Chapter 7:

Let's Do It, Let's Fake In Love

Drop Pod Romantic Error Log


Jack watched Nekkau wander away from the drop pod without a word. Yes! Here I thought I’d have to bribe her into giving me and Taru some alone time, but looks like our prong-tail companion can take a hint. I’ll have to do something nice to thank her. But for now …. He turned his gaze to Taru, who was hunched over a laminated survey map.

“Okay, I’ve got the most experience, so I’m calling the shots.” Taru looked up and oriented her folded paper antiquity to the surrounding buildings. “We should start by going north along gridline ZK063B, then right before we hit the 25th parallel we’ll track west a bit and—where is she going?”

“Oh, uh … Nekkau said something about moving faster on her own.”

“… Great. Just perfect. Splitting the party already.” Taru heaved a sigh, and Jack was disappointed to discover that her armor’s bulky plates didn’t budge a millimeter to accommodate the gesture. “Alright. Are you going to run off too? Got a hot date?”

With a well-oiled smile, Jack blushed at the ground for a beat and glanced up as he asked, “Other than you?”

Advice didn’t stick well in Taru’s head, but a few pieces had managed to stay afloat by clinging to old memories. Her grandparents had been visiting the day before Taru’s second year of middle school was to begin, and an impending typhoon had canceled their visit to the zoo. While the wind howled like a wounded beast and the rain beat down, grandpa had cut slice after glowing slice off a watermelon, and told her about how he had chased skirts at her age.

“Remember.” He set down the knife and plucked seeds out of the fruit with fingers like burled sunbleached wood. “You can trust flashy guys in a fight or a mission, because they all want to gleam like a switchblade. But comes to dating … they can’t pick a direction and hold it, so go with somebody else.”

Taru had wanted to ask how, if that was true, how had grandpa been married to grandma for 41 years and counting, but her mouth had been too full of sweetness and black waxen seeds to ask.

Taru turned Jack a sour glower. “Cut it. You are to flirt with me only when Nieuport is around, and that’s if she’s still after me.”

Dang, this girl is a tough one. How do I get through that shell?

“I just thought we should practice.” Jack turned his innocent feet north and walked into a breeze that was working up the courage to shift into a proper wind. “If you react that bluntly when your ex is watching—”

“She’s not my ex.”

“—she won’t buy that we’re a couple.”

He’s … probably right. But we’re on a mission right now! There is such thing as professionalism.

For now, the ruins obliged and gave them a nice broad avenue running due north to walk along. Taru went ahead with her nose buried in the folds of the survey map, meanwhile Jack walked easy with his hands cupped behind his head and elbows skyward. Oh, he had his eyes out for the black box they had been asked to retrieve, but he left most of the searching to the heads-up-display of the terrain scanner, worn as a pale curve of orange glass over his right eye. It presented topographic twilight lines for the terrain, and sprinkled thereon, lime circles, vivid yellow squares, and a host of other symbols. The circles moved around in tight knots or spread out a little but kept a formation. Lots of teams searching roughly the same area. He also had access to some seemingly extraneous information, including a geologic overlay. In the scan’s center were two lime circles—himself and Taru—and there a bit to the west, a red triangle was drifting north.

“Hey—”

“No.”

“I’ve got a blip on scan. Why don’t we go east and check it out?”

“Oh, uh, sure.…”

Taru looked up. In the few minutes they had been walking, the satellite survey map and the buildings surveyed had disagreed on reality. They should be just south of the intersection of two avenues, with a building with a big black obelisk in the center at the top driver’s-side corner. None of the buildings suggested an obelisk of any color. Heck, the other avenue didn’t intersect at all, it flew over their heads with black filamentous wings stabbing the buildings along its path. Taru furtively turned the map upside down, just in case. Nope, that didn’t help.

“Um, I don’t mean to pry. Do you not have a terrain scanner?” Jack kept a weather eye on the red triangle. It had come to a stop a few meters short of the end of its alley. The icon faded to a dull red—probably still there, but his scanner wasn’t picking it up any longer.

“I sold it so I could get more firepower,” Taru admitted as she studied the map. “The starter one for gunners is so rudimentary as to be useless though.”

Jack nodded agreement. “I sold my grappling hook for a better scanner.”

At last, Taru looked away from the map, disappointed stars in her eyes. “You had a grappling hook? And you sold it?”

“Yeah. The base model can’t be upgraded at all, only reaches 8 meters, and is wicked slow.”

“But … it’s a grappling hook.” Bitter awe swirled in Taru’s voice. “How could you?”

“Wayfinder. I scout for the team. I can run up an 8 meter wall. But that map ….”

“Bah!” Taru beamed. “Terrain scanners are decadent electroglam that always glitch out or run out juice, and they break down soon as two grains of sand get inside of ’em. Maps are simple and reliable. See, there’s—”

Taru let go of the map to point out a landmark, which was just the opening the breeze needed to grab the survey map and plaster it to her face. The Taru vs. Map cage match was brief and decidedly one sided, with the blue haired gunner ripping the paper off her face, and ripping the paper in the process. It wasn’t quite tattered, but the map clung to the ropes for dear life.

“… Which way is east?”

“To the right.”

Taru hesitated, then turned left and started walking west. Toward the red triangle.

“Other right.”

With a hiss, Taru turned and stalked back. “You could have said driver or passenger.”

“Oh, you’re from a cargo colony? What was your first car?”

Jack tried to keep the conversation polite and fluffy while glancing back now and then toward the mouth of the alley. He had, in fact, seen a car once. Two cars, actually. Museum piece commuter cars with the engines torn out, but having seen them at all put him in position to remember that cars had a driver and a passenger side, and the former was the one with the steering wheel. That was about the extent of his automotive knowledge—had never occurred to him that someone might use driver-side and passengers-side as directions. But he did his best to keep her talking till they had gone far enough east that Taru saw a twisting lane and insisted it was time to go south to keep with her intended lawnmower-style search pattern. The red triangle reappeared on his scanner, headed east, but circling back now and then and probing the alleys. They were well south and east and out of sight by the time it reached the mouth of the lane.

“You had to learn how to drive?”

“I was a bit of a natural, but there were rules to learn. Who has right of way. How to change a tire. Et cetera.”

“So you practiced, right?”

“Oh yeah. Took dad’s old junker to an empty lot and rumbled around at 10 kmph for a few hours to get the feel of the clutch. Otherwise I might’ve stalled it at a crossing or ground up the gears.”

“But you don’t see the need to practice fooling Ms. Nieuport.”

She shot him a look. Why do you think I chose you? Idiot. You’re supposed to sweep me off my feet whenever Selene shows up and then cut the act soon as she leaves. What’s with all this preparation shit?

“Keep trying your luck, and I’ll find somebody else.”

“Aw, you sure? The station has lots of guys, but the rest of them aren’t on your team.”

“I don’t see how that matters.”

“I’m always nearby. Selene barges into the apartment, I can be there in a flash.”

“That’s if Selene still holds a torch for me. A contingency. That’s all this is. I bet there’s nothing to worry about. I bet she’s moved on with her life and found someone new.”

Meanwhile, on the space station: a shop attendant robot stood by the register, and across the counter Selene crouched with her face up against the glass, inspecting the wares. She shot up, crossed her arms and said, “Alright. I want a dozen dozen dozen red roses. Not three dozen. Dozen dozen dozen. Only your best. Not one wilting petal, you hear? And I want it ready by 7 this evening.”

The robot did the math. Atop all the orders for other customers, now it added 1728 pristine red roses, clipped and arranged in bouquets, in 3 hours? It replied: “Let me have you speak with my manager.”

And back planetside: Taru picked up the pace so she could walk ahead and not have to look at Jack.

“Honestly, there’s nothing I like about you at all, so don’t even try.”

“Aw. You don’t think we have chemistry?”

“No. All we do is bicker.”

Jack opened his mouth to protest, but the red triangle reappeared on scan. Close too, creeping east toward them on the road he and Taru were about to step onto. So close that the scanner identified it and labeled it: Curator drone.

Okay. It didn’t make a bee-line for us earlier, but it’s definitely moving to intercept. He glanced around. The buildings in this part of the Snarl wore their age badly. All showed caved in upper stories, and lower story walls that offered as much cover and protection as a slice of swiss cheese. Seems to have a bit of trouble finding us too, so anything that disrupts sensors even a little will help. Suddenly electronic warfare gear sounded a lot more useful. Shame he didn’t have any, and he guessed—correctly—that miss maps-are-simple-and-reliable wouldn’t have any either. The terrain scanner showed all nearby teams were at least a kilometer away, but it also showed him the local rocks.

“Hey, Taru, let’s go over here.”

When Jack wrapped his arm around Taru’s shoulder armor, she shuddered to a stop as if he had touched bare skin.

“What? Wait. But Selene isn’t here.”

Jack held a finger up to his lips, whispered that he had something to show her, and led southeast to a break in the ruins, where the old buildings had given up and crumbled entirely and an old creek had jumped the walls that the former masters of this world had built to contain it. A fresh blue forest waved to them. Into this new wilderness he led, following the creek downstream. His hand slipped off the armor and down to her hand, and he broke into a jog that Taru had to run to match.

“Oi, what are you doing!”

“Something to show you.”

“If it’s your di—”

Jack skidded to a stop at a tiny waterfall that fed a large, circular pool. “Here. A kimberlite pipe.”

Taru looked and wasn’t impressed. Colorful things with eight-pair of lacey wings flitted lazy over the water’s surface. The pool wasn’t crystal clear. If anything, the shade of the trees around the edge made the water look black and unappealing.

Turning back to ask, “Where’s the pipe?” she found a Jack made new and unfamiliar entirely by the change of his smile.

“The rocks under the pool are kimberlite. It’s a pipe because the eruption leaves a vertical tube of kimberlite rock behind that interrupts whatever rock surrounds it. On Earth, this is where diamonds came from.”

“So there are diamonds here?”

“Maybe.” As he knelt at the water’s edge, Taru studied Jack and identified the changes. The manufactured smolder in his eyes? Replaced by glowing curiosity. She watched him reach delicate hands down and scoop up a heap of sandy muck and sift through it, searching for something while he told her how he knew all this.

“We only had a few vacations as a family. But whenever we stopped anywhere, Mom would point out the layers and tell me what each one was and what it meant. Ah, here.”

Jack plucked a rough red stone a bit larger than a pea from the muck and handed it to Taru. “That’s a pyrope garnet. If we had an electron microprobe, we could examine its composition to get a sense whether there was a stable craton for diamonds to form in the first place. But even if there were diamonds—” he pulled forth a duller, opaque orange-red stone. “They likely burned up. Too much oxygen in the magma.”

His entire demeanor had shifted. Gone the peacock strut, and the putting on airs. For the first time, Taru felt like he was speaking to her as a friend rather than someone whose pants he wanted to get in. He looked so relaxed. So interested and interesting. This was a complete departure from every other waking second Taru had seen of him, but curiosity seemed so natural on him. So this is the real you.

“Anyways. That’s as best I can remember this stuff. Learned all this back when Mom still called me Lysander. Been a hot couple of decades since.”

“Diamonds burn?”

Jack shrugged and smiled. “They’re carbon.”

He’s cuter like this.

“Anyways. Since we’re here, wanna swim?”

“I, uh, I didn’t bring my bathing suit.”

Just like that, the suave oil returned to Jack’s eyes. “Neither did I. You take that tree, and I’ll use that one over there. I won’t peek if you don’t.”

Taru stood up behind Jack, who was still knelt by the water’s edge. “Better idea. You’re our Wayfinder, right. Scout of the team?”

“Yep.”

“Then go, scout the water!”

Taru put her boot in the small of his back and punted him into the center of the pool. The splash sent the winged things sculling away frantic, and Jack came up spluttering.

“It’s COLD!”

“Still want to swim with me?”

Jack doggy-paddled back to the shallows and crawled back to dry land, shivering. “I’ll take a raincheck.”

Koyomi
icon-reaction-1