Rope

AuroraBlue is alive, but not home.

Lily is awake and active and scampering over her new home on Dragon's Egg, whilst still somehow remaining more or less out of sight.

Uncle Sobi has graced Dragon's Egg Station with his bartending prowess, though I think the real reason he's here is to avoid watching his Clanmates use a re-purposed, but fully armed, Mech as a construction"tractor." That and Lady Jade wanted to visit some friends on the Rim.

For me, life is what it is. My girls are ok. Sabrina is back, though we still don't see much of each other and Simon is . . .Simon. I've learned more about him. Possibly more than I wanted to, though not more than I needed to. It has been a long time since a man has shown any interest in me, partially because, at least I'm told, I intimidate the hell out of people, but more recently because I'm married to another woman.

He is certainly persistent, though I don't think I could ever imagine myself living as a frontier colonist. That was, of course, assuming I wasn't already quite happily living my life. Well. Ok. Not always happy. There've been some lonesome spells in there, when 'Brina and I hadn't seen each other in months, 'cept over the cortex. And the frustration of dealing with the job folk knew about, and the job folk didn't know about. And being a mother. Kind of.

And then there's the amateur who thinks he's a professional: Nick. The only person in a decade I've actually seen annoy Sobi. If he were a tenth as good as he thinks he is, the Alliance wouldn't stand a chance. Which means, ultimately, he'll either come to grips with his own limitations or someone with a more violent temper than Old Guy will take offence and end his span. Given his abject disrespect? I may be me that does it. Though more than one person's told me to just let him take all the rope he wants.

I suppose I'll just have to see how things develop in the near future. I have things in place where they, mostly, need to be. The girls are ok. Rope is being payed out.

All is as it should be.

Not quite what I had in mind

I am home.

AuroraBlue is not.

I can't say this all went according to plan, or the outcome was what I desired. But it is what it is and, ultimately, I determined the one thing I needed to determine: my little girl is safe. At least where "safe" is defined as not in imminent danger of being attacked my Reavers, captured by an Alliance biomedical research team, or dieing from exposure to hard vacuum.

I'd managed to track her to one of those fortress-like households the locals liked to build out in the desert, where Cody was already discussing something with the locals. It sort of figures that he'd have found her himself then not bothered to send me a wave to say she was all right. Though after his absconding with a sleeping Lily, I'm not surprised. Just another broken link in the chain of trust at this point. I've kind of gotten used to it. The number of people I trusted was dwindling back towards the point it was at when I first left active duty.

Lovely.

The locals were. . . a product of their culture. I'd read a bit of the colonial culture on Al Raquis, but dealing with it face to face was a different matter. It was plain that somehow Tiny Dragon fit into their local mysticism. It was also plain that they really had no idea what was living in their midst. While, under other circumstances, it would have been interesting to explore the depths of their local mysticism, at the time I was in no mood to have someone try and out-Zen me.

I was probably a bad person for them to be talking about "personhood" to. They had no idea that AuroraBlue and Lily had legal status as people because of the work I'd done. They didn't realize it was an insult, which was why I didn't take it as one. Though, ultimately, they were right about one thing. I wasn't going to force AuroraBlue to do anything.

I'd come to bring her home, but only if she was willing. Finding out that she was OK was more important to me. If she chose to stay, for her own reasons, I would accept that. Dragons do as they do. It is our way. Or something like that. Something had drawn her here after leaving the destroyed mother bot in the wreckage of Hale's Moon. Something about singing sand and the Ardra AI that Lily had been obsessed with. It was all tied together somehow, but I didn't have enough of the pieces to wrap my brain completely around it.

The trip wasn't a total disappointment though, for when I left the keep to call Wave Equation down to take me back off-world, AuroraBlue came down off the roof and bade me follow her into the desert. Eventually, leading the way to a small encampment sheltered against a ridge not unreasonably far from the manor house itself.

What she told me, relayed, really, since she still wasn't really talking, was something else I'd have to wrap my head around. A piece of a bigger puzzle. A piece of a puzzle I'd been putting together since I first met Lily and came to accept artificial life as every bit as "real" as the naturally organic variety. But it wasn't something I would dwell on until later. Until after I returned to Dragon's Egg.

After spending one night watching over my sleeping little girl.

Tiny dragon mine

The keys to great mystery

Held in your small hand

Understanding waits

For now I must let you sleep

Time remains to dream

The one wherein I cart around an extra couple kilos of sand in my boots

I'd like to be able to say that within hours of setting boots on the ground on Al Raquis, I'd found AuroraBlue and safely spirited her away from that unending desert. I'd also like to say I'd brought peace to the warring factions on Devenporte and found a generic cure for both cancer and the common cold. Unfortunately, I couldn't say any of those things. All I could say, safely, was that the world had a certain arid beauty to it and that if I never saw another sand dune, sans beach, it would be too soon.

This sort of work wasn't my specialty. While I had all the required skills, I typically didn't string them together in a search and recovery Op like this. Normally, I at least knew where to find my target so the Op was more a matter of figuring out how to approach than the actual mechanics of finding them in the first place.

For the moment, I was avoiding pulling any of my 'official' resources into this. While Alliance Intel had resources on world, drawing on them would raise questions I didn't feel like answering. Fortunately, I had other resources I could tap here. While part of me actually felt a little bad asking Jai and her Zenobian friends for help, it wasn't really much of a stretch. Jai knew Lily and AuroraBlue and me. She knew it was personal, not professional. It was a favor from a friend and one I would repay when I was able.

Still, before I could make contact with them I would do some ground work on my own: checking out some of the local facilities and settlements to get a feel for the place and any hints I might find before setting off into the pervasive desert to try and find up close what I hadn't been able to find with Wave Equation's sensor array.

Unfortunately, it looked like the only thing I was turning up so far was a whole lot of sand.