Last Voyage of Delilah, Episode 207: Tempest
Not as detailed as I like, but it covers the events.—Maer
Air Date: 10 Sep 2014
Present: Andy, Kim, Maer, Matt
Wednesday, 11 Jul 2525
Nuri has had an odd mental episode, pleading that there is a danger out in the forest surrounding the ship, that something is watching them. Valentine knows that Rachel and Vikki are outside on foot in the forest, searching for the crashed ship. Hinked, he decides he'll go after Rachel and Tian.
Poco is busy repairing the damage Delilah has sustained on the trip over but the stabilizer is looking iffy. He's going to need parts we don't have if he's to repair us back to spaceworthiness. He joins Valentine on foot, complaining all the way that going after the women is a bad idea, even as he starts thinking of the parts he can scav off the wreck.
Valentine comms Rachel once he's underway. She picks up.
Yeah? she says.
You okay? Valentine asks.
Yes. Why?
Nuri's got some bad vibes ….
Rachel turns around and heads back to Delilah. Her navigational sense works on land as well as space, apparently, and she meets up with Valentine. Relieved that his crew is fine, he commms back to Nuri that they're all okay and that they're going to scav parts off the crash site to fix the ship.
Valentine and his crew walk on and soon find the crash site. Looking over the evidence, it's clear that the pilot skimmed off the tree tops before bouncing off the dirt like a stone skipping water. On the last skip, the ship caught on something and flipped stern over bow, coming to rest on its dorsal hull …. pancaked into the earth.
A little removed from the crash site is a woman's body. She's a spacer in coveralls, in her 50s-60s, and Rachel recognizes her. She's Chel, Chief XO of Gideon, the ship that Rachel's brother flew. It's not Gideon that's augered in a few yards distant, but a ship called Icarus. So … What's she doing out here? Chel's body is laid out in repose, her hair tidied, clearly cared for. There is no sign of a wound, however, so it's unclear how she died. Who took care of Chel's body? We call out but no one answers.
Valentine puts the matter aside for the moment. He had Rachel stand as lookout and has Poco scavenge for parts. Valentine goes inside to check the ship for survivors and answers. He finds a way to enter via a belly hatch near the bridge. The ship's resting position has everything turned upside down and the angle's a little wonky but he manages to move around.
Reaching the bridge, he finds the pilot hanging in her chair, limbs trailing limply, unconscious and still strapped in. Looking closer, he sees that she's got a bad thigh wound, severe enough to bleed her out, yet it's been nicely bandaged. She's still alive, though unresponsive, and Valentine decides to get her out.
He unlatches the straps. She falls on him. He manages.
Outside, Rachel see no real sign of anyone having left the ship to look for help, but somebody surely must have. How else can you describe Chel's remains?
Valentine comms Rachel he's got someone and with her help, he lowers her out of the ship. The pilot reeks of cigar smoke and alcohol. Once she's on the ground, Valentine checks her bandage. It's come a little undone and Valentine tries fixing it. He flubs it and she starts bleeding again. He manages to staunch it. The pilot survives.
Clearly there's no carrying her back by hand. They'll need to air lift her out in the air car. The air car is on Delilah so someone will have to go back for it and fly it back. Valentine takes another turn through the interior of the ship, looking for anyone else who needs help. He finds a burly man tangled up in chains in the cargo hold. He's unconscious and has a head wound. Like the pilot, the wound has been bound up by persons unknown. Valentine lowers the man to the deck and finds out that he's too big for Valentine to move alone. He opens the cargo hatch. Thanks to its angle relative to the ground, it digs somewhat into the dirt and shifts the wreck around. Valentine manages to get the hatch open enough for Rachel to climb aboard. The unconscious man is still too big to move unaided. Valentine has Vikki improvise a stretcher.
Moving the man on the stretcher is a tricky job. The damage to the hull and the tree debris makes the job harder. Valentine slips on coming down and gets impaled on a tree branch. His injury isn't severe but he's stuck. Vikki throws together a winch and pulls him up and out.
Valentine patches up and goes back into the ship again. There's no telling when they'll have another opportunity to do so. Looking over the cargo, he sees it's mostly medical supplies, blankets, MREs, clothing, and boots. It's everything a small army needs to survive in the field and he wonders if it isn't destined to go to the insurgents somewhere in the area. It would explain why the ship was shot down.
Which makes Poco all kinds of eager to quit the wreck and leave. The very last thing he wants is for the Feds to show up with them still at the site, caught red handed doing illegal salvage. Not that he wouldn't mind scavving as much as he can off the wreck. He just doesn't want to get caught doing it. Can we all work a little faster so we can get the hell out'a here?
Valentine has Vikki help Poco while he and Rachel go back to the ship for the air car. They're not leaving the wounded behind. Rachel won't even hear of leaving Chel. We've room in cold storage for her body aboard Delilah. Once she's properly cared for, we can decide what to do with her then.
Valentine and Rachel make it back to Delilah and find the ship's cargo ramp standing wide open. Nuri isn't answering their hails. Searching the ship doesn't turn her up either. Valentine keys her channel on his comm and calls for her.
He hears static … and then a yelp … and then a reedy voice: Be not afeared ...
And starts spouting what sounds like poetry .... or something out of a book. But what?
Valentine keeps the channel open and talks to this odd individual, hoping to get more information on Nuri.
Meanwhile, he and Rachel are getting the aircar out and flying for the crash site. Once they arrive, Valentine switches to Icarus's comms to continue the dialogue with Nuri's captor. It sounds as if he's quoting passages from Shakespeare and despite Poco's misgivings, he's not a terrorist. Valentine tells Vikki to make a comms tracker. She pulls together a few parts and nails it: the comm signal is coming from a thicket nearby.
Valentine has Rachel and Vikki fly the wounded back in the aircar while he and Poco track the signal. Poco has to drop what he's doing—which is figuring out how to extract a valuable part he's just found—but he leaves with Valentine anyway, none too pleased at this business. It just leaves a bad taste in his mouth, all of it. However, he genuinely likes Nuri and wants to rescue her from terrorist clutches before it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
Cuz, you know … it will.
And as usual, it apparently does. The comms signal goes farther away from the ship into a denser area of trees and rock … and flat out disappears.
By now night has fallen and searching on foot in unfamiliar terrain is going to be damned near impossible. Valentine and Poco turn back, calling in their results to Vikki and Rachel. Meanwhile, Rachel and Vikki have installed the two wounded in Tian's medbay and Chel's body in cold storage. Rachel picks up Valentine and Poco in the air car and flies them back to the Sandfly for the parts Poco had earmarked for repairs. He gets those parts and the shiny thing he'd found earlier. The shiny expensive thing.
Once everyone (save Nuri) is back on Delilah, Valentine orders everyone to get their rest. They'll start first thing in the morning to get Nuri back. Poco advises against sleeping all at once, instead insisting we take watches. It's good advice.
And of course, the Universe seems willing to humor Poco. Noises are heard in the galley. The crew investigates and discovers the pilot is awake and ransacking the supplies for cigars and booze. Of which there's little to none of either, but she's managed to find a bottle that Poco's been saving back.
Introductions are made all around. The pilot's name is Jas Cantor, "Jazz" to her friends. The big guy we've rescued is Van. There's another person on the crew we haven't met yet. He's an adoptee they call Calli, short for "Caliban" Of all the crew, he was closest to Chel and they seemed to understand one another. Jazz tells us that he's also prone to odd spells and with Chel now gone, there's no telling what it might do to his state of mind.
No joke.
As for what they were doing in Whitefall's airspace, they were delivering supplies to refugees (or so she puts it). More talk ensues and we gather some impressions of Icarus's crew: more mercenary and likely dealing with the insurgents. Jazz is anxious to deliver on her cargo but now lacks the ship to do so.
Valentine can see she wants something but doesn't commit to anything concrete. He wants to get Nuri back. The crew's exhausted, having been up and running on a full day before we got caught up in the crash and the mess. We all catch some shut eye and start fresh in the morning.
Thursday, 12 Jul 2014
We try hailing Caliban again via our comms. Valentine and the crew work out a method to triangulate on his signal. It involves flying out in the shuttle and in the air car with Delilah as the anchor on the triangle. We hope to catch Caliban's signal between the three points and from there narrow our search area down considerably. Of course, this requires having him talk to us as we triangulate.
Jazz calls out to him, telling him to get back to Icarus and to bring the girl with him. Poco doesn't trust Jazz any farther than he can spit, so he's staying with Delilah to make sure she doesn't make off with anything or sabotage us somehow. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew strikes out to find Nuri. Valentine flies off in the shuttle while Rachel and Vikki take off in the air car. Jazz mans the third triangulation point from Delilah's bridge, guiding us out with help from Vikki's tracker.
As luck would have it, the sensor trail leads us to an area with a slot canyon—more like a crevasse—and it's too wooded and narrow for either the air car or the shuttle to negotiate. The crew settles both craft on the ground and proceeds on foot.
Back on Delilah, Jazz is sidelined now that she's done with guiding the crew and she strikes up a conversation with Poco, who's working on repairs. They talk and she offers to help with the repairs. She questions Poco about whether the crew has found her cargo and if they would be willing to help her deliver it. If they did, she might let them in a bit of their valuable cargo. Something that is lucrative but not … you know … official. Jazz basically tries to recruit Poco over to her side and offers him one of her Campo Santi cigars.
Poco listens and lets her talk, gleaning information as she talks, but doesn't commit to anything either way.
In the crevasses, the crew finds Nuri's comm in a tree and for a moment, it looks like we've been chasing a blind end. Hoping we're actually on the right track nevertheless, we push on deeper into the canyon. Valentine takes the lead, Vikki takes the middle, and Rachel brings up the rear.
Valentine makes an unwelcome discovery: he steps on and sets off a booby trap, narrowly missing getting skewered by a pungi stick at the cost of a bad bruise. The sharpened tip of the stick is smeared with something nasty and smelly.
Maybe we are on the right track.
We push on. It's darker in the crevasse than the day-lit world outside. The crevasse walls hug close, the floor of the canyon is narrow, and the trees thickly cover the steep slopes toward the sun and the light. Leaves litter the canyon floor, branches hang close. Valentine sees something moving in the air ahead and shouts a warning. Everyone scrambles for cover as a heft rock comes sailing through. Valentine glimpses a pale figure through the foliage.
We're definitely on the right track.
Back on Delilah Poco follows Jazz to medbay where the pilot is ransacking through the supplies. What gives? They talk and she tries to flip him to her side, to join her crew. Poco doesn't see anything in it for him and quite frankly, he doesn't like the vibe he's getting off her. So, no, he's not going over to her side and he's not letting her get away with whatever she's trying to do, either.
In the crevasse, there's a stand-off of another kind going on. We can see Caliban up ahead and he's lobbing rocks at us. The crevasse walls are too rocky and steep to climb. There is precious little cover but the crew manages to find what little is offered. The path ahead of looks as if there's a concealed pit trap under the leaves. It turns out to be a ruse—the canyon floor is undisturbed and Vikki calls out her discovery. Rachel starts calling for Nuri and leaves cover to try to get eyes on our girl.
She also gets an idea: she tells Caliban that Chel is dead and please come back so he can properly mourn her passing. Rachel puts as much grandmotherly warmth and concern in her voice and keeps pleading. Won't he please come out and bring Nuri back to her family? We’re worried about the poor girl. Please come out. Please?
Her plea brings him a little closer to the crew and they see he's an albino—sparse white hair and skin with pale pink eyes. Nuri is behind him, tucked into the branches of a tree. She appears to be unharmed and sleeping. Encouraged by the sight, Rachel strides forward and Caliban tries to stop her before … she trips another trap.
Oops.
Boulders rain downward and Rachel goes down under them. Everyone scrambles to dig her out. Caliban rushes over to help. He's awfully strong. He seems normal mentally for now, but as he digs and we recover Rachel, we can see his hands don't quite move in the normal way. They are high end prosthetics.
Rachel is lucky: the boulders at the bottom of the pile didn't crush her but kept the other rocks off her. She's a bit dusty and sports a few new scratches but she's pretty much okay. She catches her breath and asks Caliban for Nuri.
Nuri calls out from the tree she's in. She's waking up. Valentine goes over to her and sees she's rubbing her head as if it hurts. She's unhurt, save for the headache, and Valentine gets her down out of the tree. She's a little woozy and tells Valentine that there was this … guy … and … Valentine tells her that he knows and leads her back to the rest of the party.
Everyone divvies up between the air car and the shuttle and fly back to Delilah. Nuri is concerned for Caliban. In her mentally sensitive state, it was his distress over Chel's death that drew her out of the ship. She's able to feel what Caliban isn't able or willing to express, though that makes itself evident soon enough.
As soon as he steps aboard, he makes a beeline toward the cold storage where Chel lies. He knows where she is without any directions from the crew. He sits on the deck before the cold locker door and silently rocks, hugging his knees to his chest. Back and forth, back and forth.
Nuri starts sobbing. Rachel holds her and lets her cry. Vikki tries the same with Caliban but the man doesn't like being touched. Vikki gets the hint and sits nearby, keeping him company yet not intruding.
It's not the perfect state of affairs but at least we've got Nuri back. Valentine takes it for what it is and goes off to find Poco. Jazz is with him and Poco seems oddly relieved to see Valentine has returned.
Valentine gives Jazz a nod and tells her he's returned with Caliban and that the albino is grieving. Jazz sighs and says that he and Chel were close.
Poco tells him Jazz has an offer. Jazz has cargo, valuable cargo, that she's running. Or was, back when she had a working ship. She's still on the hook to deliver. The customer isn't too far away, being out in the beyond, not being too popular with the government, like. As such, it's all under the table dealing and if he could help her out, perhaps she could cut him in on the proceeds … Valentine can't get a straight answer out of her that it's guns but she strongly hints that it is guns. Regardless, he agrees to help her deliver it.
It takes a couple of hours but Nuri finally manages to disengage from Caliban's distress. She paces the deck, muttering to herself in Malay and obviously trying to work something out, and then announces to the crew that she needs to be alone. She goes up to her quarters and shuts the door.
The crew doesn't try to stop her. Nuri retreats to her quarters. Valentine, Vikki, and Rachel retreat to the bridge. Once the hatch is shut tight, Rachel quietly opines that maybe we should have left Nuri with Tian. The poor girl certain has had a rough time. Valentine quietly disagrees, thinking it might have been worse. Vikki seconds him, saying she thinks she knows what's going on.
Would she like to enlighten the rest of them, asks Rachel?
Vikki takes a deep breath and tries, warning that it might sound like something out of science fiction. Valentine tells her she doesn't have to explain it, just state what she's thinking.
Vikki's convinced that Nuri has a mental connection to Caliban. Caliban's autistic but Nuri is now his voice. Did anyone else notice that whole emotional connection thing going on between them? Okay, all right, so … She's saying she needs to be alone, possibly so she can process what's just happened to her. So maybe we need to keep them together.
Valentine adds that while he thinks that may be true, there is a piece of information that she doesn't have: while he thinks that's true, he also doesn't think it's necessarily just Caliban she's tuning in on. She's been tuning in on everybody.
Vikki cuts a look and says, yeah, that's the whole science fiction part of it. Also, what's with his hands—oh! motorized prosthetics. Oh shoot! He's got valuable property on him! Her eyes go wide. Do you think they stole him? Maybe he's an escaped lab rat? Maybe he needs our help?
Valentine has to rein her in before she starts speculating … okay, too late for that. Let's just say he tries to rein her in before she gets too outrageous. He firmly tells her that Caliban is an adult human being and that she should leave the matter be. There's no need to fly off the handle. Has he asked for help yet?
No, but c'mon, just look at him, Val.
Rachel suggests we ask Jazz where she got Caliban. Where did she pick him up at?
Well, she said that he was adopted by her. Vikki wryly suggests that maybe Caliban was adopted by Jazz the same sort of way Poco adopts things. She shakes her head and cedes the floor to Valentine. He was about to say something, what was it, sorry?
Valentine says he's worried about Nuri's ability to find a way in the moment to keep whatever she's sufferning under control, because it seems to him that it's hurting her. It's also led her to open the cargo bay door, opening her mind to Caliban. Caliban seems harmless at the moment but what assurance do we have that he'll be harmless in the future? Nevertheless, Valentine urges Rachel and Vikki not to badger Nuri about it. When Nuri's ready to talk about it, she will. Until then, give her space.
He in the meantime will talk to Jazz about what she plans to do, post-gunrunning and—
Vikki blurts she doesn't trust the woman. No.
Rachel dismisses it with a sniff. So long as the woman doesn't touch the bridge controls, she's fine with Jazz being aboard.
Vikki insists. There's something about the way Jazz looks at things. She doesn't like Jazz's eyes.
Valentine tells Vikki that he's not saying we have to trust her.
Vikki shoots back she doesn't even want Jazz on our ship.
Valentine tells her that part is happening whether she likes it or not.
Vikki persists, saying she's still not sure about Van. The big guy hasn't woken up yet.
Rachel says we have to at least have them aboard as long as it takes to drop them off somewhere else. There's no leaving them out here in the middle of nowhere, away from any scrap of civilization.
Valentine admits that Poco apparently has feelings on this issue as well—going by the faces he's been making—but the point is we need to get this job done. We need to get Tian's boy out from under the trouble he's in. Run those guns. Make some money.
So … we're running guns now, Vikki asks?
Or maybe it's drugs, Rachel adds.
Val answers it could be either or both, but he thinks it's probably guns. Does anyone have a moral issue with that?
No, but where are the guns going?
To the insurgents holding Tian's son, most likely.
Whoa, she said that?
Well, not exactly as she didn't mention Tian's name specifically, but yeah, she's running guns to the rebels, because that's who you run guns to. The Alliance doesn't need guns—they got their own already. So we'll deliver, makes some money out of this, and decide what to do with Jazz, Van, and Caliban.
Vikki subsides, willing to wait and see.
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