Hara entered the pod, his heart racing. It was impossible, he thought to himself. Aela had insisted that no animal life existed on this planet, and truth be told, he hadn't seen any as he had made his way to them earlier that day. And yet, with his own eyes...
"Hara?"
Startled, he looked up from his trance. Arms crossed, Aela was leaning against the doorway to her room, a towel wrapped around her, sunset crimson hair flowing to her shoulders.
"There should be a meal packed in the fridge. Get it started? I'll be ready in a bit."
"Oh...yeah, sure," he replied, walking to the kitchen. Opening the fridge, he grabbed a packet and stared at the label. Carnivore's Feast, it read, printed neatly in Seph's hand. Smiling, he set to work. Seph's preparation looked promising, with meats from all manner of beasts. In a matter of minutes, he had placed their soon-to-be dinner on a platter in the cooking unit and set the parameters per the instructions charted by the Company's chef. Returning to the fridge, he grabbed a bottle of Aela's favorite drink, beema, a traditional drink of her homeworld Cygan. He heated the drink as she had once taught him and, splitting it between two mugs, retired to the common area.
As he sipped in silence, he thought about the lioness on the dune. She had looked incredibly thin, framed against the dying light of the day. Yet she was still alive and therefore, he reasoned, there had to be some source of prey, which would imply other lifeforms. More than Aela had reason to believe existed. This gave him pause - Aela would have been informed by Arturi, and the latter had, in Hara's experience, rarely been wrong. The Author was well read, a nigh fanatical obsessive of all knowledge, and had surely dug deep into the histories over the course of their mission to find Prime. D.D. and Arturi had been hunting for Prime for years, and it was unlikely, he considered, that the Author would be so remiss as to overlook life on this planet.
He looked up as Aela entered the common room, noticing, against his will, how the jumpsuit clung to the curves of her body. Hoping she hadn't seen him staring, he slid her mug across the table as she sat across from him, placing her HoloGen between them.
"Mmm, thanks," she said, taking a sip. "So. How much did you get from Arturi before you hopped on down?"
"Nothing. He was happy to have another pair of eyes surveying, but I didn't really give him time to talk," he replied. He hadn't had much time at all on The Sabre, he reflected. After he had arrived, he had only taken a few hours to check in and get drop ready. His drive to get into the field had overridden his patience.
"Well, I guess we'll start from the top. So about five years ago," she started, firing up the HoloGen, "D.D. and Arturi took the job to find the Mirzaj. This is a rough illustration Arturi had made based on the description." The HoloGen projected a spherical sapphire, with a radiating, golden light seemingly trapped within it, pulsing gently. "D.D. and Arturi haven't mentioned who wants it, or why, but I bet its an old-fashioned artifact recovery contract for the Corangean Archives. Anyway, based on what Arturi has pieced together, the Mirzaj was part of ancient Corangean culture. And I mean, really, really old," she emphasized, sipping on the beema. The holograms shifted to show a resplendent scene of an ancient kingdom, as Arturi had surmised. "According to some of the oldest texts in the Archives, the ancients supposedly believed that this gem was given to them by some goddess of theirs, and that it had magical properties."
"But those accounts were written by historians hundreds of years after the fact, right?" Hara asked.
"Yeah. By Yesa Ra, I think. The famous historian of the first Corangean Emperor," she clarified, seeing his blank expression, an exasperated look on her face. "How is it I know more about Corangeans than you?"
"History never agreed with me," Hara replied, grinning. "Too many names, not enough excitement. Anyway, I knew most of this already." A signal from the cooking unit caught their attention. "Sounds like dinner's ready."
"Nothing escapes you, Seven," she said, shaking her head, a smile on her lips. She got up and headed to the kitchen. Hara followed, sustaining the conversation.
"So what about the past five weeks? What have you guys been up to?"
"Well," she replied, grabbing the meal out of the cooking unit. "The first three weeks were spent locked in geosync above this continent. We pored over the documents that Arturi had sent from the Archives. At first, we weren't sure if we had come to right place. Oh, Mino, that smells amazing," she added, inhaling deeply. "Grab the plates and stuff, will you?" she asked, sliding past him to bring the platter of food to the common area. Hara rifled through the drawers, grabbing the essentials. She continued as he set the table.
"Anyway, we figured, based on some of the drawings from the Exodus, that we came to the right planet. More or less. D.D. wanted us to have an idea of where to search on the continent though. Lero and Seph were all for combing the entire thing, but you know D.D. is all for efficiency." She started serving dinner, precisely dividing the contents of the platter in half and heaping piles of meat on his plate. "We'd been here for about two weeks when I found the passage in part of Yesa Ra's Summary of Agraean History that mentioned that those that lived in the fringes of the Great Desert had a gem that was, to them, a source of divine power. D.D. figured that was good enough and chose me to come down with him to search." She smirked. "Should've seen Lero and Seph," she laughed, taking a bite. She swallowed and sighed. "This...is amazing. How does he do it?"
"Who, Seph? He's a magician," Hara managed, between mouthfuls. He hadn't realized how ravished he was, and Seph's cooking, delicious as ever, had his full attention. What had she said about the gem? "So, wait, you read about a supposedly magical gem and figured that was the Mirzaj?"
"Well, it was the best bet we had," she countered, reaching for her mug. "There's nothing else to really go on. I guess it is frustrating," she added, begrudgingly. "Two weeks, and nothing to really show for it except some pieces of old Corangean tech that either Arturi or the Archives might find interesting."
Hara took a brief reprieve from the conquest of his dinner plate. "Aela...did Arturi mention, explicitly, that there was no life on this planet?"
She sighed. "Hara, we've been over this. This place is empty. Nothing can live here. That's why the Corangean's left."
"But what if Arturi was wrong?" He asked, standing, grabbing their empty plates and the barren platter, and heading into the kitchen.
"You know he wouldn't appreciate you saying that." She had leaned against the doorway to the common area, sipping from her mug as he filled the washer.
"I know he's rarely wrong but...Aela, I saw something. I saw a lioness on the westward dune, just before I came in here." He set the washer and turned, ready to rebut the various proposed explanations, but he found her staring at him with a puzzled look on her face.
"A lioness?"
"Yeah...you know, like a female -:
"I know what a lioness is," she snapped. He couldn't help but grin at her prickliness. "Its just that...on and off, I've been seeing these...these mirages, even through the helmet. In the heat of day, and its always something that looked like a cat. Just in the periphery. I figured it was just me, and I never brought it up with D.D., because I went back and watched the tape, and nothings there. D.D. never mentioned anything either. It seems unlikely though, doesn't it..."
"...that I'd see the same thing," he finished. "You know what, let's call up Arturi. See what he thinks," he said, walking towards the communication console in the common area. He sat down and sent a hail up to The Sabre, directly to The Author's living space. Hara felt a soft hand on his shoulder. He turned and Aela was looking at him as if seeing him for the first time, her brow knit.
"Hara...I just realized...I mean..." she pointed wordlessly at his leg. He shook his head and was about to reply when the console chirped and he heard The Author's warm, cheerful voice.
"And what can I do for you tonight, Hara O'Ans?"
No comments:
Post a Comment