Scout and Shaman

 Scout and Shaman

Lorn was having a really bad day.

It had started out normally enough - jump in, run radio and spectrographic scans on the highest-probability planet, the usual procedures for a scout checking out a new system. The scans had come back with a good 02/N2 mix, decent hydrographics, and only the usual background noise in RF. 

There were tags showing chlorophyll based plants - generally a good sign that the ecology was going to be broadly human-compatible.

She was checking those results when the targeting alarm went off. Somewhere another ship had lit her up with radar, and the only reason for that would be - there - heat plumes, accelerating fast. 

Missiles. And more of them than her little scout ship could hope to deal with. She was too close to the planet to jump, and not fast enough to outrun them. She had one chance. 

Using pure brute force, her little ship killed as much of the orbital velocity as it could, and Lorn set the autopilot on a fast re-entry. Looking at the figures, it was still not going to save the ship from the missiles, but it might be enough to save her.

As her ship hit the atmosphere, a ball of plasma formed, and Lorn left the tiny bridge. In the aft hold, an even tinier floater sat. Normally used for exploring planetary surfaces, it was not intended for high-altitude work. Tugging on her helmet, she quickly strapped in, and hit the emergency hatch release at the same time as releasing the hold-downs.

The blast of air tossed the floater out, and into the maelstrom of plasma, the gravitics providing a wafer-thin shield as Lorn drove them to maximum power  - and then she was clear. Moments later, an even dozen missiles flashed past her, and slammed into her ship, only a handful of kilometres away. The resulting blast shattered the scoutship into countless fragments.

Finder-of-Unnoticed-Details was having a good day.

Her tribe had moved on to the next stage of the annual migration, and she would join them in a day or two. For now, she was content to wait. 

Last night she had seen a new star appear. This was not unusual, but unlike the others, it had not been followed by a long needle-cloud, and the arrival of the sky raiders. This one had stopped and drifted across the sky.

It rose several times throughout the night, always content to drift from horizon to horizon. As it did, she looked to the lake, watched the insects, and her mind drifted.

In the distance, her tribe. Further away, her family's tribe. Further still, trading partners, rivals, and … there! A single faint glimmer. Searching, questioning, seeking answers. A scholar? No, an explorer. A scholar as well, but at her (her!) heart an explorer. 

Finder was intrigued, to say the least.

Finally, as dawn approached, and the star bearing the explorer made another pass, it suddenly changed direction, swooped across the sky, and erupted into a mass of fire and fragments. And a continuing gem of bright fierce focus. 

The mass of fire and debris continued across the sky, vanishing in the direction of the copper diggers. The bright gem of focused thought, though, that was following a different path, and not entirely one of the explorer's choosing. 

The valley beyond the forest. That is where it will come to rest, Finder decided. Standing, she gestured to her horse, and, when he came to her, whispered in his ear, and he trotted off towards the forest. 

Explorer or not, someone was going to be feeling very alone soon. And Finder-of-Unnoticed-Details knew exactly how to fix that. She gathered her clothes, dressed, and started slowly walking after her horse. 

>-----------------------------<

Finder-of-Unnoticed-Details was having a bad day. 

Lorn had closed herself off from her. Hiding her mind was one of the first things Finder had taught her, knowing that the sky-raiders could follow such things as well as she could. But usually she did not, knowing that Finder took comfort in feeling the spark of her mind. 

But now she was hiding that spark, even though there were no raiders. And she'd been doing it for days.

She'd seen Lorn going through the things she had salvaged from her wrecked craft. The tiny fragile thing that had saved her from the raider's weapons. Very little of it worked, but Lorn kept it all the same. Maybe she'd worked out how to fix the wreck and was leaving. That thought broke Finder's heart.

She watched as Lorn, now dressed in a hunter's leathers, worked through the salvage, apparently unaware of Finder's distress.

Lorn was having a good day. 

Mostly. 

She did not like causing Finder pain in this way, but shutting herself off was the only way she could do what she was planning without Finder knowing ahead of time.

Not much of the little grav floater had survived being used as an impromptu lifeboat when her ship had been blown up, but the power supply still worked, even after five years, and so did one of the grav modules. Not enough to lift anything, but she could focus the field and invert it. 

Using this she took the coal she'd obtained from the tribe of miners to the east, and used the module to compress the two lumps. While that took place, she took some of the fibre cabling and wove it with some copper wire from the southern tribes, combined with some hairs from the tail of Finder's stallion.  

The whole process took nearly a seven day, by which time Finder was almost beside herself, but, wonder that she was, she said nothing and asked nothing, even though Lorn could tell it was eating her alive.

It was finally done, though, and Lorn went to where Finder was staring out over the lake.

"Finder."

"Lorn."

"I know I have been closed to you for this past sevenday..."

"I have seen you working on your flying machine. You are leaving."

"I have been working on something, but not that." Lorn brought out the two necklaces she had constructed. Optical fibres from the sky, copper wire from the earth, horsehair from the tribe, and tiny bright stones, like stars. "May I be yours, and you mine?" she asked, finally letting her mind open again.

Finder was almost knocked over by the intensity of Lorn's mind, focused entirely on her being, on her heart. 

She did not say anything just stared, and then, slowly reached over and took one of the necklaces and placed it around Lorn's neck. Then she lowered her head.

Lorn took the hint, and lowered the other necklace over Finder's head. Finder looked up, eyes that were usually so knowing and calm full of tears, wonder, and joy. 

"Yes."

>-----------------------------<

Both Finder-of-Unnoticed-Details and Lorn-from-the-Sky were having a day. One that was both good and bad.

In the seven years since Lorn had arrived on this world - whose name roughly translated to 'Mother-of-all' in the local language, she had heard many tales of the 'sky raiders'. Indeed, her own arrival was due to those same raiders, but in the last seven years they had not raided within the sphere of Finder's tribe.

That had changed this morning. 

Unlike previous raids, though, this time they had warning, thanks to the equipment salvaged from the wreck of Lorn's grav floater. It had not been much. A partially working radio system, a single gravitic module, a survival kit, which did include a small laser pistol. And a micro reactor - fed water, it produced more power than the handful of equipment could use. 

Of all of these the radio was the important one this morning. The pistol was intended for hunting light game - it would be useless against someone with even the most trivial of armour. But six hours warning? A wealth beyond imagining. Especially with the tribe being able to push a warning out to the other tribes in the region. 

And so the raiders came down, and found no-one and nothing. Not even their mind seekers could find anything. And they were searching.

Lorn and Finder were confident that the tribes would not be found. They had long ago, long before Lorn's arrival, devised hiding places the raiders could not find or reach. This was not where Finder and Lorn were though. Prior to arriving, Lorn had been a Scout. And, in her heart, she still was, for all that she wore a hunter's leathers instead of her shipsuit. And Scouts learned about things. Especially threats.

So here they were, watching over the raiders' landing area by the lake. A hose ran from the lake to the ship, sucking in water to fuel the reactors. And what a ship. Lorn would have guessed it to be eight times the size of her tiny and sadly missed Scoutship. If it had been much larger it would have had trouble landing. It was heavily armed, too, with a mix of lasers and missile racks. 

There was thirty of them. Mostly human, with a couple of alien forms among them. Well armed with laser long arms, but only stab vests for armour. 

As they watched, there was some sort of commotion, and one of them started yelling and waving,  and all of them started running towards the ship.

Finder looked at Lorn with a questioning expression. She just shrugged in reply. Within minutes the raiders had returned to the ship, and a few minutes later it lifted off, leaving the hoses behind. 

Once the ship had vanished over the horizon, Lorn turned to Finder. 

"I could not hear what they were saying, but it sounded like Anglic."

"Your people?"

"Well, people from the same place. They were not Scouts or Navy. I wonder." Finder could feel her thoughts spike "Let's get to the tunnels, I need to check the radio!"

>-----------------------------<

The pirate cruiser was having a bad day. 

Normally this dirtball was a good place to refuel and grab some fresh food. The local population were bronze-age at best, and the ecology was human compatible without any processing. And no-one came here. 

There had been that scout seven years ago, but they had been quickly disposed of.

But now, there was a whole fleet of ships here. And one of them was ten times the size of their little cruiser. 

On the positive side for the pirates, it was not going to be a very long day.

Gordon Haultmann was having a good day. The depot ship he lead and the ships it supported had arrived in this virgin system just a few hours ago, and was surprised to detect radio transmissions from the primary candidate world.

He was even more surprised when they detected a ship departing the planet. 

Surprise did not even begin to describe things when they received a very basic transmission from the planet with two components - the word "Pirates" and a scout ID. One that was listed as "MIA".

Dispatching the pirate ship was barely a flicker from the massive batteries of the depot ship. 

The transmission from the surface then became a homing beacon. 

Lorn and Finder watched the new stars - "Starships" Lorn called them, as if they were kin to the barges that travelled the river.

Her kin. 

One of them broke ranks, and vanished over the horizon. Half an hour later there was a distant sound of thunder. "Sonic boom". 

Not long after the arrow-head shaped craft came into view. An eighth of the size of the raider's craft - the smallest possible. Identical to the one that brought Lorn to the Mother-of-All. And to Finder.

"Come on, let's see who has come to visit!" Lorn excitedly said.

"You do not know?" was Finder's much more subdued reply.

"Nope. I don't recognise that artwork. She's active duty, though. Those markings on the nose are the deployment group." 

"Lorn, these are your people, not mine. Will they..."

"My heart, they will have thought me dead these last three years at least. And if I choose to settle here, they cannot change that."

"But?"

"They will want to talk to me. And to you. And the elders, and the copper diggers, and everyone else."

"And then?"

"They'll leave. They might leave me a fresh beacon and other gear, but they won't stay. This is our home, not theirs."

"We have old stories about ships like that."

"So do we. We eventually learn."

Tugging on Finder's hand, Lorn started towards the ship.

Finder let her mind go ahead of her, and was surprised to feel a mix of excitement, curiosity, and hope. It seemed that these new arrivals did know Lorn after all.

Finder smiled behind Lorn's back. Let this be a surprise for her. 

Notes

I think this is where we leave Finder and Lorn to their lives together. 

I wrote the first part of this about two years ago, as a part of a blog series, and I was quite surprised a little while ago when Finder tapped me on the shoulder and said "And?"

There are just a couple of things about this one. This was inspired by a music video - bonus points if you can figure out which one! There are also (fewer) bonus points if you recognise the universe that has had the serial numbers filed off it for my setting.