“How was it?” Hili asked Peri, the cheerfulness in her voice grating.
“Supremely unhelpful. She's not here.”
“Wait, what? Are you saying my people got something wrong?” Hili looked affronted at the very thought.
“No, not at all. Marikihi was arrested, kept here, and questioned multiple times. And then she escaped.”
“Wait,
what?”
“Yeah, that's what I said. She escaped, Hili. Unless someone kidnapped her and covered it up by making it look like a breakout.”
“That'd not be unheard of.”
“Yes, but either way, it's a dead end. She could literally be anywhere, on the run herself, or with a whole trail of people following her, or holding her captive – any of that. I can't assume any of them, and there's pretty much no trail to follow.”
“Now you're just being silly. There's always a trail to follow. Always.” Hili's snout curled upwards. “Now, she's gotta either be somewhere in the city, or outbound in some kind of – hang on. Mobile.” Hili's head tilted upwards, as she began talking to the ether. “What's it? Yeah, of course, go on...” She tapped one of her hind legs a couple times, then stopped short. “Oh. Oh, nuts...” She breathed in and out. Then, urgently, “Yeah, we'll come quick as we can.”
“What's wrong?” Peri asked without preamble.
“Well, I guess whoever broke her out didn't do it with the permission of the Orahi authorities. They're stopping all trains coming out of the city.”
“Wait, what? They think someone would try and sneak her out on a train?” Peri found the idea ridiculous, using a public train for a vital prisoner, and said so.
Hili bobbed her tail in a Fehan shrug. “You'd be surprised. It's not that hard, really. Fake ID, a few bribes... Suddenly she's on a train with a few hundred other Fehan who have never seen a scientist, let alone know them on sight. Or in a cargo compartment.” She looked up at the sky. “The train system would be a good bet, actually, if you misjudged how badly the Orahi want Marikihi to stay here.”
“Did they catch her?”
“No, but one of the trains blew up.”
“What!?” Peri shouted. “Why didn't you say that first thing? Where? How? Please tell me you have more information than that.”
“Well, the people coming to search the train also blew up. Which seems to me to be a pretty obvious clue.”
“You think she's on that train.”
“Was, hopefully. Was on that train. Otherwise you got yourself a charred corpse to bring to Oerra.”
Peri lurched to her toes. “What are we waiting for, then? We need to get to the explosion sight, now! She might still be on there.”
“Already on it, got a speeder on its way to pick us up, should be able to take us there in under ten minutes. With a lot of luck, we should be able to get there before the military does.”
“Let's hope our luck finally starts flowing, then,” Peri said, scanning the sky for the craft. She spotted it only as it was almost on top of them, hovering gently over the ground, its hatch already open. “Come on!” The two of them lightly hopped onto the craft.
It was a high-end speeder, almost as good as the military ones that Peri had gotten used to on campaign. It didn't even shudder as it lifted off the ground, nor as it shot forward; it just sort of thrummed with the deep vibration of an engine. They skipped over the countryside northwest of the city, following a rail line that extended deep into the orchards that surrounded Orahi proper, cutting away from the river and into a series of low, rolling hills.
But really, Peri spared no thought for the terrain that passed below her. It could have been the most gorgeous view she'd ever seen and she wouldn't even notice it. Indeed, she could think only one, single, despairing thought – if Marikihi had died because some idiots thought she was better dead than alive in the hands of their enemies, then Oerra would probably have her impaled. Then again, Oerra didn't like dramatics.
She'd probably just shoot Peri.
In the distance, a pillar of smoke rose on the horizon, glistening black against the pale blue of the Helan sky.
“Yeah, that's gotta be it,” Hili said confidently. Nervous – not at all because of the work they were doing, but at the looming prospect of failure, Peri drank deeply from a canteen. The water ran down the hairs of her snout. She had a bad feeling about this.
The speeder slowed and began to descend. No other aircraft were in sight; just the mangled mess of a series of railway cars in front of them, some still hanging off the monorail by one end, looking like absurd little ornaments, some crunched against the ground, some stood up on end, some laying on one side like a wounded animal, some strewn about the ground in pieces. As they approached, they could see the specks of Fehan bodies lying around the wreckage.
“Please be alive, please be alive, please be alive.”
“You're a confident one,” Hili said, sardonically.
Peri hadn't realized she was speaking aloud, but she recovered quickly. “Buzz off, Hili. If you had to report to Oerra, you'd be just as panicky.”
“Fair point.” The speeder touched down, as if to punctuate her sentence. The two of them immediately made to wrench open the hatch before their pilot stopped them.
“You've got no idea if whoever blew up the train are out there, alive, and pointing guns at us,” she pointed out.
“Also a fair point,” Hili said, and affixed a gun to her snout. Peri followed suit. “Better now?”
“Not really. Keep low, at least,” the pilot said.
“Your concern is touching,” Hili said sarcastically, but she kept low nonetheless as she slipped out the door towards the crash site. Peri quickly followed suit.
The smell of burning rubber permeated everything, even the grass they crawled through. Both of them trod carefully; bits of metal sharp enough to cut clean through a paw were littered about in every direction. They came across the first few bodies almost immediately, badly burned, their hair matted and melted against blistered skin that cracked wetly. They looked like civilians who had been caught in the blast and crawled away from the crash site.
“We need to hurry. If the military gets here before we leave...”
“Yeah.”
They slunk carefully through more grass, trying their best not to rustle it. Peri pushed aside a thicket and found herself next to the train – or rather, the fractured pieces of the train. She started to poke through the debris, taking less caution now: partly out of haste, but mostly out of curiosity. “Yep,” she said to herself, examining the pattern on the skins of the cars, “looks like it was an internal explosion. Someone rigged this thing to blow.”
“Hmm?” Hili said, overhearing her. “Not a missile? How can you tell?”
“You're an informant, I'm a military investigator,” Peri said mysteriously. “Can your speeder detect whether anything's alive around here?”
“Yeah, cause life definitely glows with a special type of energy that conveniently can be detected through a whole lot of interference.” Hili began to poke through a car herself. “No, it's still too hot from the explosion to see anything.”
“Nuts. Well, no one seems to be shooting at us, so...” Peri glanced around, and then hopped on top of a fairly solid-looking car and looked about the crash site. There was no movement, and the only sound was the crackling of a fire from one of the further cars. She located the bigger piles of bodies and moved towards them, abandoning all pretense of subtlety. A couple of Fehan wore uniforms, but they were so badly charred that any identifying marks were now illegible. Worst of all, if there was any sign of Marikihi, they couldn't find it.
“Peri!” Hili's voice was urgent.
“What?”
“If we can't find anything, we need to get out. Now.”
Peri exhaled discordantly and whistled affirmatively. “Let's go.”
“Took you two long enough,” the pilot hissed. “Orahi military craft inbound. Half a minute out.” The speeder lifted off and began to accelerate.
“Can we get outta here undetected?”
“Probably, but if you had been even a few seconds slower...” The pilot shrugged, and then punched a couple of controls, not bothering to see if the two of them had strapped in or not.
The outside world began to move dizzyingly fast. Even Peri, who was no slouch as a pilot herself, was rather impressed by how competently the pilot handled the speeder, hugging the ground so closely that she could see individual leaves on the trees.
“Okay, I think we're safe.”
“I hope so.”
A couple minutes passed, their speeder circling around and beginning to head back towards Orahi to drop them off again. Peri shifted uncomfortably in her harness. Something wasn't right.
“Hili,” she said suddenly.
“What's wrong?”
“How come they just let us fly to the crash?”
“What do you mean?” Hili twisted to look at her, curious.
“Well, they're stopping all traffic from getting out of the city, yeah? They'd notice us flying away, yeah?”
“We got a military code. Friend hooked it up a while ago. Those Orahi wouldn't have had the authority to stop us running off to wherever... wherever... Oh.” Her eyes widened. “Ohhhhhh. So what if – ”
“ – What if she or her abductors had a ship that had a code itself.”
“But the train, if she wasn't on there...”
“She wasn't.” Suddenly Peri was quite sure. “She wasn't on the train at all. They set it up to explode so everyone would react to it, rather than a little speeder, taking off in some other direction. It was a distraction. Crap, we're complete idiots. How didn't we realize that? How didn't
they realize that? She could be anywhere.
Again.”
“Hey now. There are thousands of satellites around this planet. A few must've been watching.” Hili's nose touched hers, comfortingly, if also a little amusedly. “It's still not a lost cause, don't worry.”
Peri worried.
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OOC: The plot thickens!
