to anything we have in the kitchen.”

“I think I’m alright at the moment, thank you.

“I see you managed to master the shower controls,” she said, touching a curl of wet fur above his eyebrow.

“Ah. Yes.” He ducked his head. “It’s very strange purposefully sticking your head under so much water. We only use chemical wipes at home and we haven’t had any in the base for a very long time.”

“Oh, yes, I had the pleasure of them when we were making the modifications to the shuttle.” Bastila made a face. “Sera warned me, but I wasn’t prepared for the reality.”

A hint of mischief entered his smile. “Before they ran out, we used to have contests seeing who could rub them over cuts the longest. I never won, but I managed to last longer than some of the bigger kids at least twice.” He wrinkled his nose. “Demon got mad and said the game was for pussies. Him and his friends used up the rest of the wipes playing flaming snowballs.”

“Oh. Those… burn rather ferociously, don’t they?” she said carefully.

“They get a little more rough than I like,” he admitted. “Especially with the littler kids. Sometimes they scare them because it’s funny or because they lose patience with them. Or get mad at them when they cry when they’re hungry. The king used to do that,” he added suddenly. “Scare some of the kids and then laugh about it and act like he was doing them a favour.”

“And this is the person that has imprisoned your friend?” Bastila asked, feeling adrift momentarily.

“No, the King was the old king’s War Leader until he, he passed away. He’s kinda more strict and doesn’t let us do a whole bunch of stuff, but he’s not as unpredictable as the Old Man used to be. After, um, some things happened, he made it so the littler kids didn’t get to wander as much and had to stay by the base and help out and stuff. He’s still kinda mean to them, and he, like, he doesn’t…” He twisted his shoulders and pulled his face into the ghost of a sneer, as if unconsciously trying to convey meaning by embodying another. “He doesn’t like weakness. And he doesn’t like people feeling things. But that’s sort of more, like, he isn’t used to being around other kids and he doesn’t have any siblings. And then Demon and his friends and even the Old Man are always… saying things about him. Because he’s small. And because…” He shook his head reflexively, his whole body tense and recoiling from his own words.

“And this pushed him over the edge?” Perhaps two in the morning was not the right time for this.

“No. Sort of.” He rubbed at his forehead. “Meat Head… Demon, he… They were always friends. He wouldn’t have come to the king’s attention otherwise. That’s why I think Demon and the others were so pissed off, even though they couldn’t have come up with the things he came up with. And that’s why they’re pissed off at Meat Head as well, because he kinda should be one of them, but he’s not, because he wanted to play with Leader when they were kids, and they're trying to get back at them for that.”

He stopped, breathing heavily as if he had run a marathon.

“I wondered where you’d got to.” Sera slid an arm around Bastila’s shoulders, dipping her head to kiss her. “Talking about me?”

“Of course. What else could anyone ever be wanting to talk about?”

Sera laughed.

Mitri watched them, his eyes widening ever so slightly. He’s not used to this.

“Worried about tomorrow?” Sera asked him.

He blinked. “Um. Well, I…”

“I checked the nets,” she assured him. Weillith’s offering. From the mouth of a large, natural harbour. Only mildly radioactive. “Right before bed. No tears or tangles. Should clear a path a-okay.”

Bastila squeezed Sera’s knee beneath the table. “I think our guest needs a glass of water, darling.” She got up.

“I’ll have tea, thanks,” Sera said.

“Oy!”

Sera spread her hand out innocently. “You were offering.”

Bastila peered down her nose at Sera. “Hmm.”

“Gonna be okay going home tomorrow?” Bastila heard from the kitchen as she switched the kettle on. Sera’s voice was low, almost too quiet for her to hear.

Mitri was quiet for a long time. “I hadn’t really thought about that yet.”

“I’m sure your family will be happy to see you. But you’re welcome to stay in the ship if you feel you need to.”

“Everything happened so quickly. I didn’t think… They’re gonna know it was me. They’re going to take it out on my family to get back at me!”

Bastila pictured in her mind’s eye Sera reaching out to place a hand on the boy’s arm. “Mission is an excellent pilot. We’ll clear a path and get to the village before anyone even realises we’re in the system. As far as anyone will know, you’re still floating somewhere in the galaxy looking for who know what.”

The kettle switched off. Bastila took her time pouring Sera’s tea and returning to the dining room. Mitri was pinching the bridge of his nose, his eyes rimmed red.

Bastila placed the steaming cup in front of Sera. “Your tea, Your Majesty.” She set a glass carefully down in front of Mitri. “I hope water is alright. I can get you something hot if you prefer.”

Sera stared at the cup. “Where’s yours?”

Bastila sniffed delicately. “It wasn’t in the mission brief, it seemed.”

Sera rolled her eye. “We can’t have that now, can we?” she said, brushing her hand gently over Bastila’s back as she got up.

Mitri clutched at the glass with both hands, as though his salvation lay within. “Thank you.”

~~~

They popped in just on the edge of the solar system. The planet glimmered murkily in the haze of the trash field, a greasy spot of light in a noxious cloud of dust.

Sera checked their instruments, worrying at her lip. Nothing seemed amiss, but they were too far out to know for certain.

She toggled the comm on. “Okay, let’s go in slowly. I don’t want any kids getting caught in this net.”

~~~

“—and then we’re going to go to the control room, get everything safe and normal again, and then we’re going to go talk to them.”

“What about my stills?” Andrian demanded. He looked as much like a closed fist as ever. “What happens to our water supply if that brat does something to damage it?”

“Because stills can be rebuilt,” she said, struggling to stay calm. Most weren’t paying attention to her, staring in naked curiosity at the clustered group or Mission and Zaalbar and an uncomfortable looking Ran instead. “You can’t be.” As much as I wish that you fucking could. “That is why all of you need to be moved to the southern pump station to be away from the village if something goes wrong.”

An older lady raised a hand. “But what if those young ones start bombarding our houses and you’re not here?”

“That’s why we’re going to move you.”

“Hang those fucking kids,” one of the Arav’s said. “They’ve made their bed. They should stay up there and rot and be happy with the lot that they’ve been given!”

“Except our Veni,” a woman Sera remembered kicking her away from the shelter under her window said. “He’s a good boy. He’ll come home to his mother.”

“Because we wanna make everything calm,” Sera said through gritted teeth, “before anybody does anything that everybody will regret.”

“A likely story,” scoffed a man Sera didn’t recognise, but felt that she should. “What’s to stop the likes of you making off with all our property once our backs are turned?”

“Trying to undermine us, that’s what it is,” Andrian said, not giving her time to respond. “Trying to destroy what our blood and our backs have built and replace it with outsider sop!”

Sera opened her mouth, then narrowed her eye. They’re doing this on purpose. But I don’t know why.

“Believe me,” Bastila said acerbically. “The thought of anyone wanting your leavings is laughable, to say the least.”

Andrian sneered. “The outsider’s bint shows her true face at last.”

“Oh, grow up, Andrian,” Anasha said, the first words to pass her lips since their arrival. She was frowning at Mitri, crushed in his sobbing parents’ arms, a troubled look on her brow. “Before you say something your fists can’t deliver.”

“But what about the stills?” another man said.

“We’ll protect the fucking stills!”

“It’s just,” he continued, “we only have a limited store until the larger barrels are fixed and the stills are our only source of clean water.”

Sera let out a long, weary breath. “This is for my sins,” she muttered.

~~~

One hundred years later, she glared over the orderly group lined up to evacuate. Sort of orderly group.

“Is that everybody?” she said, in what she’d once heard Bastila politely call ‘a rather firm tone of voice’. She scanned the crowd. Either some of these fuckers had disappeared, or they wouldn’t stop moving.

“Hugo’s all loaded up,” Bastila said, wiping her hands on a greasy rag. “We need to set off soon if we’re going to hide our movements within the planet’s shadow.”

Fuck it, it’ll have to be. “Alright, let’s start moving,” she announced. “Everyone hold onto the person next to you and don’t let anyone fall behind!”

They all lingered a moment. To spite her, Sera was certain. Finally, under the dimmed lights of the village centre, they began to move, families in dusty coats shambling uncertainly forward, fragments of their lives piled precariously on rough carts and weighing heavily on their backs.

“We’re gonna get them back,” Sera told them, suddenly. “I promise. We’re going to do our best to make everything right again.”

A small, but not insignificant, chorus of jeers met this. An old man she recalled glaring at a child worried about their mother in hatred spat at her feet. Sera let her hands flop to her sides.

“Come on, man.”

She felt Bastila’s warmth at her side. Sera turned to face her and found her cheeks being pressed affectionately between her wife’s hands. She pouted, but allowed herself to be manhandled, her frustrations drawn out of her and pooled at the tips of Bastila’s fingers.

She let out a long groan. “We can charge for this, right?”

“I started counting the hours the instant we entered the system.”

Sera laughed, the sound swiftly muffled by the press of Bastila’s lips to hers.

Someone cleared their throat. They parted, Bastila letting her hand rest comfortably against Sera’s collarbone. She felt Bastila stiffen. Ran stared at them, then at Bastila’s hand, her face hovering uncertainly above a frown.

“I…” She coughed. “Um, I have decided that I am, uh, that I can do most good remaining here to protect the civilians.” She rubbed absent mindedly at the knotted lump of healing tissue in the centre of her hand.

After a moment, it became apparent that she wasn’t going to say anything else.

“Huh,” Sera said, for want of anything better making itself known.

Ran opened her mouth. Then closed it, growing red. She dipped her head sharply and spun on her heel, marching away before either of them could think to say anything.

Sera and Bastila looked at each other. Bastila raised her hand, rolling her eyes.

“Don’t ask me.”

Not far from where they stood, Mitri dragged a stony-faced Lana from the main group, Inabi bouncing after. He led them out of the ring of light, raising his coat to shield them further.

“Look!” he whispered. His finger poked through his clutched sleeve, pointing at the thin strip of sky they had cleared. They huddled together, still with wonder, stars twinkling a line through the grey smog of the night.

~~~

A field of foetid garbage as far as the eye could see stretched around them.

The comm crackled in her ear. “It’s not far from here.”

Sera’s figure ahead of her gestured into the near distance, her outstretched arm pointing towards a tower of precariously balanced detritus, sun-bleached white against the pitch black void of space. Around its base, a mass of crumbling supermarket bags sprawled across the garbage field, the pattern of their spread showing how they had fallen from their place cocooned around the tower.

The atmosphere monitor on Bastila’s suit beeped. There was nothing to distinguish this area, breathable, from the choking nothingness two steps before. Sera disappeared, seemingly walking into the tower itself. Bastila muttered a few choice curse words under her breath, stumbling forward over the unstable garbage, shifting with every footfall. A small, black hole made itself known at the very root of the tower. A pink-suited hand reached out to help her down. She took it, finding herself drawn into a cramped underground hollow crawling with data and electrical cables.

Sera smiled at her, as she was wont to do, and removed her helmet. She took a breath, no doubt to say something silly or charming, and froze, her face twisting into an expression of offended horror. She clapped a hand over her nose.

“Does it smell,” Bastila said, “like a garbage patch, perhaps?”

Sera growled into her hand, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. The growl melted into a laugh. “I might have been a bit out of it for the past two years.”

Bastila laughed, shaking her head helplessly.

Movement caught her eye. One of the piles in the corner unfolded itself from the floor.

“Killer?”

It raced towards Sera, throwing its arms around her and burying its head in her chest faster than Bastila could react.

“I thought you were dead! I thought that I should have forced you to come back to the base after you collapsed and that you had scattered yourself in the debris field and that it wouldn’t have happened if I had forced you to come back!”

It, a stocky child in a grubby, too-big spacesuit it turned out, cut off, their voice choked by gasping sobs. Bastila relaxed her fist, heart pounding in her chest.

“Hey, what are you doing here, kiddo?” Sera said gently, hugging the child. “It’s alright, it’s alright.”

The child pushed her arms away. They thrust a clenched fist in front of Sera’s face, unable to stop the tremor that passed through it. “You listen to me when I say you need bed rest!”

Bastila let out a laugh.

Sera very visibly didn’t say what she was thinking. “And this is my darling wife, Bastila.”

Bastila took her helmet off, to be polite. “Hello.”

“Bastila, this is The Bomb.”

“Uh. Vasi, actually,” the child said, smoothing back his fur surreptitiously.

Sera frowned.

“Oh, you’re Kyani Shuko’s son,” Bastila said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

The boy blushed.

“Anyway,” Sera interjected, “we’re trying to get Meat Head to safety. Is the door behind the pantry still unguarded.”

The boy shook his head, then nodded. “It is, but it won’t help. I’ve been listening over the radio and Demon has been harassing the King about dealing with him to prove he’s the real king. I think he’s trying to break the King no matter what they do. They’re sentencing Meat Head today.”

Bastila and Sera looked at each other.

“We’re gonna have to move quickly then,” Sera said. “You can still hear what they’re all doing out here? Without them knowing you’re listening?”

The boy nodded.

“That’s great. Hey, good job on getting that radio working for you. That took some skill.”

He hid a pleased smile.

Sera grinned back. “Right. I’m gonna connect you to our friends orbiting in the debris field, and while we’re getting the environmental controls all back to normal, you’re going to be our eyes and ears. Is that okay with you?”

Vasi blinked and let out a small gasp, the resemblance to his father suddenly showing on his face. “You’re going to… Yes. Yes! I’ll help you with that!”

~~~

“He took to that rather well.”

Sera groaned ruefully. “Shoulda been you stuck here instead of me.”

Bastila laughed. “Oh, my love,” she said, running a hand down Sera’s arm to squeeze her fingers. “You are still the most impressive to me.”

Her suit’s comm system muted the laugh that burst out of Sera.

They trekked across the rotting landscape, following a seemingly random path. The leavings of a hundred thousand households frustrated their passage, entertainment units and moulding sanitary pads shifting treacherously with every step.

Vasi pinged their comms. “They’re still arguing.”

Bastila switched to a private channel. “You know, don’t you think we should be working to free this trapped teenager before mucking about with any other nonsense?”

“Aw, don’t say that now.”

Bastila scowled. “Sorry.”

Sera smiled. “It’s on the way. It’ll be quicker moving once we’re fixed the gravity anyway.”

They reached a point, unmarked. Sera kicked aside an orphaned panel from a packing container, revealing another orifice into the bowels of the rotting ball of trash on which they stood.

“After you.”

Bastila sniffed. “Charming.” She took Sera’s proffered hand and stepped into the hole.

“I love you. Watch your step.”

Bastila felt gravity shift ninety degrees as her foot transversed the opening. She followed it, letting herself be pulled through its awkward geometry, finding herself deposited too close to the floor in a corridor of dust.

Sera’s boot kicked the back of her knee. “Sorry.”

Bastila moved to help her clamber through. “How old is this place, exactly?” The dust, where it had not been disturbed, was thick enough to engulf her foot almost entirely.

“Uh, I’m not sure. Very, I think.”

She turned her head sharply to frown at her wife. “What is it with you and wandering into ancient and abandoned artifacts of malevolent power?”

“What? No, you can’t blame this one on me! This was all like this before I even got here.”

“Hmm.” Bastila narrowed her eyes. “A likely story.”

Sera scoffed, shoving her lightly. “Follow the tracks. It’ll take us to where we’re going.”

The station terminals in the control room were flickering intermittently, a symptom of an ailing power supply. Or, heaven forfend, rotting cables.

Bastila moved towards the central terminal, sweeping her eyes across the room for any abnormalities. “You noticed no system corruption when you were down here last?”

“Uh, not that I had much opportunity to check, but no,” Sera said from the service hatch, already unscrewing the maintenance panel. “The diagnostic manual is hiding on the third menu, by the way.”

Bastila opened the file on a secondary terminal while monitoring the core systems. “Thank you.” Everything seemed horribly misaligned, nonsense data warping the ship’s internal map of itself back and forth like a ball of knotted yarn. She sighed. “I don’t suppose we can afford a full system shutdown in order to do some proper maintenance?”

Sera’s head popped back out of the floor. “Only if we want to go floating off into space.”

“Fuck.” She scowled at nothing, her fists twin rocks of tension resting on the keyboard. Then she pulled the side panel off, sticking a probe into one end of the electrical connections while rerouting power into available circuits. Sera rattled beneath the floor behind her, the occasional alarming pop of plasteel giving way the only sound punctuating the tightly coiled stillness wrapping around them.

“Um.” Vasi’s voice was taut in her ear. “They’re finished their arguments. They’re moving him to the big entrance now.”

“We hear you, Vasi,” Sera said, calm and firm. She wiped a lurid streak of coolant on a convenient rag. “We shouldn’t be much longer here and then we’ll cut across the surface to pick him up.”

“Well, I’m glad there’s no pressure,” Bastila muttered.

Sera winked, a smile that was at least seventy percent of the reason Bastila was no longer in the Order on her lips. She reached down to do something arcane just below the surface of the control room floor. Bastila’s terminal beeped, a good half of the ship’s systems glowing a happy green.

“Oh,” Bastila said. “Well.”

A tinge of self-satisfaction crept into Sera’s smile. Bastila felt her nerve endings tingling. She would have to deal with that later.

Their comms clicked. Sera accepted the transmission, a knowing gleam in her eye. Ass. “We’re nearly done here, Vasi. We’ll be on the move soon.”

Silence. “Forgive me. Mission gave me permission to patch through.” Ran. “A significant number of the adult villagers have disappeared. I cannot trace the means of their leaving, but I sense ill intent behind it.”

“Guys,” Mission broke in, “there’s a vessel on a heading set to make landfall just south of the main base. We won’t be able to intercept in time.”

“But there isn’t an atmosphere—” Bastila gasped. “They know that we won’t leave them to choke on their own foetid air! They believe that we’re too soft!”

Sera grew rigid. Bastila felt a chill as she watched the look of a woman who didn’t have a plan spreading over her wife’s face.

“I’m gonna start on the vents.”

“Sera, the coils are still energised!”

“You track me.” Sera slapped her locator beacon before shoving her head into her helmet. “Switch them off as I get to them. Seal and re-energise as I finish. One minute each section.”

*****

I was planning on getting a whack more writing done this morning. Then I got this wonderful headache. Blergh. Hopefully it goes away quickly.