(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/ubb/newsdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number;=20&forum;=*EV/EVO+chronicles&DaysPrune;=25&article;=000277&startpoint;=")Part One.(/url)
Have fun.
Part Two
The stars overhead shone dimly through the bright white trails left by manouvering ships. What little starlight managed to force its way through the murky air above New Canterbury was outshone a thousandfold by the bright neon signs covering the high-street. The red, green and blue light they threw upon the ground did nothing for Piper's complexion as she stumbled down yet another alley in an effort to get to the High Street for the third time that day (twice she had had to run away upon seeing a Fed car cruising the streets).
"Should've known," she muttered to herself. "If I leave clothes at Sadie's, there's a reason for it! I look like a goddamn hooker in this outfit. What the hell was I thinking?"
It had only occurred to her after she had left Sadie's that the reason she hadn't worn the clothes home on Saturday morning was that she was afraid to. But they were all she had, and she wasn't in any position to bargain.
At last, Piper stepped out onto the High Street. It was clearly split into two parts. On one side the brushed metal walkways were illuminated by a steady light coming from a strip suspended above - two small children walked with their mother, running in circles with happy smiles, pausing only to stare into the shop windows, laughing at the holographic demonstrations of the latest fashionable shoes, the most recent virtual reality game and the newest tools in the hardware store.
Across the wide road, a fast and furious blur of a combination of fusion-powered hovercars and petrol beasts, it was a different story. Amidst the gloom and squalor, people lay in the gutters, begging for the smallest scrap of money. Human waste congealed in pools on the pavement, and old road signs were laid across deep potholes.
"This is what I'm fighting for," thought Piper. Looking across the street, at the pristine example of Federation life, she had to wonder if she was making the right decision. What if the whole galaxy became like this place? What if everyone lives in squalor? What if-
Her thoughts were interrupted by a deafening shot. Glancing across the road, over the throng of traffic, she caught a glance of a homeless woman falling to the floor, as a man in blue and black overalls threw her lifeless body into the back of a white van, before wiping up the red marks on the floor. He got in, and drove off. The children played on, unnoticing.
Piper knew she had made the right decision.
As she walked into the bar, Piper was shocked. It wasn't quite what she'd expected. There were no smartly dressed Admirals, plotting the next attack on Fed headquarters. There were no plans spread over desks, scribbles on them denoting the when and the where of the latest bombardments. No uniforms, no weapons, no holograms. In fact...
"Jee-sus. This is like a ***in' nightclub. And this is the Rebel Base? No wonder the war isn't over yet..."
With the entrance just behind her, Piper felt like she was the main attraction of a freak show. Huge men sat at raised tables along the sides of the large room, leering down at her with the sort of hungry curiosity that weeks on a cramped spaceship could give you. With sunburned necks crammed into assorted, battered clothes, there was little that separated the cream of the Rebel fleet with a motley bunch of rednecks.
In the middle of the room, a lone jukebox was pumping out music that would be placed in a museum on any other planet. Piper thought she recognised it from her experiments into twenty-first century dancer music - not something she'd like to repeat. The huge throng in the middle of the club, however, didn't seem to be having any qualms.
And that was what made the place the Rebel hangout. It wasn't the food, or the conversation, or the security. It was the atmosphere. The cafe was packed from wall to wall with fit, young people, who's only crime was to fight for what they believed in. A distant quote rang in Piper's ears, from a TV show she'd watched when she was growing up;
"Life is short. You gotta get out there and live. Right now. Make the most of what you've got, cause, tomorrow, you might be dead."
And that was exactly what everyone was doing. No love, no intellectual debates were going on. The place was just full of people living. Every one of them knew that the very fact that they were willing to stand up for their beliefs meant they were living with an expiry date - the very next day their number could be up. The dance-floor was filled with people grinding, touching, reaching out to one another with a quiet desperation that only impending death could give you.
And Piper was just another lone body in the crowd.
"Oh God," she muttered. The chances of her finding anyone in this mess were close to nothing. Still, she had to try. It wasn't like she could just forget what had happened.
Pushing her way through the throng, she made her way to a tall, dark man, standing alone, watching the activities with piercing blue eyes. He looked like he knew what he was doing here. Maybe he could help her.
"Excuse me?" she shouted, trying to make herself heard above the din. "I said, excuse me?"
"Huh? Oh, a kid. Whaddya want?" He didn't even look at her.
"I'm trying to find a rebel leader. I got some information for him."
"Don't know no rebels, kid. Just here for the ride."
Thanks. Fat lot of good he was. Piper moved away, a new plan. She had to get up somewhere high, where she could see everyone. There's gotta be someone in this place. Sadie's contacts were legendary. She wouldn't be wrong.
Climbing slowly up the packed stairs to a higher level, Piper reflected on the direness of her situation. A few days ago she wouldn't have been seen dead in a place like this. And Now it was all she had left.
As the glass windows around her erupted in a huge explosion, Piper barely had time to lift her head out of her self-pitying slump before she another body hit her and she was thrown out of the first-storey window, landing in the dumpster outside.
As the blackness closed in, and Piper became less aware of the sharp pain sticking into her shoulder, she had time for one more coherent thought.
"Oh...Fck!"
A little girl, playing with her nanny in a huge white room. Learning from her mother. Sitting alone at a table, being served food from the servants. Not a laughing little girl. A solemn little girl.
As Piper emerged from her fragmented dreams, the first thing that hit her was the incredible pain in her shoulder. She could hardly breathe for the excruciating flame that was burning, somewhere inside her breast.
"So, you had a good sleep? We better get up, kid, we got things to do."
"Wha-huh?" Piper agonizingly turned her head, to see the tall dark guy sitting at a computer terminal in the corner. "It hurts... too bad."
"Oh, sorry." He didn't give a shi*t, she could tell even in this blurred world, "That's just the wound maintainer. You got hit pretty bad, y'know."
"I... figured," Piper did her best to pull a wry grin.
"Here. Sorry, but I ain't got no pain pills. You're gonna have to grin an' bear it. Won't take a second." The guy leant over, scalpel in hand, and went to work on her shoulder.
If Piper thought she knew pain, this was something else. She didn't scream, though. Couldn't. Bet that guy's done this a hundred times. He saved her life, she wasn't gonna beat on him now.
Through the incredible piercing flame that was inside her chest, she heard a voice.
"Kid? You can scream if you want."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
And the pain stopped. The guy was standing over her, holding what looked like an old fashioned compact disk.
"How the hell did that get inside me?" she wondered.
"I put it in. You've had a lot of healin' to do, kid. It's been three days since the feds took out the Blue Parrot. Your shoulder's pretty much good as new, just got a little scratch where I took the disk out now."
"I'm looking for a Rebel. I need to tell him something."
"Well, you ain't tellin' me. I'm out of the Rebel fight, kid. This cruiser's all torped out. I'll get you back on your feet, but I ain't helpin'."
"Please." Piper would've got down on her knees if she had any energy. "Just get me to someone who will help. I've got important information."
"I'll think about it. I'll get back to you when you're up. Alright?"
Piper wasn't going to get any more out of him, she could tell. "Alright," she murmured, and collapsed back onto her pillow.
When she woke up again, she felt revitalised. Climbing out of the threadbare bed - there wasn't even the slightest hint of pain in her shoulder - she pulled on some more substantial clothes that... what was his name? She didn't know... had left on the bedside table. A knee-length lilac coat, a pair of the same coloured trousers and a white shirt. Whoever he got these clothes off was a fashion victim, that was for sure - these clothes were more expensive than anything Piper had in her own wardrobe.
Walking into the other room, she saw a head leaning over the top of the sofa. Her benefactor was watching the news on the holovid. It was violence, more violence and the latest hover-football scores. SSDD, Piper thought.
"So," she said, bouncing vibrantly down on the armchair opposite him, "where am I going?"
He looked at her, a long, slow look that made her feel like she wasn't having the quality of her skin examined, but also the length of her intestines and the colour of her spinal cord.
"First of all, you're gonna tell me what you heard. I may not be a rebel anymore, but that definitely don't mean I'm a fed. You're gonna tell me what you heard, and why you think the kingpins up at HQ need to know about it. Then I might take you."
Piper sighed. She'd expected no less.
She recounted the story, skipping nothing. She didn't know if he'd believe her or not. She figured he might even think she was a Confederate spy.
After recounting what she heard over the radio in her manta, she paused.
"I realise that's not particularly incredible, but then these Fed guys came after me. They said they were gonna find me, and shut me up. I've been on the run ever since. They seemed pret-"
She looked at the guy. His face was white, and trembling. Suddenly, she knew what his name was.
"Oh, my God. You're Luke."
"Kid, lemme tell you a story. I think what you know could be pretty damn important."
Luke recounted how he was one of the best fighter pilots to graduate from the Rebel Academy. Him and Cynthia, between them they'd wiped out over two dozen of their Dogship counterparts. They were the best. Cynthia had recieved awards for bravery over and over again, and he'd turned down command of a destroyer three times.
"I may be hot with a joystick, kid, but I'm built to serve. There's no way I'm gonna be giving out the orders. So, anyway, we go on a routine attack on fed forces. We'd done loads of them before, and never broken through, but there's always that spark of hope - saying "This time, this could be it". It wasn't though, and when the Admiral realized we weren't gonna win we pulled out.
"Me an' Cynthia, we always have these little races to get back home first. She pretty much always beats me, she's damn good at judging the right place to hyperspace out. Anyway, the way hyperspace works, you come out pretty much the same distance apart that you went in. So when I came out, I expected Cynthia to be there. Only she wasn't.
"The boffs in the lab say there's a one-in-a-million chance that she coulda been knocked out of hyperspace by another ship. But I knew that something was wrong. I called, and called, and turned up at the labs, but everywhere I went I got stopped as soon as anything happened. It was like they knew something was up, but didn't want to tell me. I've tried meeting with some of the high commanders, but they know as little as me. I figure, it's being kept way up high in the pyramid, for them not to know.
"And so I quit. If they weren't gonna help me, I wasn't gonna help them. All they would do is tell me she musta hit another ship in hyperspace. But the way you put it, there was only one ship that got hit. She musta been knocked out of hyperspace by something else."
"Couldn't her engines have gone wrong?" Piper asked.
"Kid, that's not the way hyperspace works. Once you're in, you stay in there until the gravitic thrusters pull you out. You don't need no engine to keep moving in hyperspace."
"So what are we gonna do?"
"Well, we're gonna get you to Admiral Hope, and you can tell him what you've just told me. He's got a place up in Southwold Street. We'll take my ship. I keep an upgraded manta in the bays over on the other side of the river. I don't use it much, but we gotta get there fast. And I'm talking in minutes here."
Piper jumped out of a chair, anxious to get going. The sooner she told someone what she knew, the sooner all of this crap would be gone.
"C'mon, what are we waiting for?"
Turning around, she saw why Luke hadn't come with her.
He was dead.
There was a smoking hole in the window, and another one in his chest. The mark of a high-powered laser rifle. His eyes stared lifelessly up at her.
But Piper didn't even have time to scream when another bolt came sizzling through the wall, burning a hole in the floor between her legs.
She jumped up, slammed the door open, and tore out.
Where could she go? They were looking for her. There wasn't anywhere that would be safe. What the hell was she gonna do?
Then it hit her. Admiral Hope. She had to go to Southwold Street. It was a small place, she'd find him eventually. She had to. As another beam of light swept through the wall a few metres away, she ran to the end of the building, and sprinted down the fire escape. Grabbing an old woman's hat - "Sorry, I need it more than you" - she swept up her hair under it and disappeared into the crowd.
***Several hours later. It's night-time.
A desperate, loud knocking on the door. Hope got up, jolted out of his trance. He switched the holovid off - his mind had been on other things - and picked up an old-fashioned Walther from the table. You couldn't be too careful, and whoever was at the door didn't sound like they were selling dictionaries.
He pulled open the door a tiny amount, peeping through the crack.
Wham! He was stunned by the force that the small framed girl pushed her way in with.
"Who the hell are you?!" he stuttered, training the gun on her.
"Admiral Hope, I've got something to tell you," said Piper, pulling the hat off of her eyes. Something pretty important."
(This message has been edited by Jamin! (edited 12-23-2003).)
