Planet Leviathan

^{Chapter 14} Daddy’s Adult Toy

Stanton and Skin didn’t get as much rest as they probably should have, although they both pulled themselves away from each other long enough to fulfill an hour each of sentry duty. In the early hours of the morning, Skin was as bright and cheerful as though she’d slept for twelve straight hours, while Stanton noticeably dragged as they all gathered their meager belongings. While Skin joyfully stripped down and cleaned the 808 and the three remaining plasma pistols (which she again had figured out how to take apart and put together with no help from Stacia), Stanton hobbled on over to Stacia and conferred with her in whispers.

“Stanton. You’re looking sore this morning.”

“Yeah. She’s, uh, feisty.”

“Sounded like it.”

“So, no offense to her or anything, but do you think I’m going to need heavy doses of anti-virals and retro-biotics if we get off planet?”

“Given what I know of how she was treated before this? Let me just say this: anyone she was forced to be with before this probably didn’t take a very proactive view of sexual health.”

“Forced? So you mean…” He made an awkward gesture with his hands that, while it didn’t actually mean anything, gave Stacia a pretty good idea of what he meant.

“A little bit of advice, Stanton. I have no idea if any of us will live past today, and even if we do I have no idea what the two of you might do after this, but just remember this. She’s had a hard life, but neither is she a delicate flower. Treat her right, and treat her like a human.”

“You feel responsible for her, don’t you?”

“She’s like a puppy that followed me home. How could I not feel responsible?”

“What about us? You and me, I mean.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“If we live, I’ll owe you my life.”

“No. No more debts. I’m doing this because I felt like I owed your mother. If we get off Leviathan, everything is square between all of us.”

“Come on. I’m my mother’s son. Do you really think I’m not going to look for a time when I can repay you?”

Stacia smiled. “You can be annoying sometimes, Stanton, but there is no doubt that you’re a Borealis.”

“Um, thanks?”

By Stacia’s rough calculations, they didn’t have very far to walk today. She had been given rough coordinates ahead of time for Stanton’s crash site, and more exact coordinates for the escape ship’s resting place. But she had no idea what might lie between them. For the first several hours of the morning, the terrain remained much like they had seen before. The craters became shallower and less numerous. Stacia thought she caught a glimpse of something once near the bottom of one, something that looked like a huge pair of skeletal pincers, but they pulled back into the ground before Stacia could get any other details. Whatever the creatures were, they didn’t leave the craters, and her party likewise refrained from going in.

Later in the day, though, the rocky territory began to give way once again to the grass-like vegetation they’d seen on the plains. The land here was hillier, and every so often, Stacia thought she could see tube-like pillars of dark rock rising high in the far distance, but otherwise they might as well be back on the plains. This included clear signs that a Wet Lisa or two had prowled this area at some time in the past, but the patches and paths of dead earth they left behind were already growing back over with grass. The plants grew fast around here, apparently, likely as an evolutionary trait to make up for the hardy appetite of the weird green puddles.

“We’re approaching the place where the ship should be,” Stacia said, “but it must not have landed exactly where it should have.”

“What’s that over there?” Stanton asked, pointing at a patch of land near the top of one of the hills where the grass didn’t appear to be as thick as everything around it.

“Could be something,” Stacia said. “Let’s go take a look.”

Keeping a close eye out for any fresh sign of Wet Lisas, they made their way over several smaller hills until they went up the much larger one that Stanton had indicated. It was obvious before they even reached the top that they were on the right track.

“Looks like something burned the ground here. Could be the cover explosion.”

“Or it could have been a real explosion and our chance is gone,” Stanton said

“Not feeling too optimistic, are you?” Stacia asked him.

“I was last night, but today I just keep thinking over and over about what they say.”

All three of them said it at once in quiet, almost reverent tones. “Nobody leaves Leviathan.” There wasn’t much Stacia could say to refute that without lying. Still, she preferred to wait to see the status of the ship before she gave in to the planet’s reputation.

They started to see debris as they got closer to the top. Skin thought that was a bad sign until Stacia pointed out that was part of the plan: the outer shell was supposed to be blown to hell, and anyone looking at it from the security platforms would assume there was nothing operable left. It was also a good sign in that so much usable scrap metal was still left sitting out unclaimed by any person or settlement. It meant that the ship had likely not been discovered and looted.

At the top, they stopped and looked down into the shallow valley beyond. Stacia had to admit that whomever General Borealis had clandestinely hired to take care of this part certainly knew what they were doing. The ship’s position between hills gave it a perfect natural cover from prying eyes. There was an enormous scorch mark and debris field surrounding the ship exactly like they had expected.

Except there was also one detail they hadn’t planned.

“Um, I know I’ve only ever seen a small handful of spaceships in my life,” Skin said, “so maybe I’m wrong. But is that ship upside down?”

“Yes, that ship is most definitely upside down,” Stanton sighed.

“This wasn’t something I had a contingency plan for,” Stacia said.

“Let’s wait until we get closer,” Stanton said, suddenly sounding full of a determination he hadn’t shown before. “As long as everything is still in working order, I still might be able to do something about that.”

“How?” Stacia asked.

“You yourself said I have somewhat of a reputation as a pilot. And I did in fact have to land a ship upside-down once. Theoretically, this should be the same thing in reverse.”

“I’m not sure if it works that way,” Stacia said, but she said nothing else. She and General Borealis had figured that Stanton, should Stacia be able to find him alive, would be the best person to pilot the ship off planet. Stacia herself had some minor flight training, and her tactical implants could give her some help, just enough that she could land a small ship in an emergency. But once it came to piloting ships that were lying on their backs, she was completely out of her comfort zone.

Stacia had to admonish Skin not to stop and pick at the debris as they went down the hill to the ship. The young woman wasn’t used to seeing that much useful material just lying around, and the born survivor in her seemed to want to gather it all up just in case.

“But, we might need it…”

“Skin, no. Trust me.”

“It could be used to make a house, or a sled to pull supplies, or…”

“Where we’re going, we don’t need to make that stuff ourselves out of scrap. All that stuff gets manufactured in mass quantities. You can walk into a store and walk away with a house bigger than anything you’ve ever seen, if you have a vehicle that can haul it.”

Skin stared at her, her wide eyes showing her obvious disbelief that any such thing could possibly be true. Reluctantly, Skin put all the scrap she had gathered back on the ground.

By the time Stacia and Skin caught up to him, Stanton had already made a circuit around the whole outside of the ship at least once. “I recognize this make,” he said. “A Cumbermarch H-85. Not exactly the type of ship I would have expected anyone to use for a rescue mission off one of the most dangerous planets in the galaxy.”

“Why not?” Skin asked.

“It’s basically a rich person’s luxury cruiser. Maybe an older model that the trendiest people wouldn’t be caught dead in anymore, but still reliable.”

“Like I said, we didn’t have much time to waste while we prepared for this,” Stacia said. “We had to take whatever we could find. It was either this or something called a NewHouse N.”

Stanton made a disgusted face. “A NewHouse N wouldn’t have survived any of the crap this one needed to go through just to get here, let alone get off the planet. Why those two? There had to be plenty of better options.”

“Because we didn’t just need one. We needed two ships that were of exactly the same make.” She explained why and what would be packed into the ship’s hold.

“Makes sense, I guess,” Stanton said.

“Getting one older ship no one would miss was easy,” Stacia said. “Getting two that were exactly the same was a bit trickier given the time constraints. So, what do you think? Can you do something with this?”

“I think so. We need to get inside first before I can be one hundred percent certain.”

Getting in proved to be interesting. The ship’s boarding ramp could easily be opened with a code and a few hidden switches, but it opened from the bottom. Which meant they all had to climb all over it until they were on what was now the top. Stanton was able to hold his own on this climb, but Skin still needed help. As Stacia pushed her up the side, Skin pointed out the faded letters in chipped red paint that they passed. “What do those markings mean?”

Stanton turned his head sideways in an effort to read the upside down writing. Stacia, however, already knew. “It’s the ship’s name.”

“Ships have names?” she asked. Then, with a little more anger and incredulity, “Ships have names even when I didn’t have one?”

“Wait a second,” Stanton said. “Am I reading this correctly, or did the chipping to the paint remove something important in the translation?”

“No, you’re reading it correctly.”

“Who would name their ship that?”

“You said yourself that it’s an old luxury ship. It was probably originally owned by an old man in need of an ego boost.”

“I can’t read,” Skin said. “What’s the ship’s name?”

“Daddy’s Adult Toy,” Stacia responded.

“I don’t get it.”

“I’ll explain the concept of adult toys to you later. I’m sure it’s something you’ll like quite a bit.”

Once the hatch was open, they dropped down to the ceiling, being careful not to smash any more of the overhead lights.

“Inside looks a bit roughed up,” Stanton said. “Is this the way it was when you got it, or are we seeing damage from its less than conventional landing?”

“My guess is that it’s probably a little of both, but I couldn’t say for sure. I was already taken away in handcuffs when this part of the plan went into effect.”

Stanton stood straighter as something occurred to him. “Hey, are you going to be able to return to the Galactic Marines after this?”

Stacia just looked at him silently.

“But can’t your name be cleared? Can’t you explain what this was all about?”

“My trial and sentence was public knowledge. And the other thing that’s public knowledge is no one gets off of Leviathan. If we do get off and anyone finds out…”

“It would be chaos for the Galactic Marine bureaucracy, wouldn’t it?”

“There are probably people that would kill us rather than have it go public that their impenetrable prison isn’t as perfect as they’ve been saying for over a hundred years, especially given the corruption within that we already suspect exists.”

“Well, that’s why we’ve got to go public, get all of this information out there…”

“We can’t go public, Stanton. You, me, even Skin, once we leave, we’re fugitives.”

“What do you mean? Neither Skin nor I did anything wrong. I crashed here, and Skin was born here.”

“It doesn’t matter. Escaping from Leviathan is against the law.”

“That’s a stupid law!”

“Yes, it is. But according to the accepted public history, there is no such thing as an innocent person on Leviathan. They refuse to acknowledge that people like Skin exist, and last I saw, all efforts to change the law because of what happened to you are deadlocked. If I had to guess and subscribe to conspiracy theories, I’d say that the people responsible for keeping the law from getting changed are the same ones responsible for you crashing in the first place.”

Stanton apparently didn’t have anything else to say to that, instead going quiet as he stalked around the ship and inspected it in places that didn’t seem of much consequence to Stacia. The luxury craft was designed, when it was right-side up, so that it could be flown by just one person if needed, yet had accommodations for up to six people. Any furniture in the rooms that hadn’t been bolted down was of course strewn all about, but most of the nonessential pieces had been removed prior to the ship being sent here. Skin took a turn that the other two didn’t and vanished for a time, although Stacia could swear that she heard the young woman crawling around in the ductwork. Stanton and Stacia finally ended up in the cockpit, where Stanton had to climb up onto the dangling pilot seat in order to inspect the controls.

“So?” Stacia asked. “Is there anything you can do?”

“Possibly. Obviously, no ship is ever designed to take off from the ground while upside down, but we lucked out. The thruster configuration on these Cumbermarch H-85s is such that I think I can do it. That’s the good news.”

“And is there bad news?”

“The bad news is that I don’t how fast I can do this. It could take most of the day.”

“I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with us eating up that much time.”

“And the even worse news is that I can’t guarantee that Daddy’s Adult Toy won’t get further damaged in the process. I can easily see some of the shielding panels getting damaged if I do this too fast, and possible loss of structural integrity if I do it too slow. I won’t even know for sure if all that is possible until I cycle up the engines and do a diagnostic. It’s less than optimal landing could have damaged something we haven’t seen yet.”

“How long to do that diagnostic?”

“Maybe half an hour if I ignore some of the less important systems. Like the bathrooms. I wouldn’t try using them for a while anyway. Trying to take a dump while upside down is guaranteed to end in tears.”

“Work on it. I’m going to see if I can find Skin, and then set up a guard perimeter to watch for anything or anyone unwelcome.”

“I don’t suppose there’s food in here somewhere? I work better when I’ve got something in my mouth.”

Stacia found and gave him part of an emergency ration of jerky, then took about ten minutes to search for Skin. The ship wasn’t huge, yet Skin still managed to elude her. Finally, Stacia simple called into one of the ducts that she wanted Skin to help her outside. Skin’s echoed reply from somewhere deep within the ship’s innards was barely audible, but it did sound like maybe she agreed to be out in a few minutes.

After some thought, Stacia left the 808 and one of the pistols where Skin would be able to find them near the hatch, taking the two remaining plasma pistols and a sonic blade from the ship’s supplies with her. Skin had started to show an ever so slight proficiency with the 808, and the plasma pistol could be a backup. Meanwhile, Stacia suspected plasma would be more effective against a Wet Lisa if she found one, although she hadn’t actually tested that yet. If a threat came from anything else, Stacia was sure she would see it with plenty of time to warn the others.

Her tactical implants realized the flaw in this logic only as she was pulling herself up out of the reversed hatch. Which of course meant that she found herself standing on the belly of the ship with four guns pointed at her.