"Rich kids," Veil had a rotten tone to her voice.
The shuttle rumbled as the bottom thrusters ignited and the landing gear lowered.
"So they came into some money, just means the pay off will be greater," Dionna unbuckled herself and then slung her rifle on her back. She reached into the overhead compartment and pulled out a submachine gun. She looked me in the eye and said. "Just in case your pistols aren't enough," and handed it to me.
"So where'd you get the armor?" she asked.
"From a friend back home."
She nodded. "Nice," Dionna turned to face the others as I got out of my seat. "Ok get focused, Black Halo has a reputation to keep."
The ramp lowered onto the landing pad and white light flooded the cabin. We all filed out of the shuttle and were greeted by a woman in her thirties.
"Thank you so much for coming, please follow me inside." There were tears in her amber colored eyes. I could tell she was hiding a lot of emotion. She was wearing a silver dress that was close to the skin to the waist and then broke into short gold strips. Under the dress she was wearing black pants. She was covered with the dark grey soot that covered most of the forest floor. She gestured towards the house.
We followed her up a cobblestone path into her cyncrical house. Windows lined the entire building. Once we traveled through the ornate double doors leading to what seemed like a lobby she led us through some hallways to the middle of the house where all the white light gathered into a courtyard in the middle of the cylinder. She gestured to some stone benches and we all sat down. She started to tear up, stifled it and began to speak.
"I guess I should ask you what you need to know about him, hes... hes only 7 years old."
"I guess I should ask you what you need to know about him, hes... hes only 7 years old."
"Your name?" Dionna asked. The woman looked ashamed of herself.
"Oh goodness I forgot to introduce myself," she stuttered a little with the last word. "Patrica Turner, you must be Commander Casswool?"
"Yes," she pointed to each of us as she said our names."this is Matthias, Issac, Veil and Amye."
"Pleasure to meet you all." She bowed. I guessed it was a common custom on this planet.
"Now what can you tell us about the night your son ran away?" Dionna inquired.
"Well we were looking at geography for his school work, there is a Mountain not too far from here, Mount Haven. He's not good with words yet, when his father passed away, I told him his Dad went to heaven," she sat down across from us on another of the stone benches. Her head hung low. "I told him we could not to go. I told him that it wasn't what he thought, that the living cannot go to Heaven."
"You and your son live here alone?' I asked.
"Yes, its been three years since I lost Jakob. Alex didn't take it well, still doesn't." Another tear rolled down her cheek.
"What happened next?" Issac asked.
"I told Alex he could finish his homework later, and that it was time for bed. I made sure he was in bed, checked on him an hour later and he was fine, fast asleep. When I went to get him up for breakfast he was gone. He left a note that said he was going to see his father."
Dionna was already on her wrist computer checking the landscape and plotting a route.
"So we head for Mount Haven; was he usually well behaved?"
"Yes, I'm sorry I cant give you much more information, you are welcome to take the truck."
"Thats OK, we are going to hoof it anyways. It isn't too far from what I can see. We will get your son back."
Patrica hugged each of us before we left the house. We walked around back to find a play ground. Behind that was the forest where the trees stretched up to the hills and the mountains.
As I entered the forest I heard the crunch of twigs and dried silver leaves. The forest seemed to shimmer with the wind.
"Over here, I got a trail," Amye, the one with tracking skills. She was looking at a bush. "He stopped here, perhaps looked back at the house to think about what he was doing, but continued this way. There are some other tracks around, most likely Patrica looking for him or indigenous creatures. But the Helmdure doesn't travel in a straight line."
"Helmdure?" I asked. I had never heard of it, this was the first colony world I had been on.
"It's similar to Earth's Deer or Elk, very timid, we would be lucky to see one."
"Cool, so which way did the boy go?"
"It looks like he climbed this tree here, and then headed towards the mountain," she walked past a tree and pointed into the brush to the north.
We started marching through the forest growth towards the mountain, an hour passed and the ground became very steep. Mount Haven must have been one of the volcanic upheavals from Altair's past. We entered a clearing where it appeared to be covered in ash and soot, a four foot wide crater in the middle. Was Altair an asteroid hot-zone as well? I walked up to the crater as I took a bottle of mineral water out of my duffel bag. I noticed the hole in the ground was still smoldering and smoking.
"Matthias! get away from there!" Issac yelled. I started to slowly step away as I drank my water. The crater erupted with blindingly hot smoke and steam. Issac pulled me away from the plume shooting into the sky.
"Wow, this planet is full of surprises,"
"Psssh Earth-Born's are all the same, you really think things are going to be the same elsewhere?" Amye said.
"Well no, but I wanted to see how fresh the, well I thought it was a crater."
"Give him a break, hes new to this," Dionna said as she sat down on a rock. "Hang on Ive got a message coming in from the guild."
"Commander Casswool, I have orders for you to abort your mission, the first half of Mrs Turners payment came up negative. Her bank account is empty." It was the operations officer, I hadn't seen him before. There was a gruff tone to his voice.
"Are your assets clear to come back to Cathedral?" he said in his gruff voice. Dionna sighed.
"Yeah we can head out, what do you want me to tell her?"
"No money, no hired help, we cant fuel our ships on promises. HQ out." the connection went dead.
"Ok everyone pack it up, we are heading back to Earth."
"What?! why?" I asked.
"Ms Turner is unable to pay us for our work. The the pre-misson payment fell through."
Veil could see the concern on my face.
"Drop it! Rook, this is the dark side of contracting. Whatever the case if they cant pay we walk, its not our problem."
"So we are just going to leave a child stranded and lost, probably alone and scared in an alien wilderness?"
She put a finger right in my face "It isn't our problem. OK? We cant just give handouts. " She was getting angry with me. "What have they done for you? That what the money is, its compensation."
"I'm not talking about the money! There is a kid out there, who thinks he is going to find his dead father, you are telling me a couple thousand credits is worth..." she punched the words out of my mouth. The air became palpable as I hit the ground. Thick with the tension. My first mission and they already hated me. The way Veil had been acting I knew something was brewing. The others stood back, I don't know if they had ever seen her get so emotional or maybe they had, and knew to back off.
"No one would ever do that for you, for me, for any of us! Not unless they were paid back for it somehow. Humans don't work on something for nothing, humans are scum, the sooner you realize that the better it will be for you in this business! "
I pulled myself off the ground and slung my SMG and duffel bag on my back before saying.
"I'm not human remember?" I started walking north.
"Where the fuck are you going?" Veil screamed at me.
"I'm not out here to make money, I'm not here to kill, I see the weapons and armor as tools to do whats right," I kept my tone level. There was enough tension already. "I made a promise to someone, and I keep my promises."
A tower of fire erupted in front of me.
"Veil! Stow it! I need you to calm down." Dionna had grabbed Veil's arm. Was the tower of fire supposed to be around me? I kept walking.
"He's right," Issac had a huge grin on his face. He seemed more like the take orders and don't ask questions type. But I knew Mercs were different. "I'm going with him."
"Matt!" Amye yelled, "You're going the wrong way!" She headed left of the way I was going. "Follow me," she said. "We cant have you getting lost in the woods as well." Veil and Dionna soon followed, Amye and I in the front with Issac in between. Dionna was talking Veil down. We walked for a few more hours in silence. Amye spotted small foot prints leading to a wide open clearing. The five of us walked out onto some jagged shiny black rock. The hole in the clearing went for miles into the mountain, forming a giant cave. The side of the hole was too steep to walk down and was about thirty feet down. The kid wouldn't have survived the fall. At least thats what I thought before I heard the screams for help. Alex had fallen down and was hanging on the the rock face.
"I'm having Antonio send down some climbing gear," Dionna got on the radio and within minutes a grey blur shot down into the forest behind us and a giant plume of dust flew into the sky. I walked over to the cigar shaped tube sticking out of the ground and opened it up. Inside were the spikes, ropes and buckles.
After a few minutes of set up while hearing Alex's screams, Dionna and Amye went down and retrieved the boy.They emerged and were covered in the black dust of the volcanic rock. The boy was coughing lightly.
"Can you tell me your name?" Amye asked him as she set him down.
"Alex," he said through a cough. He had a round face and messy short brown hair.
"You went looking for heaven, and ended up in hell."
"Mom said this would happen, that I would see daddy someday, but If I go looking I wouldn't ever see him, I was so scared," he rubbed dust out of his tear soaked eyes. "Th... thank you."
"Don't worry, we will take you back to your mother," Veil seemed to have cheered up a bit. She even carried Alex all the way back to the house. Alex fell asleep on her shoulder. She still wouldn't talk to me though.
"You found him!" Patrica said running up and snatching Alex from Veil. Veil said nothing and headed for the shuttle.
"Thank you all so much! I, I just found out about the bank, my husband, all this was his, we only have the money to feed ourselves. His death was unexpected, and all his money went several of his shareholders. We were left with barely enough to live on."
Dionna pointed to the symbol on her armor, the Sword with wings. She winked at Patrica.
"We aren't pirates," Dionna smiled in a way I hadn't seen before after she said it.
"God bless you all," she responded through tears.
"I wouldn't go that far," Issac said as he headed for the shuttle. Dionna turned to me.
"The council is going to want to speak to you. What you did was pretty ballsy. "
"Oh damn," I said before waving Patrica goodbye.
LOG END EARTHDATE 2219 January 2nd
