PeculiarChangeling
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Alpha Colony - Chapter 2
🕑 Added 2020-06-27 08:49:55 +0000 UTCI had fun writing this one. Answering questions is fun, but creating more questions is funner. (Yes, funner is a word. Usage dictates meaning. Don't @ me about it.)
Chapter 1 can be read here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37447044
Lucas held tight to the handle as the tram slowed. The magnetic braking was fast and efficient, but it was hardly a gentle stop, and he’d stumbled more than a couple times from lack of care during his first days on the public rail.
His mind was still on the scene at the club. On that girl. She’d shown up, ready to rip his clothes off and take him right there on the bartop. Then she got in a fight with colony security, crapped her pants, and vanished without a word of explanation for any of it.
Who was she?
The door hissed open and he stepped off, looking around the dim lighting of his stop. He was on the fifth layer down, where no natural wolflight would filter down, and this late in the loop, the faux lighting had been dimmed to simulate night. The filtered air was more stale than the upper levels, but they were up far enough from the waste processing plant that it wasn’t acutely unpleasant.
It was the level for cheap, functional lodging. Most laborers in the colony had an apartment somewhere down here, unless they opted for a plain bunk to save money. Lucas liked having a little space to stretch his legs and his own shower, so he’d sprung for the apartment.
Strolling towards his home by memory, he pulled out his communicator, tabbing through the menus. The girl, Sara, had linked hers to his so that they could talk in the bar. Maybe she’d left some kind of signature, a tracking number, some way for him to contact her.
An ID number would do it. Heck, a last name would be enough to isolate her - everyone was in the system, and there weren’t enough people on the colony for many duplicate names.
Frowning, he decided to pull up the registry anyways. ‘Sara’ was a common first name, even taking into account all the possible derivatives and nicknames. All he had to do was look at the list of colonists with the name, and he could narrow it down to a few options.
As it turned out, there were sixteen people named either Sara or Sarah who had come to the colony. Tapping through the list, Lucas was able to rule out a few right away.
Three were still listed as primary school students, so that ruled them out. Another two were deceased, and a third, one of the original scouts from the Griffin debacle, was ‘presumed dead’ since they’d never found the body.
That left ten names for him to sort through. He looked for any recent arrivals, since he suspected she'd spent some time on a colony ship, but nothing stood out.
It was a puzzle for later. At the moment, he wanted to get into his apartment, drink some water to stave off a burgeoning headache, and get some sleep.
Instead, he almost walked into the slender figure standing at the bottom of his apartment’s stairwell. They wore a long black coat and a broad-brimmed hat, and they were standing square in front of his door.
Lucas frowned at them. “Can I help you, uh…”
“Were you at the Fifth Rock nightclub this evening, sir?” Their voice was stiff and scripted, like someone attempting to sound pleasant while reading out a shopping list.
Well, that’s a loaded question. “What’s this about?”
“There was an incident at the club involving our security personnel. We’re looking for witnesses who can give us information about a certain person of interest. Were you there?”
He couldn’t place their voice. It sounded unfamiliar but reminiscent in a way that made his spine shiver, like something he’d only heard in a dream.
Whoever it was, they were asking about Sara. Obviously. Lucas could connect the dots when the dots were this huge and clearly labeled. “I didn’t really talk to the girl much, but I’ll tell you-”
Technically, he didn’t stop talking. The next sounds out of his mouth, though, sounded something like ‘bghhhfffjuuuh’ and were not intelligible in any known language.
Nonlethal detainment methods had moved far beyond simple electrical charges. Modern, colony-approved stun guns fired needles that would send regulated pulses of neural information, scrambling their victim’s entire nervous system. Lucas didn’t feel pain, even as his body tumbled down the stairs, but that was because he couldn’t feel anything.
At least when he came to a stop, he’d rolled face-up, so he could get a view of what they were doing.
Keeping a hand on the stun gun’s trigger so that the containment signal would continue to scramble Lucas’s body, they pulled out a radio with their other hand. Not a communicator, but an honest-to-god radio, complete with a cartoonishly long antenna.
Lucas could also see that their hand was an advanced bit of cybernetics. A prosthetic, but one that was more useful than the original limb it was replacing.
They raised the radio, speaking softly into it. “I bagged him. Getting ready to come in for interrogation and correction.”
If Lucas could have frowned in confusion, he would have, but he had no control over his facial muscles as they looked down at him. Whatever expression they wore, it was concealed by a mask, a simple reflective visor.
But he wasn’t looking at their mask. He was looking above them, at the quickly descending boot coming falling from a level above, aimed right towards-
CRACK.
Sara drove her foot into the figure’s shoulder blades, driving them to the ground next to Lucas.
Whatever happened next, he didn’t see it. He was distracted by the sudden flooding of sensory inputs as the stun signal ceased to course through his brain.
His back hurt. He’d landed on it funny, and then kept his weight on his shoulder in a weird way. There was a bruise on his cheek, and his pants felt strangely warm and wet-
Oh. Right. Loss of bodily functions.
At some point between falling and regaining control, Lucas had wet his pants. By the smell, he’d probably done more than that, but he had no time to worry about what was weighing down the back of his pants.
The needle in his neck was yanked out, and he turned in surprise to see Sara jam the needle into the figure’s own neck. They were splayed on the ground, reflective mask cracked, and Sarah reached down and manipulated their fingers so that they were clamped down on the grip of the stun gun.
Body going rigid, they gave up struggling.
“They’ll be down until someone comes and takes their hand off the stun gun,” Sara said, offering Lucas a hand. “If you want to keep your mind intact, you’re going to come with me.”
Lucas accepted her hand, using the wall support as he got up, feeling a squelch in his boxers. Yes, I definitely-
“This is your place, right?” Sara asked, gesturing to the door.
He nodded, then shook his head to clear up the fuzzy thoughts that were still swirling around. The lingering buzz from one drink too many was making this all hard to take in. “Y-yes.”
She looked up, eyeing something that was past his field of view. “Is there anything in there that you would hate to lose? A personal effect, something like that.”
“Not really. I don’t keep many souvenirs.” He frowned. “Why-”
“Because you’re not coming back.” Grabbing his hand, Sarah pulled him up out of the stairwell, running at a pace that he could just barely keep up with.
“S-slow down!” he said, as the level’s dim lights spun around his head. “I can’t-”
Groaning, Sarah stopped, tugged up on Lucas’s arm, and flipped him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Despite the fact that Lucas had to have thirty or forty pounds on the girl, she took off running at top speed and was quickly outpacing his best sprint.
“Where are we going?” he shouted.
“Tramway!” she called back.
That didn’t make sense. If she was running from the authorities, putting herself on a tram would be the same as shipping herself straight into their hands. All the security police would have to do is wait at the next stop and boot the tram, and Sara would fall right into their grasp.
He almost said as much, but considering how his night was going, ultimately decided that it was best to default to her knowledge.
The platform was empty, and a new tram was rolling in just as they arrived. Barely waiting for the doors to slide open, Sara jumped in, dumped Lucas onto a seat, and then turned to look the way they’d come.
Only when the doors shut did she breath a sigh of relief. The tram took off at top speed, jolting Lucas to the side in his seat.
Sara stood through the change in inertia, barely seeming to register it.
“This tram runs up to the first level,” she said. “Direct route. We’re lucky that we got on this one, and not a route with more stops.”
Lucas stared at her, wild-eyed. “Why is that lucky?”
Sara reached down, pulling off her shirt and stepping towards Lucas. She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Because it means we’ve got six minutes alone.”
“Woah!” Lucas jumped out of his seat, hopping back a few steps and falling as the tram turned slightly. He landed with a squelch, reminding him that he still needed a change of pants. “You’re still- you’re not even going to explain what’s going on?”
“You’re safer not knowing,” Sara shrugged, unzipping her pants and fiddling with the button. “And this is probably the last chance either of us will get for a long time, and fuck me if I’m going to waste that opportunity.”
“I- But-” Lucas stammered. “I… I pissed myself when the stun gun hit me.”
Pulling her own pants, Sara uncovered a plain, white diaper, which she started to untape. “I don’t care. Yes I d- I. Don’t. Care. Do you? You were interested back at the bar, I assumed that still applied.”
“No it doesn’t apply!” Lucas got to his feet, holding onto the wall for support. “I was interested in you when I wasn’t in a life or death situation! What the fuck is going on?”
Sara looked genuinely disappointed, and a little confused. “I told you. Can I please handle this?”
Lucas’s confusion deepened. “What-”
She stamped her foot, throwing back her head with a petulant groan. “Fiiine.” She stuck the tape back down on her diaper, knelt to pull her pants up, and said, “The security police and I are not on good terms with each other.”
“No shit,” Lucas said. “Who was that person back at my apartment?”
“An instigator. They’re raised from birth, black ops types.” Sara picked her shirt up off the floor, pulling it back into place.
Lucas’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember details. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have. They’re good at black ops. They are the only one on the colony that I know of, and they’ve been tracking me for a few weeks now.” Dressed, she walked to the side to peer out the window. “Since they’re worried that I’m trying to cause damage to the colony, and that I might know information that could cause real harm to their image, they want to kill me and wipe anyone who I’ve talked to.”
“Wipe… like, erase my memories?” Lucas stammered. “I didn’t think they could do that.”
“They can’t. They can give your brain a hard reset, though. You’d have to relearn your potty training and your ABCs, but that’s a price they’re willing to pay, as long as its your life they’re paying with and not theirs.” Sara sighed, turning and slumping into a seat.
Lucas realized he was still panting, and tried to catch his breath. Focused on his breathing, he couldn’t help but notice how badly he smelled. “Why do they want to kill you?”
That got a smirk out of her. “They think I’m responsible for the explosion at the terraforming engine.”
Lucas blinked a couple times. That had been on the news for almost a month, with constant coverage and updates on the repairs. He stared at her. “...why do they think that?”
“Do you want me to make you a new identity?” she asked, stretching her arms, making him struggle to follow the non sequitur. “I can probably find someone MIA from the old crash and poke around in their system to give you their ID numbers. You’d have to go to the far side of the colony and avoid your old friends and anywhere you hung out, but you could live a life like that.”
“You mean the OSC Griffin?” He sat up, making a few connections. “Is that what you did for yourself? You made an identity from one of the crash victims?”
“Focus on yourself.” Sara stood, pacing up and down the platform. “We’re going to my safe house, and you can stay there a couple days, but it’s not a long term solution. You’ll need to put this all behind you, one way or another.”
“I… I’m more worried about the officers that are going to be waiting for us when this tram stops, honestly.” Lucas rubbed at his forehead absently. “Aren’t we going to be facing a whole battalion’s worth of fire once we step off the platform?”
“No, of course not.” Sara paced, and Lucas was relieved until she added, “The main station is going to be crammed full of people, and they want my capture to be private. They’ll follow us until we’re isolated, then hit us with everything they’ve got.”
“That’s…” Lucas swallowed. “So what are you going to do?”
Sara grinned, and for the first time, Lucas noticed her teeth. She had too many teeth. “I’ll hit back.”
