/* Big Country "Far From Me to You" _Why the Long Face?_ (1995) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE STAR-CROSSED Part II: A Walk in the Woods Benjamin D. Hutchins (c) 2010 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2356 LOCATION UNKNOWN_ Gryphon came to and briefly had no idea where he was or how he'd come to be there. His first thought was that this was a damned peculiar place for a cuddle. That brought him sharply back to reality. Slowly, carefully, he unwound his arms from around his passenger, sat up, and looked around. The Ranger's cockpit was reasonably intact; the reactor was still online and some of the instruments remained powered. The cabin might even have retained pressure integrity. These things really were built to last. He took a breath, let it slowly out, and consulted his remaining instruments. Outside pressure, just shy of one bar. Oxygen content nominal, a little on the thin side but within the comfort band. Ambient temperature a bit nippy, 44 degrees, but livable. No significant concentrations of known contaminants detected. Not super-comfortable, but better than it could have been. Just stumbling across a livable environment at random like this was an astronomical - literally - improbability. Somebody up there must like me, he thought wryly. Or just isn't finished torturing me yet and won't let me die. Dear Zoner: Please tell Eris to back the fuck off a little. Love, G. He eased his quarian passenger gently back against the comm panel, being careful not to let her head loll. She was still unconscious, though if he watched and listened carefully, he could tell that she was breathing. He spent a minute searching his memory for everything he knew about her species. It didn't amount to much. They were oxygen-breathers; the encounter suits were precautionary, because they'd lived in sterile shipboard environments for so many generations that they were no longer sanguine about their immune systems' chances in the outside world. Or something like that? It'd been a long time since he'd even seen one. Three decades at least? More. Gryphon weighed his options and decided that he'd have to risk cracking the suit. He was hardly going to be able to assess her condition, let alone administer any kind of first aid, from outside it. He was hunting for the release mechanisms, as best he could in these cramped quarters, when she stirred, murmured, and then - with a sudden, urgent movement that caught him slightly by surprise - seized his wrist in one slim, two-fingered hand before he could reach her neck seals. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded indignantly. Her filtered speech had a slight accent - to Gryphon's Earth-bred ear, it sounded vaguely Russian, though he was sure it wasn't really - and he caught himself reflecting that, whatever she might look like in there, she had a really sexy voice. "In medical circles they call it 'triage'," he replied. "But since you're awake, it seems there's no need." "You were trying to open my helmet, weren't you," she said. "It's reasonably clean in here, and I'm still sealed myself," he pointed out, plinking a fingertip against his CVR helmet's facebowl. "I thought you might be concussed, or worse. It seemed like the lesser of two evils to open you up and check. Uh, so to speak." Fixing his eyes with the ghosts of her own, she said flatly, "Never do that again." Then she let it drop and looked around, as best she could from her awkward perch. "Where are we?" "Some kind of Class-M moon, I think." When she cocked her head in puzzlement, he added, "We had a little FTL malfunction after you decided to take your nap. Which wasn't all bad, since it means we lost the two dozen or so fighters from Omega that were chasing us. On the down side, the navicomputer's fried and I have no idea what system we're in. How do you feel?" "Like I've been shot with a neural stunner, sold at auction, knocked out again by a blow to the head, and involved in a crash landing," she replied. "But I don't think anything's broken." She checked something on what appeared to be a small holographic computer built into the wrist of her encounter suit. "Suit integrity's good." Gryphon chuckled and indicated the starburst of cracks in the duracrys behind her. "The canopy broke before your head." He sighed and reached for the cockpit release. "Well, I guess we can't sit around in here all day. Brace yourself. It's chilly outside." He popped the cockpit and raised it to full open. Without saying anything, the girl swung herself over the coaming, toed down the boarding ladder (unnecessarily, since it only extended a couple of inches before reaching the ground) and climbed down. She was slightly unsteady on her feet, but given what she'd just been through, Gryphon could hardly blame her for that. He climbed out after her, grabbed his Gallant-H90 and the crash kit from the rack on the back of his seat, closed the canopy, then tried the Cyclone hatch just aft of the cockpit. Unsurprisingly, with the Ranger's entire structure distorted by the crash, it wouldn't open, and the emergency release failed to fire. "Dammit," he grumbled. "Of -course- not. Goddamn thing -never- works on Rangers. The hell didn't I buy the Beta." Sighing, he gave up messing with the hatch and jumped to the ground. "Hope it's not too cold for you," he said. "I didn't pack for a passenger when I left on this trip, and even if I could get it out of the hold, I don't think my tux would fit you." "My biosuit is insulated," she replied. She moved to stay ten feet or so distant as he walked away from the Ranger, looking at him with a mixture of puzzlement, defiance and apprehension evident in her body language. He wasn't looking at her anyway; he was looking around at their surroundings, his eyes narrowed, face thoughtful. The little valley they'd landed in tabled off here, then doglegged to the right and debouched into what looked from up here like somewhat more open tundra. Off in the distance, Gryphon could see a lake glinting in what, on Earth, would've felt like winter afternoon sunlight. There was something a bit peculiar about the horizon, but he couldn't put his finger on just what. After a moment he reached up and flipped up the facebowl of his helmet; a puff of steam came out from his next breath. "Something's not right," Gryphon murmured. He felt a strange vibe in the cool, crisp air of this deserted landscape. It put his nerves on edge, though he couldn't say why. He reached into the storage compartment, took out his scattergun, and offered it to the quarian. "You know how to use one of these?" "Bryar Seventeen, cut down. Sure," she replied. Then, tilting her head in puzzlement, she said, "You're giving me a weapon?" He nodded. "Something about this place I don't like," he said. "You might need it." She took the blaster, checked it with quick, sure movements, and magged it to the mount on the small of her back. "What's to stop me from just blasting you and collecting the hundred million?" she asked. "You think you're going to be able to fly out of here in this?" he asked her, gesturing to the wrecked Ranger. She looked at it, then at the blaster, then at him. "Maybe," she said. Gryphon grinned. "In that case, I guess nothing," he said, and then his face returned to seriousness. "Let's take a look around. I want to know more about this place." He locked the Ranger's cockpit, set the encrypted beacon, and made sure his CVR's locator was charged, then led the way down-valley toward the lake, choosing his direction pretty much at random. He tried not to think about how screwed they were. For all he knew this moon was completely uncharted, in which case they would probably be stuck here forever. To take his mind off it, he said, "What's your name, by the way?" The quarian regarded him for a moment, unspeaking, and then said, "Tali. Tali'Shukra nar Kythera." When he didn't immediately reply, she added, "I don't have to ask who you are." "Hm? No, I suppose you don't," he said absently, eyes still fixed on the horizon. "Although there are days when I feel like I do." Tali didn't ask him what he meant by that. Instead she followed him in silence for a few minutes, trying to organize her own thoughts. The day had certainly not unfolded according to anything like her plan, though at this point that was par for the course in her life. It sounded like the human could relate. She reviewed what she knew about the man, which wasn't much. He'd been one of the key officers of the old Wedge Defense Force, and had been accused of a heinous mass murder just before the WDF fell. That much everybody knew, though it had happened so long before Tali's birth that she couldn't find much emotional attachment to the facts. It was just something she'd been told about as a little girl. The fall of the WDF had been held up to her by her tutors as one of the reasons why the quarian people were still doomed to their neverending migration, cosmic vagrants unwelcome almost anywhere in civilized space. If this man had been responsible for that, she supposed she should hate him on some kind of principle, to say nothing of the natural revulsion any right-thinking person should feel for a criminal so foul and infamous. And yet... he wasn't acting like a vicious murderer. If he were really a ruthless killer, why was she still alive? What kind of desperate fugitive buys a slave, makes cheerful quips about ancient human holidays, and then fights off a pair of mercenaries - almost literally with one hand tied behind his back - to keep her alive? For that matter, what kind of slaveholder hands his slave a blaster shotgun and then walks ahead of her across a deserted field? She decided to ask him. "Why did you buy me?" He hesitated, glancing back at her, then kept walking. Without looking back again, he said, "Because I didn't want that batarian to have you." "Why not? What did it matter to you?" "It's just... what I do," he replied. "Oh." Sensing that she wouldn't get anything more out of him on that subject just now, Tali abandoned it and asked instead, "Where do you think we are?" "I'm hoping to get a better idea of that when we get to the top of this ridge," he said, gesturing. She hadn't noticed, but they were, in fact, climbing a slope now. The ground had reared up ahead of them to the extent that she could no longer see the lake they'd started heading toward. A few moments later, as the grade got steeper and the going a little harder, its far edge reappeared, then a bit more, and then, as they crested the ridge, the whole area spread itself out in a vast panorama. /* Martin O'Donnell & Michael Salvatori "Delta Halo Suite" _Halo 2: Original Soundtrack_ (2006) (0:00 - 02:31) */ Like almost all quarians, Tali'Shukra was a creature of starships. She'd seen wide-open spaces in documentary and travel holos, but before leaving the Migrant Fleet on her pilgrimage she'd never been outdoors at all, and even then her planetary travels had been confined largely to urban areas and spaceports. This was the first time she'd ever seen anything like this, and she gasped in spite of herself at the -scale- of it all. Gryphon, too, though he'd grown up not far from a particularly scenic part of old Earth, was impressed; it'd been a long time since he'd seen anything this pretty. It reminded him a lot of the old country, in fact, the way you could see from ridge to ridge and off to the mountains in the distance, with low clouds and gentle sunlight. The gibbous Jovian was different, it added a nice 1960s-novel-cover touch to the whole scene ("The Moons of Neptune!", he thought), but all in all, there was more familiar here than not. From where he stood, he could see past the lake to another ridgeline, then down another slope. At the base of the slope was a band of what looked like forest, and beyond that a low complex of what were unmistakably artificial buildings. They were greyish, probably ferroplast. Flatpack prefabs, housing by IKEA. "Well, that's a relief," he said. "Probably take a couple of days to walk there - maybe more, depending how hard it is to get around that lake - but as long as we keep our bearings we should be okay." "Uh... " Tali pointed hesitantly into the distance, beyond the buildings. "I'm no expert on planetary geography," she observed, "but... the ground isn't supposed to do that. Is it?" Gryphon gave her a puzzled look, then followed where she was pointing. Past the base, or whatever it was, there was some more forest, then the gleaming blue expanse of another lake. And then... He blinked, then blinked again, shaking his head. At first he thought it must be some aftereffect of shock, his eyes playing tricks on him, but no, there it was. Miles ahead, instead of a horizon, the ground curved -up-. Beyond a distant range of mountains, a huge stripe of terrain bent upward and disappeared in a great arc into the clear blue sky. After staring slack-jawed at this phenomenon for almost a minute, Gryphon whirled and looked behind him. Sure enough, a similar thing was visible opposite, rising behind the mountains in the background and receding into a distance huge enough that his eye gave up trying to gauge it. He leaned back as far as he could, eventually letting himself topple onto his back, and looked straight up into the sky... and there it was, far off in the blue distance, just a thin strip of whitish-grey from this far away. It went all the way around. "... It's a -ring-," he murmured. "Keelah! I've seen ring stations before, but never on this kind of scale," said Tali. "This one is so vast it doesn't even need atmosphere containment. Who could have built such a thing?" "I don't know," Gryphon replied, climbing to his feet. "But - " He stopped talking suddenly, holding up a hand. "Do you hear that?" "No," said Tali, and then, "Yes. It sounds like... " She brightened. "Engines. An aircraft! Someone must have seen us crash." A moment later, she was proven right as a small, slab-sided antigrav vehicle appeared over the ridge backing the crash site. It made a low pass over the Ranger, then turned toward them. Tali raised a hand above her head in the international "over heeeeere" sign. Gryphon was just trying to decide whether to stick around and be rescued, with all its potential complications, or pull a quick fade and let them pick her up alone when an alarm bell rang in the back of his head and he knew that neither one was an option. "Down!" he cried, lunging, and without time to do it any more elegantly, he knocked the much more lightly built quarian down by main force, chest to back, looping one arm around her neck so that his vambrace, not her visor, would take the impact with the ground. "UFF! What the hell are you - " Tali began to demand, but a moment later she was cut off as a barrage of gunfire laced the air where they had just been standing and ripped into the turf beyond. "Up!" Gryphon cried, scrambling to his feet and pulling her up after him. Then, giving her a hearty push between the shoulder blades, he added, "Run!" The aircraft overshot them, hurtling out over the ridge they'd just been looking down from, and started turning for another pass. Gryphon didn't know quite how sturdy Tali's encounter suit was - the back of her helmet was plenty tough, to bash a dent in a duracrys starfighter canopy, but the rest of it looked to be made of fairly soft materials - so he assumed that of the two of them he was the better- equipped to handle an aerial cannon shell, if it came to it. Cover was in fairly short supply out here. But there -was- that gully over there - carved, he supposed, by runoff from the glacier in warmer weather. "There!" he yelled, pointing. He noticed, as he had on Omega, that his young companion had a good head for danger. Apart from her initial protest, which came when she didn't know they were in danger, she kept her cool and didn't offer anything in the way of backtalk. Instead, she dove for the ditch, getting there an arm's length ahead of the next barrage. Gryphon was right behind her, hitting the dirt with a clatter of armor on stones, and the aircraft's gunner missed high again. "We can't keep dodging them forever," said Tali. "I know," Gryphon replied. "Too bad there's no way we'd ever get the SPARTAN Laser out of the Ranger without a couple of 30-ton jacks." He pulled his Gallant from his hip, thumbed it to full power, and popped up the optical sight. "Still, I bet they're not expecting us to shoot back at all." He peeked up above the lip of their trench and saw the gunship completing its turn. Raising himself up on one knee, he balanced the Gallant on his upraised right forearm, took aim, ignored the shots whipping past him from the aircraft's chin cannon - time becoming elastic, stretching out, like it had during the crash, as he fell fully into zanshin. He had time for one shot; he had to make it a good one. The Gallant's full-power mode was intended as a desperation setting, for use when a Cyclone rider was in a very tight corner. It burned an entire one-megajoule ammo capacitor in a single shot, but the effect was worth it, because the tightly collimated particle beam punched straight through the gunship's armored window, and its armored pilot, and his armored seat, and the armored engine bay, and went straight out the back. The vehicle rocketed past overhead, its slipstream nearly blowing Gryphon over, clipped the top of the ridge behind them, and tumbled out of sight with a grinding scrape of metal on stone that ended in a satisfying THOOMP. Straightening, Gryphon jacked the spent cap out of the Gallant; it sizzled faintly as it settled into the mud, sending up a small curl of steam. He walked carefully to the lip of the ridge and looked down. What was left of the aircraft was burning at the bottom, a crumpled, unrecognizable heap of metal. Nearby lay the body of a man, human or humanoid, dressed in a suit of composite armor with a distinctive paint job. Judging by the neatly incised hole in the back of his armor, he had been the gunship's pilot. There was no sign of any other crew. Tali joined him at the top of the ridge, looked down, and said, "I recognize the pilot's armor." "So do I," Gryphon replied grimly, switching off his Gallant and holstering it. "The Blue Suns." He looked around, his expression peevish. "What the hell are -they- doing here?" "Maybe they followed us," Tali suggested; then, before he could say anything, she shook her head and answered herself. "No, not with that gunship. It's atmosphere-only. Besides, if we don't know where we are, how could anyone else know where we were going?" Gryphon nodded. "Exactly." He scanned the horizon again. "We'd better get out of here. Somebody's going to come looking for this guy sooner or later." "Where can we go?" Tali asked rhetorically as she followed him along the ridge. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "This aircraft didn't come from that settlement we saw from up top, though. It's possible that whoever's there isn't affiliated with the Suns." "And if they are?" "Then we're walking toward another fight." Gryphon shrugged. "Welcome to my life, Tali'Shukra." He sounded so weary and resigned about it that Tali didn't have anything to say in response. It occurred to her then how long, if the stories she'd been told as a child were right, he must have been living more or less like this. And yet he rescues complete strangers from batarian slavery, she mused. What a strange, strange man. They walked for hours through scrubby woods, always with one ear open for the sound of another aircraft; but if the Blue Suns had found their earlier handiwork and gone looking for its authors, they were apparently not doing it with aerial patrols. Or they were looking in the wrong place. Gryphon had covered their tracks as best he could until they got under cover of the trees. Eventually they came across a small cave, which seemed like a decent place to take a break; they could sit down and rest without being out in the open. Gryphon sat down on a rock, heaved the crash kit off his back, and opened it up in front of him. "Are you cold?" he asked. "No," Tali replied. "I won't use up a thermo-rod, then," he replied. "Hungry?" He blinked as a thought occurred to him. "You can't eat my emergency rations, can you." She shook her head. "No. Our species are incompatible. I'm not a biologist, but it has something to do with protein structures. Humans have... left-handed DNA or something?" She shrugged. "But that's not unusual. Most sapient species do. It's one of the first things they teach us when we're preparing for the pilgrimage - don't eat alien food. It wouldn't be a good idea anyway. Who -knows- what kind of contaminants might be in there? Nothing your system can't cope with. You won't even notice they're there. But I would." She opened one of the little pouches that ringed the upper arms of her encounter suit and drew out a slender grey tube. "It's all right. I have my own." "How are you going to eat it without taking off your helmet?" "Like this," she said, and, reaching up under her chin, she fitted the tube to (he assumed) a port hidden in the workings of the helmet under there. There was a faint hissing sound; when she withdrew her hand, the tube lay across her palm, empty and transparent. She tucked it back into its pocket and was silent for a few moments, then said, "And that's dinner." "Does that stuff... taste good?" Tali snorted. "No." "Mm. Because it didn't look like it did." "There are -several- reasons why you'll never find a quarian restaurant," Tali told him sagely. "But it's got everything we need to keep us going." Gryphon rummaged in the crash kit for a few moments, then came up with an emergency ration bar in one hand and a miniature hyperwave receiver in the other. "Well, if it makes you feel a little less put upon by the universe," he said, holding up the ration, "this isn't going to be any better. Back in the WDF, we didn't call them rat bars for nothing." Tali leaned forward, the ghosts of her eyes narrowing as she squinted at the wrapper. "'Lemon Surprise'," she read. "What's lemon?" "It's a fruit from Earth. But this doesn't taste anything like one. That's the surprise," Gryphon replied. "Does it taste like rat?" she asked impishly. "Even after 67 years as a galactic fugitive, I'm pleased to say that I have no way of knowing," said Gryphon. He peeled the wrapper off the bar, revealing it to be a slightly crumbly but mostly waxy yellow substance, bit the end off, grimaced, chewed, and swallowed. "Ugh. Our Salusian friends used to claim that people would eventually choose to starve to death rather than keep eating these things." He closed the kit, propped the radio on top of it, and started fooling with the dial. "Let's see if we can get anything useful out of this." For a couple of minutes, he got nowhere, scanning from band to band of dead aether. He started with the actual radio bands before switching to hyperwave mode, just in case the Blue Suns were using some old-fashioned long-wave EM comms, but there was nothing there but static. In fact there was only one signal anywhere on the dial right now, as far as he could tell, and it came as something of a surprise, after the scratch and buzz of so many empty bands, to suddenly come across a calm and pleasant human voice saying, "This is London." /* BBC Orchestra "Lillibullero" (David Arnold arr., 2000) */ There followed a short, sprightly piece of music by a stringed ensemble, then five short electronic tones and one long one before the voice returned: "Eighteen hours GST, and here is the news from the BBC Galactic Service." Gryphon grinned and sat back against the wall of the cave. "Wow. It's really true what they say. Wherever you go... " Tali chuckled. "We used to listen to the Galactic Service back on the Flotilla. All that news about things happening in places we'd never heard of. It made the galaxy seem... safer, somehow." She shook her head. "That makes no sense, I know, but that's how it made me feel." With a nod, Gryphon said, "I know what you mean. The World Service used to make me feel the same way when I was a kid. There was only the one planet then, as far as we knew, but the feeling was the same. They'd talk about what was happening in Mombasa or New Delhi and you'd think, hell, things can't be THAT bad there, the nice Englishman is perfectly calm." "When I was a little girl, the Shipping Forecast would come on every night just as I was going to bed. There was something soothing about the way they read it, all those cryptic names and numbers, the same but different every night." Tali sighed faintly. "I haven't thought about that in years." They listened to the rest of the news report in silence; when it was done, an arts program came on, and since neither he nor Tali had any measurable interest in the process by which the Bith composer Figrin D'An approached his contract to write the next World Cup anthem, he switched the radio off and tucked it back in the crash kit. "Press on or dig in?" he asked. "I don't know what time of day it is for you, but I think I'm on something roughly like GST right now, so I could stand to keep moving for a while." Tali got to her feet. "I'm good," she said. "Let's go." It was she who had the idea, as the sun went behind the gas giant and a bluish quasi-night descended an hour or so later, to sync up her holographic omni-tool so that it kept track of the planet's relative direction. In lieu of a useful "north", that at least gave them a basis to do some rudimentary orienteering. "Say, that's spiffy," said Gryphon at the sight of the omni- tool. "I ought to get me one of those." "As far as I know, my people are the only ones who make them," Tali told him. They tramped on through the blue gloom, feeling strangely detached from reality, each wrapped up in private thoughts. Then, suddenly, Gryphon began to sing. Tali didn't recognize most of the words, but the tune was from the BBC Galactic Service's ID tag: Ho, brother Teague, have ye heard the decree Lillibullero bullen a-la That we're going to have a new deputy Lillibullero bullen a-la Lero, lero, lillibullero Lillibullero bullen a-la Lero, lero, lero, lero Lillibullero bullen a-la He glanced back over his shoulder, making a "join me?" gesture, and she shrugged. "I don't know the song." "That's okay. Most of the words are the same in each verse. You'll get the hang of it," he said, and then went on: O by my soul, it is a Talbot Lillibullero bullen a-la And he will cut every Englishman's throat Lillibullero bullen a-la Lero, lero, lillibullero Lillibullero bullen a-la Lero, lero, lero, lero Lillibullero bullen a-la Tali did, indeed, get the hang of it, and found herself enjoying the song - not because it made any sense to her, because it didn't, but because it was good for walking to, and made the time pass. Eventually, as verse piled upon verse, she got the distinct impression that Gryphon was making up the two lines that changed each time anyway. She didn't know what the original song was about, but she was fairly sure that "And when we catch up to Largo, my boys / Lillibullero bullen a-la / Then we'll show him what we think of his toys / Lillibullero bullen a-la" hadn't been part of it. They finally stopped (walking, not singing; that had only lasted about ten minutes) several hours later, when they came across another cave and Gryphon declared - perhaps not entirely truthfully - that he was worn out and needed a rest. True or not, Tali, who was and did, wasn't inclined to argue. While he set up the perimeter sentry scanner from the crash kit at the mouth of the cave, she figured out how to work the hand pump that inflated the air mattress. When he trudged back to their campsite a few yards inside, she had it sorted, but in the process had discovered a problem. "There's only one air mattress." Gryphon tilted his head thoughtfully. "Well, yes. It's a one- man crash kit from a single-seat fighter. But," he added, pointing, "it is double-wide!" Tali put her hands on her hips and, he imagined, eyed him skeptically. "Trust me," he said. "What am I going to do, anyway? You're wearing a space suit." The assertion was not accurate - her encounter suit was only rated for a few minutes' vacuum exposure - but she supposed he had a point, all the same. He took off the hard parts of his armor and stacked them neatly by the open kit case, ready to reassemble at a moment's notice, then made sure his Gallant was close to hand; she did the same on the other side of the mattress with her scattergun. They got as comfortable as they could under the circumstances, eventually settling back-to-back. Gryphon reached over to the field lamp, shut it off, and then, almost as an afterthought, switched the radio back on. "... on the BBC Galactic Service. And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at double-oh one five on Saturday the 28th January 2356. There are warnings of gales in Viking, South Utsire, Forties, Fisher, Trafalgar, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes, and Southeast Iceland. The general synopsis at midnight: Low, Sole, nine eight five, expected England nine eight seven by midnight tonight. Low, Fair Isle, nine nine three, expected Faeroes nine nine five by same time. New low expected, southeast Trafalgar, nine eight eight by that time. The area forecasts for the next twenty-four hours: Viking, southeast four or five, occasionally six. Moderate or rough, occasionally very rough. Snow. Good, occasionally very poor. North Utsire... " Tali shifted slightly against his back and gave a low, contented sigh. "I love the Shipping Forecast," she said sleepily. "Yeah," said Gryphon. "Me too." /* Martin O'Donnell & Michael Salvatori "A Walk in the Woods" _Halo: Original Soundtrack_ (2002) */ That set the pattern for the next several days: Rise with the morning report, to bed with the Shipping Forecast, spend most of the time in between walking (or climbing, or abseiling, or occasionally wading). For the most part they didn't talk while on the move, preferring to keep an ear out for pursuit, but sometimes the quiet got to be too much for one or the other and sporadic conversations broke out. On the third day, around midday, Gryphon suddenly asked, "What pilgrimage?" "... Sorry?" said Tali. "When we stopped for lunch on the first day, you said it was the first thing they taught you when you were preparing for the pilgrimage - not to eat alien food. What pilgrimage?" "You're just getting around to asking about this now?" He shrugged. "I was replaying the situation so far in my head and it jumped out at me. If it's something you'd rather not have mentioned, forget it. I was just curious." "No, it's all right, I just... wasn't expecting you to ask. How much do you know about my people?" "Not a lot. I know you were driven from your homeworld by rogue AI constructs before Salusia made contact with Earth, and I have recently learned," he added dryly, "that you're very particular about your environmental integrity. Back when I was with the WDF, we visited the Migrant Fleet once, but they wouldn't let us come aboard any of the ships. I thought at the time that they were just being standoffish." "I've read about the Flotilla's encounter with the Wedge Defense Force," Tali said. "They say you offered to let us settle on your planet." Gryphon nodded. "That's true. Zeta Cygni II, that is, not Earth. We didn't have any say over Earth, and it was overcrowded back then as it was; but ZC2 was mostly empty, so we figured, what the hell? But the Admiralty Board turned us down cold. Thank you, we don't want your pity, good day." He shrugged. "You try to be nice to some people... " "Well, I can understand why they did it," said Tali. "We're a proud people with little left to be proud of. It was pigheaded and rude," she added, "don't get me wrong, but... " She sighed. "Our society is fragmenting. We've been on the move for so long now that a lot of our young people think it's our rightful state. They don't think they -want- a homeworld. And some of the older quarians say they won't accept any home but Rannoch. They still think we can go back and take it from the geth." She shook her head sadly. "Seventeen million of us in a fleet of rusting old hulks are going to accomplish what five billion failed to do with the most advanced technology our civilization ever produced. Sure." "You're young people," he remarked. "What do you think?" "I think... I don't know what I think," Tali admitted. "I used to think the Flotilla was fine. I couldn't imagine any other life. But now that I've been out here for a while... I don't know. On the one hand, seeing environments like this, some part of me yearns to have somewhere like this for us to call our own. On the other hand, part of me thinks it's frightening. So... -big-. So uncontrolled. Nature is messy. Even simulated nature like this place." She shrugged. "Settling on Zeta Cygni II wouldn't have worked anyway. It's a world built for people like you. Even the plants would have been poisonous." "Mm. Well, see, we didn't know that at the time. Nobody told us. It explains why a couple of the admirals thought we were being facetious, I suppose, but it was an honest mistake. And I think we could have made it work. We had a hell of a life sciences team." "That's a strange thing for a mercenary space force to have." "We weren't really mercenaries. That's how it looked on paper, because we were under contract to the United Galactica, but our purpose was... higher." He sighed. "Or at least we always thought it was." "Hm." Tali said nothing for a few minutes, then observed, "I never did answer your question." "You did not," Gryphon said agreeably. "I suppose 'pilgrimage' is kind of a misnomer," she said. "We're not going to a specific place - it's not like, what's that thing Earthpeople do, the hajj. It's a rite of passage. Once we finish school, we're sent out to look around the galaxy and try to find something valuable to bring back to the Flotilla. I think it's also intended to give us perspective on our culture by seeing the way other people live. Either way, we're not considered adults until we return." "You're raised in such an insular environment, and then get booted out to see the universe when you graduate from high school?" Gryphon shook his head. "Harsh. You must get a lot who don't come back, especially nowadays." "Some never return," Tali agreed, "but it's not as if we can afford to write off entire generations. We're well-prepared, trained for what we can expect, given good equipment. And as a people, we're natural survivors anyway." She shrugged. "It's a good example of artificial selection. 400 years ago, the quarians who -weren't- survivors mostly got killed in the war. Those who were left made up a pretty hardy gene pool." She chuckled mirthlessly. "And a stubborn one, as you learned when you visited the Flotilla." "I noticed that you're pretty well able to handle yourself for your age," said Gryphon. "When the shit hits the fan, you duck and plan rather than panic." "In a sense, my people live in a constant state of emergency. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you," said Tali philosophically, "then you might be a quarian." "That's funny, I was just thinking of Kipling," Gryphon mused. "'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look beyond the Ranges - / Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!'" "We must be getting close." "I hope so. I'm getting mighty tired of rat bars." "If you decide you would prefer to starve to death, let me know so that I can take the radio with me." "Heh, no, I think I'll make it. How are you doing in there?" "I'm good." "That's good. -I- need a bath." "Yes. You do." "Why don't you?" "The miracle of nanosanitation technology." "I don't think I want to investigate that more closely." "Good." WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2356 UNKNOWN LOCATION_ Gryphon peered at the little town for a few more seconds, then lowered his electrobinoculars and turned to Tali. "Well, they don't look like mercs," he said. "Civilian clothes, as far as I can tell, and not all of them are armed." He handed her the binocs. Rather than try to look through them, she linked them to her omni-tool and took in the view that way. "It looks too... -clean- to be a mercenary camp," she said. "Mm." Gryphon accepted the binoculars back and put them away in the crash kit. "How do you want to play this?" "Maybe we should just walk into town." Tali shrugged. "Not really my area of expertise. That's what I would do if I were alone. Walk in and try to make it plain that I'm not here to cause any trouble." "With me along, this may be... complicated." He thumped his fingertips rhythmically against the top of the crash kit case for a few moments. "Maybe I should just let you go in and keep walking, see if there's another settlement further along. These folks must have comms of some kind, they can get in touch with your people." "Making contact with the Flotilla won't help me," Tali told him. "I can't go back, my pilgrimage isn't complete. Besides, where would you go? For all you know, the only other people on this... ring... are the Blue Suns." "You have a point," Gryphon said glumly. "I just don't want you to get caught in the crossfire. If I'm recognized, it'll probably get ugly." "I'm not worried. And neither were you when we shot down a Blue Suns gunship and walked away." He grinned. "I didn't know you were a minor then," he said. She chuckled and got to her feet. "Come on," she said. The strangers came into town at sunset, traveling light and looking wary but unafraid. They were both armed, but neither's weapon was drawn, and though both were wearing armor, neither seemed particularly aggressive. Scott Chen saw them walking down the middle of Main Street, big as you please. His first thought was that the Blue Suns were back, but their armor was wrong. The man was wearing CVR-3 - the same model armor that Salusian fighter pilots had worn for generations, nothing the Suns would wear - and it was plain grey without any squadron markings. And the woman... wasn't human, now that Chen looked more closely. Her shape was mainly that of a young human woman - close enough for him, anyway - but she had slightly digitigrade legs and feet that looked to have two widely-spaced toes, big enough and wide enough apart that her shoes were built to suit. Sighing, he grabbed his gunbelt, strapped it on, and went out to meet them. /* Big Country "The Travellers" _Peace in Our Time_ (1988) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presented UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE Star-Crossed Part II: A Walk in the Woods To be continued in Part III: Goodyear (Pop. 225) E P U (colour) 2010