[RFC][Story] Mission to Arcadia

[Dartz]

Departure
June 2024

That moment when you get on a rollercoaster, the bar locks down, then everything starts slowly crawling forward.

He stood inside the spaceport lounge, gazing out onto the apron beyond. Impatiently, he checked his watch, before scrolling back through a few screens to doublecheck the email that'd told him to be there a half hour earlier.

They couldn't even keep proper time.

He watched a Shuttle roar down the runway with three thrusters blazing, disappearing up into the dust-storm. He was in the courier-port, not the main spaceport, waiting for a shuttlecraft to land in the bay opposite and take him away.

He turned around, scanning the lounge. An elderly couple with some old rocket were grabbing themselves an expensive burger - an expensive excuse for a daytrip in their spacecraft. Some children were playing, making noise with imitation blasters while their parents chased after them.

The wait was giving him time to have second thoughts. He knew the person he was being hired by wasn't just a martial artist and speed freak. It seemed crazy. But the pay was good, and the opportunity was tantalising. It could really get his career as a researcher moving in a way a decade-long bughunt on Mars wouldn't.

It could blow the whole thing up if it went wrong.

He paced around the lounge, having third and fourth thoughts on top of that. There was the door, and all he had to do was walk out of it and never hear from her again. The fifth thought tripped him up when he remembered he'd signed that piece of paper.

He was already in.

He chuckled to himself. It was hardly James Bond. It was hardly how things worked in those Double-Oh Fenfics kicking around. It felt far more slipshod than suave and sexy. Somehow, it felt strangely unfair. He sighed. It was the same thing with exobiology, really. The glamour of seeking out new life soon fell by the mundane wayside as real work was involved. Maybe being a troubleshooter was much the same?

It seemed oddly comforting. The reality was more normal. He sat himself down in one of the plastic chairs, fidgeting with his bags while watching an old-model Blackbird roar in.

He looked up in time to see an attack helicopter stop in place over the landing bay. It was a two seater, with a single rotor whipping a cyclone underneath. Stones pattered against the quartz pressure glass. It hung in the air, angular and deadly with a pair of bombs under each wing. Navigation lights flickered as it dropped itself down onto the landing pad.

A red light over the airlock door came on as it began to lower down into the bay.

Was this him? Or the shuttle due afterwards?

He gathered his bags in a hurry, getting to his feet before the doors had closed over the chopper. He was standing by the airlock door when the light went green. It burred open - to reveal Jet Jaguar standing taller than he was on long legs.

"Sorry I'm late," she said. "I'm in a hurry. Put your things in the back hatch, then get in the gunners seat."

She pointed towards the chopper, engines still winding down. Not even a polite hello, or handshake. His right hand was left hanging there as she slipped past him with a deftness he didn't think somebody with such a rigid body could possibly have managed.

He turned around to face her. "Gunner's seat?"

"The front." She pointed towards the forward cockpit without even looking back at him. "You've a few minutes while I pay for the landing."

"Expecting trouble?" he asked, dryly, looking at the chopper.

"Nah." she shook her head, wearing a soft grin. "It has two seats, that's why..."

He looked at her for a moment, watching her rush across the hall to the spaceport agent, wondering just what had her in such a hurry. He couldn't help but notice that, beneath the wings and antennae vanes on her backpack, someone had seen fit to sculpt for her an attractive metal bum.

Cybers were strange, he concluded. Desperate to free themselves from humanity, while clinging on desperately to some obvious vestiges of it. Not that he was complaining.

He struggled to carry both overweight suitcases down the short corridor leading to the landed chopper. The rotors still slowly turned over his head, engines moaning softly as the wound down. What he'd thought were bombs were actually fuel tanks - but the cannon in the turret under the nose seemed real enough.

Black paint and a hard, angular shape made it seem far more intimidating close up. The armour around the windows was thicker than his arm. The whole chopper exuded a menace that bristled across his skin.

"You're dealing with troubleshooters now, mate," he whispered to himself.

The matte paint made finding the rear hatch trickier than it should've been. He struggled with an inelegant door-catch for a few moments before finally figuring out that it operated in the exact way he wouldn't expect. It someone seemed like a metaphor for how this was happening.

Exactly how nobody thought it was supposed to happen.

A red light lit the inside enough for him to see what looked like an electric motor and a pair of power packs the size of old car batteries that weren't really supposed to be there. He'd been a postgrad for long enough to recognise a piece of apparatus that'd been patched together. It wasn't comforting.

He heaved both suitcases inside with a grunt, cursing himself for bringing so much of his things with him rather than paying for shipping. But shipping was expensive. He locked the hatch and made his way round to the gunner's door. He climbed up into the gunner's cockpit, hauling the door shut behind him. It slammed down, threatening to bite his fingers off. Inside, the armour closed in around him, giving a strange sense of cocooned safety. The headset felt plasticky and flimsy around his head.

He scanned instruments he didn't really understand, picking out what looked like weapon controls and switches that were horribly old-fashioned. It was very Airwolf in execution. What digital instruments there were were nothing more than LED segment displays straight out of 1984.

Weren't troubleshooters supposed to be on the bleeding edge of technology?

He glanced out and saw Jet returning at a slow jog. She jumped up to the rear cockpit, before slipping in behind him. Her door didn't close. He glanced in a mirror to see it latched open.

"You alright in there?" she asked, her voice crackling a little through his headset

"Bit tight." he answered, adjusting some of the seatbelt straps. It was more than that. He wasn't large by any means, but the cockpit seemed to have been built around someone smaller than her.

"Grand. It'll take about 5 hours to get out there so make sure you're comfortable."

He fidgeted on the hard seat. "I don't think that's ever going to happen. Let's just get going."

"Right so." There was a pause. He was aware that her voice had an odd artificial tone do it - a resonance that sounded unnatural, more like a recording that someone speaking to him.

The engines didn't start. The cockpit door wasn't closed, even as the landing bay depressurised and the doors opened. The engines still hadn't started as the rotors began to turn, only a soft humm rising from somewhere behind him.

Mars fell away beneath as the helicopter lifted up into the sky, rapidly gaining altitude. He xoon saw the curvature of the rusting world and the green haze of its thin atmosphere. Within minutes, there were only stars and the soft whirr of the ventilation blowing warm air on his face.

"So," he began, conversationally "How long have you been doing things like this?"

"Long enough," came the answer. He sighed, momentarily frustrated.

"Let me guess, you can't talk about it?"

He was answered by silence.

"Not what you expected?" she asked him. He caught the hint of amusement in her tone.

"No," he answered. "Somehow I expected something more...." He trailed off as he began to search for the right word. "I suppose, more sophisticated and more spy-like. Like James Bond."

"A lot of people do." There was a pause. "Code Double-Zero has a lot to answer for."

He felt himself chuckle. "I think television has the same effect on any profession. They think science happens in flashy labs with white coats, not scratching in the rust for months on end building towards a conclusion years down the line." He sighed. "I guess if you need biologist, a lab and some divers, this is going to be something far more mundane than running gun battles through Kandor city."

"You almost sound disappointed."

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't on some level. Even if common sense tells me my sole contribution to a running gun battle through Kandor city would be to get in the way of a bullet so somebody useful didn't."

"Hah!" she barked. "Unfortunately, this isn't going to be anything like that. We're just moving an elephant out of the room while everybody's agreed not to look."

He thought for a moment. "And this elephant's on the bottom of an Arcadian sea?" She didn't answer. He decided to push a little harder, offering his own theory. "The divers. They're miners, aren't they? You're mining something inside the Zone. "

"I won't confirm or deny that for now." Her voice had hardened a little, a gentle warning not to push it further. "I suppose, being a scientist, you aren't used to this sort of secrecy."

"On the contrary," He said, a faint smile forming on his lips. "You'll find there's no-one in the universe more secretive than a scientist who's worried the new discovery he's chasing will get scooped."

He took a deep breath, lowering his head. Competitive collaboration was the way he'd always thought of it.

"I wouldn't have thought..." said the woman behind him.

"That's the reason I agreed to do this," he said, his tone softening. "The hardest part about a career in Science is getting to the point where you can make discoveries yourself, rather than making someone elses."

It was hard for him to hide the note of bitterness in his voice.

"Well, the cyber said. "Your briefing's in a tablet under your seat. You've got 5 hours to read it. It's got details of the cover story, why you've moved out to Frigga and what to say and do." she paused. "It's programmed to self-erase on command, or next time it's shut down - so memorise it."

"Right," he murmured., fumbling under the seat where the lifejacket should've been. His fingers found a could metal slab, with a small text-only screen, manual keyboard and scrollwheel to ratchet through pages. It was one step up from the neolithic, being built with a weight to it that suggested it'd last an age. It wasn't exactly a design that was promiscuous about who it was friendly with.

He wound through the text file, scanning it at first to grab the jist of it, while saving the rest for later in the flight. Mars was a red spark falling behind in the mirrors. He glanced back behind him, noting that the Pilot's door was still latched open.

Even the Combat Cyborgs weren't what he expected.

He sat for an hour, alternating between reading, watching space go by, regretting leaving his book in his suitcase, and wondering if is watch wasn't suddenly running slow. Long spaceflight was a unique kind of boredom when someone'd deliberately disabled interwave communications. He fiddled with some of the controls and had some fun tracking the gun turret to aim at various stars.

Eventually, Jet broke the silence. "How do you feel about this?"

He thought on it for far longer than he'd expected, before recalling something from way back when he'd first interviewed to attend Vesta, years earlier.

"Nervous. Like I'm getting on a rollercoaster and it's just begun to move."

That about summed it up. It was the long climb up to a blind crest, after which came a long and interesting ride.

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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?