2.23.1

Dispatch and Detour

The team breezed through their briefing in preparation for the Maxwell mission. Anders and Tenya pieced together a good plan and coordinated with Romo and Dell. But Captain London held no illusions of keeping Astrid aboard ship.

After he relayed his orders and reaffirmed that Anders took command once groundside, he dismissed the whole team to gear up.

The Aldebaran would park in the colony on Argos. The locals referred to the city as “the Hill” for its placement atop a plateau overlooking vast plains. The Hill remained too minor and underdeveloped to be what one could call a destination colony.

But its people were polite enough and asked no questions of an EMS frigate seeking dry dock. The crew secured the rental of a shuttle, and efforts immediately fell underway.

The cargo hold bustled while the newly form team synched up their comms and buckled one another into their gear.

Ramsey, and Astrid, however, both forewent armor. To allay suspicions that they carried out an active operation.

It also nurtured trust between them. To those at the Academy, it would support the guise of a concerned brother escorted by overly professional crewmen. To the Aldebaran, it showed Ramsey’s willingness to accept a more vulnerable position for the good of the team.

Still, he and Astrid seeded comm units into their ears, and checked in with the Bridge to make sure they, too, were connected with all others.

“Tenya, Ramsey, and Dell, you’re going in first. Know what you’re going to say?” Anders checked while they armed themselves.

“We went over it,” Ramsey assured with a look over to Tenya. Still, he adjusted his formal Service tunic and straightened his posture.

“Don’t forget your primary task is recon. But if you guys get into a pinch in there, we’ll come running.”

Astrid ran her fingers down Tenya’s back plate to make sure she latched everything tightly.

“I won’t let you down, Kitten,” Tenya promised under her breath.

Romo clasped Dell on the shoulder. “You sure you’re ready to go back in?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve got this,” Dell told him.

“Team Two to Team One. Comm test.” Anders spoke for the device in his ear. Across from him, three hands raised to indicate they’d heard transmission.

“Forward Ground Team to Bridge. We are prepared to disembark. Standby.”

Anders rounded them up, down the gangplank and into the waiting shuttle, where Romo took the helm of the vehicle and warmed it to life.

Astrid pushed Ramsey's armor, and her own, into their cases and packed them onto the shuttle. Just in case. Then five more bodies, three geared, two decidedly not, filed in after Romo.

The agent eased them out of the port and raised them gently into the sky. Morning crested and filled the small vessel with the same ambient light that turned the colony into a crown, rested illustriously over the grasslands.

“I expected a little more growth by now.” Ramsey commented when they flew overhead and away from the colony. “They were founded maybe fifty years ago. With all that acreage of plains. It should have been a perfect location for animal husbandry.”

“I imagine the presence of a Sanctuary changed things,” Astrid told him. “I don’t know what they get from the Governorships for hosting one. Maybe a tax break, or a stipend. Maybe the people here just want to live in quiet contentment rather than compete.”

“Let’s take a little detour,” Anders said to Romo. “I want a flyby of Argos.”

“Sir?” Astrid turned her face to him in the sunlight that filled the cabin.

“Just a look,” Anders expressed soberly. “It’d be a shame to get this close and not get our eyes on it.”

Astrid nodded and rotated back to the window.

The nearby academy, and the Sanctuary, lay about an eight-minute shuttle ride away from the Hill. Sky passed over, and land beneath, to sandwich their flightpath in serene landscape that only the ruin of a Channeler Sanctuary could mar.

But mar it did.

Romo alerted when they drew close to Argos, but he needn’t bother.

Astrid projected, based on the remnants, a domed structure of white stone. With high columns and natural light caught in the field-lands outside. The Sanctuary grounds sat half in the pale shadow of an adjacent hill ridge, to block it from the wind. But still, while the shuttle slowly swung around, the view painted for her a visage of Greco-Roman inspired grandeur. What would have been a polished stone gem amidst a sea of green.

Unfortunately, what remained, looked closer to the ruins of its very inspiration.

Argos wasn’t just empty. It lay toppled. In some places, Astrid could see through to the stone foundation beneath an unintended skylight in the ceiling. Pillars lay strewn about in a chaotic sprawl.

Yet, the columns lay outward from a center site, and provided insight into the “impact point”, if one could call it that. Like ejecta lines around a crater, the long structures pinpointed a place west of the Sanctuary center, where the worst of the revolt must have erupted.

All bodies, save Romo, went the windows, to get a good look. Tenya clasped Astrid’s shoulder while the team whispered their theories.

“Almost looks like it was hit from the outside, don’t it?” Ramsey observed next to Dell.

“There,” the technician’s gloved finger pointed to the same location Astrid isolated. “It must have started there.”

“I don’t see any bodies,” Tenya shared. Though it didn’t even occur to Astrid that any should remain. “Maybe Polaris and the S.O. put them to use. Or the scientists.”

Astrid’s stomach squeezed. In this case, she felt relieved to know less about Argos and what transpired there. It protected her from visualizing worse.

“We can’t linger. We don’t know who else will be watching the skies,” Anders spoke to them, then to Romo in the driver’s seat behind him.

The agent sped them away, west, to the coordinates of the school.

That, Astrid realized, would be the closest she’d ever be the last place Gi once stood.

With a heavy heart, she lamented that a part of her didn’t seem over that loss yet. It should have been easy, she reasoned. Their time seemed a small fraction of her past now, with plenty of years between to adapt.

And yet, as though she believed in miracles, she wouldn’t have been surprised, or displeased, to a see a head of jet-black hair climb out of the rubble when they flew overhead. Asking to hitch a ride.

That pitiful hope, and its denial, brought her remorse. So much life happened since. And now, she told herself, was no time to regret what brought her this far.

Maybe their friendship already served its purpose in her life. Maybe now, she could, and should, put his spirit to rest.

Romo regained some height, for appearances, before they arrived at the school. A kilometer proved a much shorter distance than Astrid anticipated. It seemed close, too close, for a Static institution to stand aside a Channeler Sanctuary.

The school loomed, crafted of the same material as Argos. But instead of honoring an ancient architecture of history, it stood a solid, squarish block, as though a shield of rock itself. Befitting Statics, Astrid thought.

The facility lay out in a box shape that lacked its fourth wall. The remaining side opened into a piazza, that utilized the rising sun to light its open entryway, for at least part of the year.

From the sky, it looked much like a block-typed “C”.

As soon as they drew close enough to see, movement caught their eye. Two men at a set of double doors, at the back of the formal piazza, hastened to the arrival of visitors.

Not so abandoned, after all. But Astrid observed no children, small or otherwise, in the surrounding area.

Romo touched them down, as casual as any visiting delegation. Astrid and Anders huddled up with him at the helm, should anyone try to look inside when Ramsey, Tenya, and Dell lifted the side hatch of the shuttle to exit.

Anders nodded to each as they passed, but Tenya reserved a last, lingering look for Astrid before the chief’s boots hit the verdant grass just outside. Then she slammed the door closed behind her.

Painfully, the Channeler watched the three trudge forward across the landscape to the stone square where guards awaited.