Ack. I hate double posting.
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Three days had gone by. There were leads, but it was always a case ‘Your Princess is in another castle’. They were on the trail, so were 5 other hunters.
What had once been a pristine and fresh smelling cabin now smelled of pizza, chinese food, and sweet fruit. Anika was sitting with her bare feet pressed against the console, wearing nothing but a nightshirt she’d borrowed from Ford.
She wished she needed to sleep too. Just for the break. A quick shower had been refreshing, but it just hadn’t been enough.
Fenspace’s Got Talent was doing it’s best to send her to sleep anyway. It was funny at first, but now it was just getting boring and a tad ridiculous.
Gil was quietly and efficiently following waypoints while she ran scans every few minutes. Scanning was easy. Analysing scans, that was tough. The Blackbird was hiding. Thermal spikes could be probes, they could be shuttlecraft, they could be the ‘bird itself. Cross reference heat output with electromagnetic signatures and radar cross sectional information. If there’s a transponder, compare with any registered data and see how they matched.
If there wasn’t any, see how close it was to a standard Blackbird signature. Or if it looked in any way suspicious. There didn’t seem to be much out there today; they were in a darker part of the belt.
It seemed kind of stupid to hide out there. Anything alive stuck out like a hot sore thumb. It was much easier to hide in a crowd.
That was how they usually did it themselves. It was easier to look themselves like another unremarkable fencraft beneath notice, than it was to disappear entirely.
She checked this Blackbird’s reported signature once more. It didn’t seem like the Zwilniks flying it were even good enough to consider altering it. Eight recordings. Eight equal signatures.
Bored beyond belief, she changed over to another feed. The Worlds at War. Episode 20: Jusenkyou.
What started as a quick fascination on her part about the real Boskone, quickly mutated into a far deeper unease as a part of her mind began to rail against the idea that what she was seeing onscreen was even possible in the real world. Flint.... Flint had nothing on these. She tried to compare her Saber work, the missions the Knight Sabers took on, but even the worst of it came nowhere close.
The dispassionate narration isolated her even further as digitally generated diagrams depersonalised the people involved, reducing them down to little more than computerised icons. It all seemed strangely fake. It wasn’t real.
That little comfort shattered when she found herself recognising one of the faces onscreen.
There was Jet, explaining something to a Senshi. She paused and reverse the feed just to be sure. Yes! There she was. Blades fitted, bloodied and dirty, with her armour smashed open on her leg to reveal the framing underneath but still unmistakable. She looked right at the camera for a moment and smiled, as if the person behind the lens had been someone she recognised, before returning to her conversation with a Senshi in battle dress uniform.
Whatever she was explaining was lost beneath the voice of the narrator.
Jet’s very existence made it real in a way that couldn’t be denied. Anika shut it off a moment later. On quick reflection, she was glad she could make it go away with a quick press on the keypad.
Reruns of Catgirl Bebop were far less disturbing.
Another sensor sweep turned up nothing once more. There were a few settlements out there. A space shuttle was on the edge of sensor range, broadcasting a high-powered radio signal. Melchizedek was out and about. She sighed loudly.... maybe another bounty hunter had already caught them.
There were noises from the back of the ship. Her onboard clock told her that Ford’d been asleep for only four hours. The aft hatch opened a moment later, Ford entering, scratching herself under her cybernetic arm while yawning wide.
She was still in her underwear, just a black sports-bra and cotton panties. Dark tendrils of metal seemed to radiate out from her cybernetics, crawling under her tanned skin.
“Any luck Anika?”
She made a show of glancing at the screen beside her. “Nope,”
Ford looked right at her, chocolate eyes seeming to read her very mind. “Something up?”
“Nope,”
Anika’s voice cracked just a little. She shrunk down into her chair as Ford began to loom over her.
“What happened?”
“TherewasaprogramontheBoskoneWaronandIsawJetonitandIthoughtitwasalittlebitweirdandcreepywhathappenedbecauseitwasallrealratherthanjustTV.”
It just sort of blurted out before she could stop herself, or even think about putting the brakes on her mouth. The buffer had been filled, and it had to purge itself as fast as possible. Ford stared a moment, giving her a perplexed looked that seemed to ask ‘Is that all?’
“The Worlds at War?”
“Yeah,”
“I think she’s seen in three of them; Turning Points, Jusenkyou and she was interviewed for Downfall if I’m right.,” Ford softened her expression in a way that made it almost unreadable. “Both of us are in Turning Points together, when we both met up on Gnarlycurl.”
Curiousity warred with the polite intention to avoid bring up something that she knew had to be uncomfortable for them. If it was bothering her just knowing it existed?
Ford padded across the deck sitting into the pilots seat. Anika watched her for a moment, a question starting to burn its way into the back of her mind.
“Ford,” she tried, tentatively.
“Yeah?”
“Are there real Boskone on Greenhaven...or the bounty we’re chasing?
“No,” Ford said. “Only ordinary Zwilniks really. I just call them all Boskone out of habit,” She smiled self-deprecatingly, “I guess I’m getting old,”
Anika felt herself relax just a little. “It’s hard to imagine what it was like,” she said.
“I’m glad it is,” Ford responded. “I’m glad you have to imagine it.”
Anika thought about Flint. She thought about the Saber missions, about how scared she’d been on her first, about what happened to Daryl’s partner. Pirates and Zwilniks were no match.
She near shot out of her chair when her panel started to beep happily to itself. What, what? What’s happening here? She scanned her instruments. Sensor target, edge of range.Pattern match. There it was... there’s the Blackbird. It was passing in front of them heading sunward at right percent lightspeed.
“I got it!” she announced, already congratulating herself, “I found the Blackbird,”
“Gimme a course,”
“Forwarding sensor data.” With a sweep of her fingers, the data flowed to Ford’s console. Another glance. “And it looks like they’re alone.”
Ford grinned like a fox who’d sighted an open chicken coop. “So nobody’s caught up with them yet,”
“And I can’t see anything on an intercept course,”
Ford hauled the Dragon Wagon around onto a new course, pushing the engines up to full power. A strange energy was rising up inside Anika, a thrill that seemed to fill her body as she plotted their course out on the sensor display, intersecting with the ‘birds and promising a big exciting payout.
“Time to intercept,” Ford demanded.
“One hour, fifteen minutes,” Anika chirruped. “If they don’t change course,”
“Great. Time enough to get dressed,”
Anika giggled at the thought of a high speed space chase in her underwear.
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