Crystal Conquest (20 page)

They hurried down the corridor, passing door after door
until they came to a room with a sign on the wall that said Flax. The door
opened and the lights came on. The chamber was piled high with stacks of
crates.

“These are flax seeds,” Juice told Crispin as they entered.

She led him to the back of the room and stopped at a specific
spot on the floor. Standing straight with her hands at her side, she faced the rear
wall. A stack of crates and a section of the wall lifted to expose a bright
tech-room with a polished floor and a burnished custom console along the back.

Entering Criss’s lair, Juice stepped to the console and touched
the panel that monitored his crystal housing. She scanned the display and tapped
to a secondary page. “Huh.” She stepped back and looked at the small handful of
switches and dials on the console surface. “For some reason, his emergency
shutdown tripped.” She reviewed the panel a last time and couldn’t find the
cause.

Returning to the primary panel display, she moved her hand
to reestablish his connection with the outside world. “Welcome back, Criss.”

Swipe
. Lenny spun through the
scout’s displays with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. He’d never imagined
he’d be given access to such amazing technology. At the same time, he’d never
imagined that the price of that access would involve the fate of the world.

At one level, he thought this might be his destiny. Life
blessed him with certain talents, and he’d spent years honing them in simulated
grand challenges.
I’m being tested.
While not particularly religious, the
line of thinking calmed his nerves and gave him focus.

He’d never practiced with a partner, though, and this one had
an intimidating manner and a random-as-hell thought process.
He makes rapid-fire
demands with no appreciation for what doing them actually entails.

But Juice Tallette had blessed the brute with authority over
all these toys. And random or not, Sid behaved with such confidence, Lenny’s
instinct was to follow his lead.
It’s not like I have much choice.

Sid had asked his help in rescuing some guy from the
devastation of Lunar Base, and Lenny struggled as he tried to learn if the guy
was alive and where he might be located within the base complex—or what was
left of it. He tapped and swiped, exploring how the scout’s subsystems might be
used to search for survivors. He couldn’t find a good solution.

He knew the ship had the capabilities he required, but with
no one to show him, he needed time to find the right tools and figure out how
to use them on his own. Give him a week and he’d master everything on the ship.
Give him a sophisticated request and a couple of minutes, and he was stumped.

His hands and eyes moved in unison as he flew through
different displays. Hoping for some help, he asked Sid if he had any ideas.
“How we gonna find him?”

“Find who?”

Lenny’s hands froze in midair. Here he was, suffering under
the pressure of decisions that could affect the survival of civilization, and
the big guy couldn’t remember what they were working on? He turned to Sid and
made no effort to hide his annoyance. He waved his hand at the image of the
pillar of dust. “We’re headed into that mess to rescue your buddy and you
forget?”

“Oh. He’s a she. You’ll like her.” Sid replied, followed by a
rude comment that made it sound like the idea of Lenny liking girls was somehow
deviant.
Asshole.
Lenny let the comment slide off his back, though. He’d
been teased his whole life, and if he harbored ill will toward every one of his
tormentors, he’d never have time for anything else.

He checked their progress on the looping course and saw they
had a little more than two hours to go before they’d reach the surface on the
far side of the dust cloud. Feeling the pressure of time, he decided to go with
what he knew. “If you give me access to my bag, I might be able to find your
captain.”

Sid frowned. “You talk about that bag a lot. What’s so
amazing in there that you can’t live without it?”

He swiveled in his chair and faced Sid. “My com, for one.
And tools I know how to use. We need a solution in the next few minutes, and it
will take me hours to figure out these systems.”

“Can’t Lucy locate her?”

Lenny shook his head. “Lucy can barely find herself. She’s
well-trained to navigate, pilot, and maintain the ship, but she doesn’t have a
whole lot to offer past that.”

“How about if we lower me down and I look around? There have
to be some passable halls down there. She’s likely in the command center or her
quarters.”

Lenny looked at him and couldn’t help but think of a child.
“Your best idea is to wander through the crumbling structure of a blast zone?”
He turned back to the ops bench, and his fingers resumed dancing. “If you want
me to find her, I’ll need that carryall.”

Lenny could feel Sid staring at the back of his head. He
tried to ignore it while he searched for a solution, knowing he’d been through
these same displays several times already. He heard a noise and, glancing back,
saw Sid disappear into his cabin. Moments later, he exited with the bag. He
emptied it onto the floor and poked through the different items.

“Careful,” said Lenny as the rock hammer toppled next to his
com. Sid continued digging. “Hey, Sid. Stop. Look at me.”

Sid remained crouched next to the pile but lifted his head.

“Make a decision. Either you need your captain back or you
don’t. You want my help or you don’t. Work with me. Help me. Be
nice
to
me. And I’ll bust my ass helping you.”

“Nice speech. You done?”

“For now.”

Sid looked at him for a three count. “Okay. Until she’s on
board, I work for you. How can I help?”

Grinning from ear to ear, Lenny jumped from his chair and
slid on his knees, stopping in front of the pile. “Come to Papa,” he said as he
picked out the small pouch of nibs, the camball, and his com. He scrambled back
into the pilot’s chair.

“That’s it?” asked Sid.

“Your first assignment is to put the rest of the crap back
in the carryall.”

Lenny opened his nib pouch, picked out the travel pattern
nib, inserted it into his com, and set his com on top of the ops bench. He
placed the camball into the pouch alongside the other nibs and stuffed the
pouch deep into his pocket.

He was so happy to have tools he knew how to use, he began a
monologue, explaining to Sid what he was doing. “The scout can collect the com
signals from Lunar Base, but I couldn’t figure out how to make sense of the
jumble. This nib”—he glanced over his shoulder at Sid—“a nib is a tiny speck of
crystal. Anyway, it has procedures I can use to locate positions and track
movements.” He tapped here and there. “I connect to the scout.” Colorful
displays popped up. “And we are go.”

Lenny leaned in and squinted as he paged through the
displays, now augmented and presented in a format of his own design. “I can
separate out about twenty com signals. Do you know how many people were on base?”

“Somewhere north of a thousand.”

Lenny sat back and put his hands in his lap. He didn’t turn
around.

“Her name is Cheryl Wallace.”

Lenny hesitated, dreading delivering the bad news, then
reached up and began reviewing the displays. “Hey, I have her signal. She
hasn’t moved in a while, though.”
Tap. Swipe.
“Her emergency beacon is
on, which will help a lot in pinpointing her position. She was tracking oxygen
levels.”
Swipe.
“They’re low. We need to get to her.”

“Let me talk to her.”

Lenny considered what to tell him. “I don’t think she’ll
hear you.” He swiped the bench surface. “Okay. You’re sending. If she doesn’t
respond, it’ll store as a message record.”

“Hang on, sweetie. I’m on my way.”

Lenny waited and then understood that was the complete
message. As he’d anticipated, they didn’t receive a reply. After an appropriate
time, he closed the connection and tried to make Sid feel better. “She’ll get
the message when she surfaces.”

He continued his planning, the whole time thinking that if
Sid called her “sweetie” without identifying himself, he wasn’t talking to some
commando. They’re in a relationship.
And that means he’s playing me for a
sucker.

“What can you learn about Hop, Jefe, and Dent?” Sid gave
Lenny formal identifying information.

“Their coms aren’t responding. Without some sort of signal
or beacon, I can’t locate them.”
Tap.
“Their last connects all were in
different zones from where Cheryl is now.”

“Let’s focus on Cheryl. Once we get to her, maybe she can help
with them.” Sid picked Lenny’s hammer out of the carryall and toyed with it. “How
long before we land?”

Lenny looked. “Two hours to our original destination, but to
hover right over her…”
Tap. Tap.
His shoulders slumped. “It’s still two
hours.”

He paged through the displays and stopped at one. “Hold on.”
A pressure pushed them both against their left armrests. It lasted for about
ten seconds. “Okay, that’s what I can do. We arrive in an hour twenty.”

“How can we get to her?”

“She’s six levels down. That’s probably why she’s still
alive.”

“Help me, Len. How do we reach her?”

“That’s a tough one. I don’t have a schematic of the base. With
a dreadnaught orbiting Earth and the Lunar Base systems wiped out, I have no
place to grab one.”

Sid leaned forward and stretched, his huge paw reaching over
the bench. Lenny heard a quiet click. When Sid pulled his hand away, his com
was sitting next to Lenny’s.

“I was up here a few days ago and brought the Lunar Base central
record with me. Whatever you need should be in there.”

Tap. Tap. Swipe.
Lenny picked up the com and held it
over his shoulder for Sid.

“You can’t use it?”

“I’ve grabbed everything. Take it back. You’ll need it if
you’re going inside.”

Lenny began digging through his newfound wealth of
information. Sid was quiet. Lenny peeked over his shoulder and saw him seated
with his head back and eyes closed. He took the opportunity to open Sid’s private
vault, where he found vids and touches with Cheryl.
I knew it.
Glancing
again to make sure he hadn’t been seen, he moved on to the business at hand.

“Voilà,” Lenny said as a construction image projected in
front of the ops bench. He stood up and walked to it.

Moving his hand back and forth along a rectangular tube at
the top of the image, he said, “Okay, this hallway is above her, and it’s reasonably
close to the surface.” His hand moved downward, and his fingers traced a zigzag
pattern. “This is six flights of steps from that hallway down to her.” He
brought his hand up to the hallway and traced down along a vertical tube. “The
other option is this lift shaft.”

A small red button showed at the bottom of the construction
image. It brightened on a regular cycle, much like the rhythm of a heartbeat.
“This”—Lenny pointed—“is our lady in distress.”

Lenny looked Sid in the eye. “Tell me you aren’t using this
catastrophe to help some criminal escape.”

“What the hell? Why would you say that?”

“Maybe because she’s sitting in the local jail. And maybe
because you two are lovers.”

* * *

Juice reached out to reconnect Criss
with the outside world.

“Wait,” said Crispin. His forceful delivery caused her to
hesitate. “I have another message for you from Criss.”

“Geez, Crispin. Let’s go through the whole playlist. This
dribs-and-drabs approach isn’t working for me.”

Crispin spoke in Criss’s familiar intonation. “Good evening,
young lady. If the Kardish arrival is imminent and I’m malfunctioning,
misbehaving, or isolated, then I’m not fine. You are hearing this message
because Crispin is with you. Please move me into the synbod so I may assess the
situation from quarantine.”

“Whoa. If he knew all this in advance, why didn’t he do
something about it?”

“I do not know.”

“I know you don’t,” said Juice, feeling a moment of compassion
for Crispin’s simple existence.

With no time to reflect and no one to consult, Juice acted.
“Take off your shirt.” While one part of her brain admired his perfect physique,
her focus remained on switching the crystals. “Turn around.”

Standing behind him, she saw a faint scar in his skin that
traced the outline of his crystal-housing receptacle. She toggled the housing
as Criss had shown her days earlier, and the top of the receptacle tilted
outward from his back, tearing the skin along the scar and exposing the crystal
unit. Juice hooked her thumbs into little loops on each side, slid the unit with
her crystal out of the synbod, and set it on top of the console.

She released the clasps securing Criss’s unit, pulled him up
and out of his slot, and slid him into Crispin. She toggled the receptacle closed,
wincing at the ugly wound tracing the top of a rectangle across the back of his
shoulders.

“It’s wonderful to see you, Juice.” Criss enveloped her in a
snug embrace and rocked her gently. Juice hugged him back, her head resting against
his shoulder.

“Are the Kardish here?” he asked, stopping their slow dance.

“Yes.”

“Here in orbit, or here on the farm?”

“Here on the farm, which I guess means in orbit, too.”

Criss picked up Crispin’s crystal housing and slid it into
the console—his previous home. As he did, he said, “There’s ointment in the
cabinet next to your right shoulder. Please rub some on that nasty scrape on
your palm, and if you would, please apply some along the tear on my back.”

The cream worked wonders on her hand, soothing the pain on
contact. Criss stood patiently while she daubed the ointment along the length
of his wound with her finger.

As he put his shirt back on, he asked, “Did Crispin bring
any milk?”

“Yeah, there are six and a half tubes in the pack.”

Criss opened the pack and searched it thoroughly. He handed
Juice two energy bars and drained a full tube and the remainder of the half
tube of his nourishing liquid. “I have enough here for ten days. If we can get
to it, there’s more milk in the farmhouse.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t burn it down, then.”

He looked at her and she shrugged. “It’s a story for later.”

“Have you been eating?” he studied her face from different
angles like a clinician performing a physical evaluation.

“I guess so, if by ‘eating’ you mean energy bars.”

Criss put the energy bar wrappers and empty milk tubes back
in the pack, and Juice tossed the ointment on top.

“We’ll get you some proper food, too.” Pulling his shirtsleeve
down over the palm of his hand, he polished the console. “Does anything seem
out of place?”

She glanced around her. “Looks the same to me.”

He lifted the pack over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”