Starship Armstrong - Season 2

Part 13 - Sides (III)

Mitzner woke up, still alive and fundamentally intact, inside a perfectly functional crash bubble. The transparent blue force-field must have stabilized before impact.

Mitzner could easily trace the path of destruction her crash-bubble must have torn through the treeline before landing in this small crater of smashed pine branches and upturned dirt.

She sighed with relief. Chalk up another win to the Foundation and their multiply-redundant wuss-tech for wussies.

Through the blue haze of her crash-bubble's force-field Mitzner could see another identical bubble half obscured in the trees. This was likely Ensign Wagner. If his own bubble activated properly as well he should be fine.

Well, there goes the Mir, thought Mitzner. she was worried that crashing all these shuttles was going to negatively impact her otherwise unimpeachable reputation as an ace pilot.

Mitzner clicked a button on her shoulder strap, deactivating the bubble, and climbed out of her chair.

It looked like she and Wagner had busted up the trees pretty bad on the way down. Several had been felled completely, and many other had major branches broken off. Whatever fires may have been started had at least burned themselves out, although some areas were still smokey.

Mitzner made her way across the fallen trees towards the second crash-bubble and peered inside. She was right, Wagner was still breathing. He was also still unconscious.

There wasn't a practical way to deactivate Wagner's force-field from the outside. She would have to wait until he woke up.

Mitzner couldn't remember how long that sort of thing usually took with baseline humans.

* * *

The attack from the new Alliance weapon has missed it's target, that much was obvious. There was nothing in Evergreen Forest worth destroying, and certainly not with this kind of unheard-of firepower. It attack was obviously meant for the Bridge.

Once enough time had passed for it to be deemed safe, Coordinator Oola sent a small team to inspect the attack site and see what they could learn about the new weapon and it's ammunition.

The other possibility, if the disturbance wasn't an attack, was that it was a distraction. Therefore the Coordinator wasn't going to risk sending more than a bare-bones scouting party. She kept the garrison at the Bridge on high alert.

The scouts knew the forest, and were able to make it to the crash site in a matter of ors. They fanned into a circle as they began to approach, muskets slung over their shoulders.

Miika began giving frantic hand-signals. The others stopped perfectly still and listened with their eyes.

The hand-signals were meant for hunting. They proved insufficient to express the religious experience Miika seemed to be having.

"Target. Bright sun. Target. Sun in my eyes. Urgent. Target. Urgent. Bright sun. Look. Look. Urgent. Everyone," she signaled.

The other scouts, as slowly as necessary but as quick as they dared, began to move closer to the crash site to get a better angle and perhaps see what Miika was on about. They navigated the pine-needle covered ground soundlessly.

Once they had proper vantage points the scouts immediately noticed two things. One, there was a woman wearing clothing that conformed with no known uniforms and two, there was a tiny blue sun shining in the middle of the forest and there was also a person inside somehow.

This initiated a flurry of signals. No one, however, seemed to be able to form a coherent thought about what they'd just seen using the hand-signal language.

Nom held up his hand.

"Stop," he signaled.

The others stopped their signals, and turned to watch Nom's hands.

"Miika. Juun. Circle around. Opposite side. Weapons drawn. Provide Cover. Kem. With me. We confront. Cautiously non-violent."

This was the kind of talk the hand signals were intended for.

* * *

"Heya!" yelled a deep-voiced man, as he stepped out from behind cover "Put your hands up. Back away from the blue sun."

The man's accent was as thick as any Mitzner had ever heard, but he was definitely speaking Martian.

He brandished a primitive-looking firearm. He was followed by a companion with a similar weapon of her own.

Mitzner stood, slowly, and put her hands over her head.

"The local constabulary, I presume?" asked Mitzner.

"What language is she speaking?" asked the woman.

"I take it you are officials with the local government?" Mitzner tried again "Warriors for the boss man? Or boss lady, I could actually really go for a bunch of primitives with a despotic lead-mad lady autocrat for a change. Is any of this getting through?"

"Your accent," said the man "You are from the north?"

"Close," said Mitzner "Try straight up. And then probably 70 degrees spinwise. I could point the star out for you at night."

"You're from the sky?" scoffed the woman.

"Oola will want to speak to you, whether anything you have to say is true or not," said the man "You're coming with us."

"Am I your prisoner?" asked Mitzner.

"Of course not," said the man "That would go against our principles. You are free to do as you please. However, I am also free to do as I please and I will shoot you if you do not comply."

"It sounds like your people have worked out some wonderfully quaint hypocrisies and normally I love to play along with this stuff, but I have to babysit this one over here," Mitzner gestured towards Wagner, still asleep in the bubble "He's basically a baby bird. So I'm not going anywhere until he wakes up and turns off his crash-bubble."

"You're coming with us," said the man, brandishing his gun.

"No, I'm not," said Mitzner "Not without my crewmate. So if you're going to shoot me, now's the time to shoot me. But make sure you don't miss with that inaccurate looking blunderbuss you have going because if you do I'm going to kill you, your apprentice caveman over there, and the two braying mules that think they're hiding behind those trees. Four shots. Pew pew pew pew. Have you worked out what my weapon is yet? That's going to be important information in a few seconds when I get bored of waiting for you to get your nut up and just start exercising some of my own freedom all over the place."

"Very well," said the man "I suppose it would do no harm if we all wait for your friend to wake up."

"Crewmate," Mitzner corrected him.