Chameleon in Chrome

***My writing time is being taken up with real life at the moment, so this one's something to read from out of my uh, ... vault.

Think of it as a Taltos 6 action comic.

Most of this is from the memories of the protagonist, but there are parts which concern others and he wasn't necessarily aware of them at the time.

0_o

***

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The service bay was dark as he approached the door from the colony side of it and the door opened. There were two distinct and muted clicks from automated lighting contactors somewhere and a very few lights came on so that he didn't need anything portable to find his way with. The cold of the place hit him instantly as he cleared the doorway and the door shut behind him automatically. He pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt that he was wearing under his jacket.

His communicator alert chimed in his ear and he reached into his pocket to pull it out as he walked. But it was only the alert from his craft that someone was near to it. The cams on the ship were active anyway and the computers were now sending him a feed to his phone, basically.

He saw a rather tall man in silhouette walking along the side of a modified Morgaron strike/interdiction craft and stepping through a few clouds of steaming water vapor. He watched as the image came nearer in the view of the cam. Just a man in pants and boots wearing an old bomber style jacket with the collar up as well as a hood against the cold of the landing/service bay.

As shitty as he felt, he had to crack just the slightest smile for the stupid irony of it. The system was doing what it was supposed to do -- send him proof that there was somebody near his unattended craft in the bay there.

Ryan was looking at himself on his phone.

Right there in the bay, the climate was a little bit of a tortured no-man's land. Behind him the place was a touch too warm for his taste, heated as it was by the geothermal heat distribution systems as they drew heat from the planet's core. Everywhere back there it was like that, as though the inhabitants and visitors passing through needed for it to be that way against the other extreme out there just beyond the fused stone walls.

Outside, the wind and the cold could suck a man's life from him in minutes without the proper protective and heated clothing.

The landing/service bays were somewhere in the middle; alternately blowing hot and cold in an attempt at some sort of balance. There was always water vapor blown around by the overhead heaters and the floor was always wet. When the outer doors opened to receive or send off a craft, the floors froze over in seconds and the water vapor became an icy fog for a while until the heaters could make a bit of headway once more.

Nanworth Colony must surely be the asshole of the known universe, he thought. Well, as far as orbiting gas stations and trading posts went. Unbelievably cold and hostile to most lifeforms ...

No, he thought, check that.

Unbelievably cold and hostile to most life forms that he's have preferred to deal with on a daily basis or even get to know. The only survivable parts of it were inside. Outside on the surface, it was pure howling Hell -- if your idea of Hell featured permafrost around eighty feet thick on average.

He'd just been identified by his ship's systems which lowered the narrow boarding ramp for him and he walked aboard, the door closing behind him. The craft, depending on facilities encountered, could stand on rather long, wheeled legs.

He was almost halfway to the flight deck when it hit him.

Shorty wasn't there.

The young creature would normally now be in front of him, as happy and excited as a puppy -- well for a warm-blooded flying reptile-ish creature, anyway.

He called a couple of times, but there was no answering squawk accompanied by the scratchy scrapings of talons against the floor grating.

Ryan walked onto the flight deck and saw the blinking notification that there were messages for him.

He sat down and slumped in the pilot's seat and watched the fog of his breath for a second.

Reaching over, he configured the exhaust vents for one of the auxiliary power units and then he turned the fuel flow to the unit on and with things in that system's control quadrant showing him a green panel, he hit the starter and a hundred and seventy feet or so behind him a small turbine lit off and sat at idle as he watched the temperature digits in the display climb in blue until they turned green.

He quickly made the small changes needed to both power the auxiliary electrical bus and more to the point, shift some of the turbine's bleed air to the interior of the ship so that it would warm up to something liveable.

He went to the galley to make himself a cup of coffee, thinking the whole way there and back.

Sitting with his coffee, his hood still up as he accessed the messages using the main display, he sighed heavily.

There were the notifications that his craft had passed the fitness and eco-space tests, which he'd expected. The next one was the bill for the operation to repair the long-term damage to Shorty's wing. There was also a bill for the service to his drives -- which he'd also expected -- and the amount at the bottom caused him to wince slightly.

After that, there was a note from Shorty.

The little guy couldn't really speak, other than make some sounds and the odd word, but he was pretty damn bright and he could keyboard pretty well.

Ryan's heart sank to read that Shorty had gone to look for Taela.

He supposed that given the nature of the creature's life and upbringing, he should have known that something like this was bound to happen.

Taela probably wasn't equipped to handle wandering around all alone on a trading post with its numerous bars, synthetic opium dens, and pleasure portals, but it had been her choice, as she'd pointed out to Ryan. He hadn't tried to change her mind at all. He'd just done his best to try to warn her a little.

Shorty wasn't equipped to handle it at all.

He supposed that it had been a little bit of parallel development -- long after the fact, but the overall shape of the craft that they'd gotten here in bore something of a passing resemblance to the old Rockwell B-1R variant of the B-1 bomber of the United States Air Force of centuries ago.

It was a good deal larger, of course, and it wasn't just a sled that you sat in to drive. You don't need a winged craft for space travel, but this one had them and not for space-runs either.

The wings swung out for flight in atmosphere -- where there might be one, but it was mostly for light interplanetary warfare, waged from the Morgarod side, rebuilt and retro-fitted by Ryan, Taela and Shorty to get them off the world where they'd all met a few years ago.

Other than aid in dispersing ranging signals like radar, the slick shape bought them little other than comfort. It was in an atmosphere that the thing excelled, the point of the design way back when had been two-fold; use as a penetration/strike craft or just as effectively, use as an interdiction craft to stop penetration of defenses.

Morgarods were a rather complex bunch, and if they were anything, Ryan had learned, they thought things through.

Ryan and his companions had one because, ... well, they had one.

It might have belonged to the Morgaron military complex at one time, but finders-keepers and though it hadn't seen a lot of long or hard service, it was old and outdated for its original role, now looked a little different after it's necessary modifications and - Ryan liked this part on a personal level - it had just been certified for use as a light trader.

The certification that Ryan had just obtained for it made this the equivalent to a man owning and flying a P-51 Mustang after the Second World War on Earth after having purchased it as surplus, though this was a lot more fun and challenging to operate in the flight rule-rich environment of the present-day shipping lanes.

The three of them could live on it in a little comfort and it could haul shit in the cramped cargo bay. That, along with its speed and its hidden weaponry -- as outdated as it was, well, .... What more could you want?

Ryan sighed.

He wanted them both back.

Ryan set the mug down on a console and then he placed the call to the colony. When he saw the female security watch person, he asked if there had been any reports of a winged creature getting into any sort of difficulties.

"No sir," she replied with a bit of a harried and an 'I-don't-really-give-a-flying-fuck-about-your-problems' sort of expression, "As owner of your craft, you are responsible for the actions of any crew or passengers that you carry and --"

"I know that," Ryan said in a hard-edged tone, "I'm only calling you to inform you that he's missing. You know your shithole here better than I do, I'd hope," he said as he sent her a photo.

"He answers to 'Shorty' and in a place like this, he'd have about the apparent mental capacity of a thirteen year-old human and would be easily confused and overwhelmed in a crowd. I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for him. Could you please pass this along so that your patrols are informed? That's all I'm asking."

The watch officer leaned toward her desk cam a little, "Are you saying that you want a search mounted for this individual? Be advised that there will be a back-charge to you once we locate him -- in any condition, even dead, and --"

"What I'm saying is that I'd really like it if you could just do your fucking job, Lady," he snarled, "I'm aware that on this snowy dustball, it's all about service charges. I just want a little help here -- like it says in the scrolling banner that I'm looking at along the bottom of my screen.

Does my ID show there in front of you? I just want you to know who it is who'll be coming to speak to your commander if you don't think that you can get up off your fitted-ass chair."

She nodded coldly until she read what was superimposed in light transparent script on her screen. Her eyes widened a little and she apologized then and disconnected with only, "Understood. Out."

Ryan sat back and sipped his coffee, trying to think of where Shorty might have wandered to. He tried to put himself inside the little guy's head, and regretted it instantly. Shorty would be looking for Taela and he wouldn't have a clue. More than likely, he'd become officially lost and wandering after the second turn in the commerce section of the place.

It almost caused Ryan to jump up and run out there himself, though he knew that it would be about the least constructive way to go about it. He kept thinking about the dangers to both of them.

No matter what the colony's security people liked to portray about them having it all under control, this place and any other like it anywhere had a seedy underbelly.

No one said a word to him officially, but he'd already heard that the colony had a vampire infestation. They weren't vampires in the classical Bram Stoker sense, they were more of a problematic type of nocturnal carnivore which preferred to drain as much of a victim's blood as possible for the warmth before the real eating began.

He began to worry again.

Ryan thought that if he even knew how to get there, to the wrong side of the tracks, he'd go there straight off and try to cut to the chase.

But he knew that having placed his call for assistance, he had to make himself available, so he'd also have to stay put -- until it was time to go to the security offices and pull that self-important cop right the fuck over her desk and drag her into the watch commander's office.

One thing which hadn't changed in all of the time that he'd been in cryo -- Ryan was a decorated veteran and this was still the military civilization where he'd been born. It wasn't all that much, but it did get him a lot in the way of slack from desk aviators.

He thought back then, over all of the time and space to what had brought him here.

It was a long haul.

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Far away, three calendar Earth years ago:

The speaker in his earpiece crackled for a second and then he heard Berkov's voice.

"Flight deck to Security; McCallum! McCallum, where are you? I show you somewhere on the lower level, that's all."

He thought her voice sounded stressed. Wondering about that, he switched his comm system to voice actuation and tried to seat the earpiece a little better.

"Right here, Mandy," he replied, "I'm still on Level B, Bulkhead Charlie, moving forward. What's up?"

This was the seventh time that he'd been awakened out of cryo. When he'd signed on to be part of the security detachment on this trip, he'd run into Berkov in a hallway at the shipping company's offices. Mandy Berkov was the deep-space pilot there to accept the contract offered for this trip. They'd both stopped and stared for a moment and then passed by on their way elsewhere with small smiles.

A little later, she'd found him in one of the vacant offices as he sat ploughing through the mountain of on-line forms at a terminal as he was signing on for the job. After a bit of quiet conversation, they'd agreed that he request that his tasking schedule be changed to include the annual ship safety checks. There were bonuses, she'd said.

It meant that the two of them would then be awakened together for a few days on a yearly basis to perform the system testing and soundness checks of the ship which were required on every deep-space haul. It made certain that the freighter was still on-course and that everything was copacetic. This was done while the rest of the crew and any passengers slept on in cryo. These days, it was a formality done mostly to satisfy insurance company requirements. Any course deviation or system alarms would wake a member of the flight crew anyway.

For a few days a year, Berkov and McCallum were the only ones awake and active on the huge craft.

It cost them a year or so off their life spans overall, but the tests were easy and quick, there was a large pay bonus for volunteering and the perks were pretty good as well.

They'd been fucking their brains out whenever they'd had the time for it.

This time, they'd both only been awake for about an hour and had started their testing programmes so that they could maximize their time together. They'd woken up in sections far apart, and had only taken the time for a shower and a quick meal alone. They hadn't even seen each other yet.

Ryan McCallum knew that there wasn't anything to it on Mandy's part. They were both in it just to get laid.

Besides that, McCallum was in it for a little peace for his heart, though he knew that it wasn't possible. Cryogenic-sleep had been developed to counter the problem of flight crews aging or dying off on long voyages such as this one. The light cryogenics involved held the metabolic rate of their bodies to very nearly zero, but time still moved at the same rate for everyone else.

What McCallum wanted was a fat-assed chunk of time between himself and Sarah, and every time that he was awakened for these tests and the after-hours playtime with the bombshell pilot marked that much more separation between him and what he'd left behind him.

A career grunt, he'd come home from a tour on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons. The wars there had been raging for about twenty years, driven by the need to monopolize access to the large moon's resources, the same as anywhere else that mankind's hunger for wealth had caused him to travel. It was a normal rotation, and he'd expected to be able to spend the four months of down-time with his wife Sarah, but it hadn't worked out that way.

He was two days early and he'd forgotten to call beforehand. The arrival times of military flights were never publicized.

Until then, he'd been working to the plan that they'd laid out for themselves together, but Sarah, ... well, she was now his ex, and that was pretty much that.

The guy in his bed was one thing, but the nearly empty bank balance was another. He'd guessed that the guy sure must have been something between the sheets, because Sarah had planned to be gone when he got home. That much was obvious. The place was already nearly empty.

The two of them had tumbled out of bed and cowered against the wall when he'd walked in on them. An awful lot of murders happened this way. Ryan already knew about the bank balance. He'd never told Sarah, but it was the first thing that he checked on arrival every time.

It had nothing to do with trust.

It actually had more to do with the next piece of their nest egg being there. It had more to do with needing to be sure that the funds had been transferred as was specified in his contract -- payment on return landing, whether he was on his feet or in a body bag.

He'd had to do things on these tours which had an effect on his sleep patterns for a long time afterward and he wanted to be sure that he'd gotten paid for it.

This time, he'd found that the payment had been held back, since there had been large changes to his account during his absence. It was a military paymaster's precaution. He was informed that they'd been waiting for him to call. He opened another account over the phone and the funds had gone there while he went straight to the bank to sort it out. Sorting it out had shocked the hell out of him, but with most of that done, he'd gone home to find the reasons.

While they stood there and babbled at him nervously, Ryan pulled out his phone, took the one required photograph and made the legal changes that were required on-line, using the military access to one of the law firms which were kept on 24/7 standby for this sort of thing to begin the divorce process. It happened fairly often to serving members of the military -- of either gender.

He just didn't think that it would ever happen to him.

The nice lady at the other end of the call asked him a few questions and then gave him a choice. He chose and then confirmed his answer, sending her the signature file that she'd need to affix to the documentation.

Whenever either his wife or the asshole who she'd been fucking in his bed moved a muscle during his call, he'd only looked up at them and they'd frozen in place.

A six foot four, two hundred and forty pound veteran trooper with a ton of experience at extinguishing somebody's life was a little intimidating, and the two naked people in the room both knew what a dangerous game they'd been playing.

Ryan did his best to keep his face straight and his voice level. He was really hurt, but he wasn't stupid and his pride wouldn't let what he felt show through. He'd find a hotel for that.

He received confirmation that he'd be divorced within the hour. Once he'd read and heard that, he tried to smile at Sarah, "Sorry for whatever caused you to do this. Just give me a minute and I'll be gone, Sarah. I'm not going to hurt you or anything. I never would."

He turned to the stranger as he moved aside a little, "You, on the other hand, ..."

The fool ran out of the apartment stark naked and Ryan felt the heat of Sarah's glare for it.

"What?" he chuckled, "He can hump your ass for what, months while I'm gone, and he loves you so much that he'd run out and not stand up to at least look me in the eye? Sorry if I pissed on your dream, but I'm not having a good day here myself."

Other than the way that it felt to his heart and trust, to do it this way had cost him the ten years of pay and savings that Sarah had transferred off-world. As Sarah trembled against the wall, Ryan told her that the funds were hers and that he wished her all the best. It was the way that things were done to say it that way, that was all. The lawyer had actually instructed him to say that.

He'd actually hoped that she'd choke on her breakfast cereal one morning, but he wasn't going to prison for murder or assault, just as she wasn't about to argue over the legality of what she'd done.