Chapter 26

"Come on... Come on..." muttered Thallin as the phone on the other hand of the line continued to ring. "Damn!" The phone had rung out for the third time in a row. "Where the Hell are you, Kay?" He slammed the receiver down onto the craddle, his anger building. 

<Hold it,> he thought to himself. <Remember what Lang said. Emotions are easily read.> Thallin began to clear his mind of his anger. <There must be some sort of range on this. Surely she can't tell what I'm feeling from the other side of the ship.> A shiver ran up his spine at the thought. 

Picking up the phone again, Thallin dialed Izabelle's pager. "Someone has got to be reachable." 

"pager service number two five four seven zero please leave your message" intoned the life-less voice of the automatic paging system. 

Thallin sighed. "Izi, it's Thallin. Please call me as soon as you can." He hung up the phone. <I wonder if this is how Gloval felt when told the engines had gone?> 

Rising to his feet, he picked up the sheaf of paper next to the phone and flipped through them without really reading them as he headed down the stairs to the Club's main lounge area. Eventually, he slowed his flipping, concentrating on a set of pages which detailed the preparations for tomorrow's grand-opening of the Black Pegasus Club. 

<We're still short one waitress,> he noted as he opened a door leading to a short hallway. <Where am I going it find another waitress on such short notice?> Thallin was beginning to think that the Club was not as good an idea as when he had first thought of it. He pulled a key from his pocket and inserted it in the lock, waiting for the scanners in the door to read his bio-imprint through the key. The locks popped open. <At least,> he thought as the door opened, <I have a place to keep the Night of Gold safe and sound.> 

The lights came on, revealing an empty hangar. 

Thallin swore. 

"What do you mean you gave it clearance?" shouted Thallin over the vid-phone in the ground-floor office. 

The Wave on the other side of the screen looked visibly shaken. She had not expected to be called on the carpet so close to the end of her shift - or ever, in fact. "I... I... She had proper clearance, Lieutenant," she stammered in reply. "RD5-43/00." Thallin groaned - Izabelle had thought of nothing better than to use his own clearance code. Yet another thing he would have to explain to Lang when he finally became aware of it. And Thallin was quite certain Lang would hear about it. "The VX-001 and shuttle departed twenty minutes ago to look for survivors." 

"Shuttle," repeated Thallin. "What shuttle?" 

"Lieutenant Landers requisitioned a shuttle, sir. For any survivors." 

"Thank you Ensign. You have just made my day even worse." Without bothering to explain, Thallin shut off communications. <Kay in a shuttle with Izabelle riding escort. Not a pretty picture in light of what Lang told me.> Looking at the spare parts littering the hangar floor, Thallin realised something else. <And the VX probably isn't up to scratch, either. I wonder how much Izi was able to repair before she left.> 

"Are you sure you can pilot this ship, sir?" asked a worried hangar technician. 

Thallin looked at the vaguely sportscar-like two-seater shuttle and nodded. "The controls are not very different from a standard aeroplane, correct?" 

"Correct, sir. I must warn you, though - nobody's taken one of these babies for a trip as long as you're planning... even if it is in Mars-grav instead of Earth-norm." 

"Well, then," stated Thallin as he strapped himself in, "we'll call it an endurance test, shall we?" 

[Reality Check - Saturday, Feb. 13 2010, 1803 hours, Mars Airspace] 

Thallin and his Ghost support flew in concentric circle from the remnants of Mars Base Sarah in an attempt to catch some sort of contact from either the VX-001 or the shuttle. So far, though, all he had found were the wreckages of mecha from both sides. As he passed the silent monument that had once been a MAC-II, Thallin could not help but feel a tinge of sadness at the lives lost during the attack. <If only the VX-001 control system had been perfected, none of them need to have died.> 

Thallin banked a little further 'North' to cover the next area in the search pattern. Slightly behind and above him, the Ghost support plane's primitive neural-net sensed the change in course and proceeded to bank in concert, keeping the two-man shuttle covered with its weaponry. 

Suddenly, a light started blinking on Thallin's radar as the shuttle's sensor recorded another pile of debris. Thallin manouvered the shuttle closer to get a better glimpse at the wreckage. As he approached pile, Thallin tried to make out what sort of mecha or support craft the pile might have previously been, but the crash had been so severe that identification had been rendered impossible. Thallin decided to set the shuttle down and investigate on foot. 

Once on the ground and walking about, it soon became clear what had happened. <Mars Base is off that way, so it was coming from there,> thought Thallin as he looked at the gouge the craft had made in the Martian soil. <But the trajectory's not quite correct. I wonder...> He looked about and spotted a peak with a large black- streaked scrape on its side. <There's my answer. So the ship came from Mars base and for some reason clipped the side of that peak rather hard, then finished its flight rather unceremoniously right here.> Poking his head through various gashes and holes, Thallin investigated further. <From the looks of this, it happened a while ago. Certainly not with the last twenty-four hours. I wonder what it was?> 

Rounding a corner of the wreck, Thallin noticed what looked like a cylindrical escape pod a few feet from the crashed craft. Moving towards it, he noticed a hand through the pod's transparent upper half, a fact which caused him to run towards the pod. Upon reaching it, he stumbled around for a moment looking for the release catch before remembering to check the occupant's situation first. Turning on his helmet's extranel spotlight, Thallin directed the beam into the escape pod to reveal the figure of the occupant. 

The figure was obviously female - a fact revealed by the fact that whatever clothes she had been wearing had been ripped to unidentifiable shreds. Her body was battered and bruised, with blood seeping from various wounds. The makeshift helmet she was wearing, however, seemed to have survived the battering of the crash. 

<Good,> thought Thallin. <Looks like she can handle a few moments in Mars' atmosphere.> Popping the pod's seal, Thallin threw the transparent canopy asside and began to drag the woman's body out of the pod. 

No sooner had her feet cleared the opened seals that Thallin felt himself being lifted off the ground and thrown sideways. Hitting the red ground with a dull thump, Thallin winced as his oxy-pack dug into his spine. <What the...?> He flipped himself onto his hands and knees and pushed himself onto his feet. A blur to his left caused him to raise his arm in time to intercept a roundhouse to his head - but he completely missed to follow-up kick to the stomach that send him reeling backwards, trying to catch his breath. 

The woman jumped high and came down feet first on Thallin - or rather would have, had he not moved asside at the last moment. She swung her left arm around in an effort to hit. Thallin simply caught the arm and flipped her over his hip and onto the ground. 

Getting up more warily, the woman looked Thallin up and down, her eyes slightly squinting as she did so. A questioning look passed briefly over her features before she again attacked. Again, Thallin defended, but noted that these moves had neither the speed nor the strength or her first attack. 

The woman's expression turned to one of shock mixed with fear. "Dielmelkesta!" She dropped to her right knee and bowed, her right fist on the ground. "Zhan toh zaneskes alkes." 

Thallin bit back. "Delkesu!" The woman stood back to her feet and waited patiently. He looked at her for a few seconds, something nagging at the back of his mind. Then, it hit him: she had not spoken in English, nor any other Terran language Thallin had been aware of. And not only had he understood, he had automatically replied in the same tongue. 

"ohboy..." 

Forward to Chapter 27. 
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