Songs of Seduction - Fire and Ice

"Where, Ixtil? My life inside? What do you mean?"

Ixtil reacted to her voice with his characteristic left right shift, and Fleming's heart ached for him. He couldn't see her, but how many days had he been waiting?

"Fleminggg. Ixtil hearr!" His inner feathers ruffled and flowed in reaction to her voice, and Fleming wanted to rush to him, his little golden creature, Fallen from the sky.

Fleming remembered, the sudden heart-stopping thump of the thunder shock and her screaming fall, and the lullaby sensation of her mother's gentle hands lifting her from a bed.

She turned slowly to face an internal vid, and said, "Athena, recovery report. What happened?"

Athena told Fleming how the external vid showed Ixtil emerge from low in the clouds, his wings grey, barely visible against the cloud, beating with a sure steadiness as he made his way straight to the capsule, cradling Fleming in her golden suit in his arms. She told Fleming how the angel went to the hatch, tore away the entry corridor they had made from the parachutes, and placed Fleming's body within the airlock, and how the very last things that parted, before the hatch door closed, were their fingertips.

Later, Fleming replayed the external vid and saw Ixtil return to his rise, limping and dragging a wing, saw him face the far off storm, lightning flickering steadily across the clouds, and saw him stand tall, his wings high, his arms stretched up, and his head arched back, left right. She couldn't say whether it was fury at what the sky had done, or reverence. Knowing the importance of the sky in Ixtil's world, she thought it might be worship, she thought it might be god. She watched as he exploded into the sky and departed.

Athena told Fleming how she had managed to lift her helmet from her head and gasp a giant breath, and how her lips were blue and her skin dead white.

"You were cold, Fleming, very cold."

Later, Fleming played the internal vid, and saw how she had managed to crawl from the airlock, get herself out of the suit, and crawl through to the med bay. Her naked body was small and white, blue tinged on her fingers and toes. She was shocked to see how small she was, and deathly white. When at one point she turned, and the vid showed her belly, she was astonished to see it was more her usual healthy colour, nearly pink, as if a huge hand had held her there and kept her belly warm. She leaned forward to look more closely, and swore she saw four shadows, curving around.

"Pilot's Eyes Only, Athena, on that vid, thanks."

Athena told Fleming how she had pumped heat into the cabin, but she didn't mention the massive reserves she used from her QMR archives to do it.

Fleming watched herself over the next week as she moved around the cabin in a daze, covering herself with bundles of clothes and stripping them off an hour late. She watched herself eat like an animal, only to stagger later to the waste bay and vomit it all up, shivering and quivering, clutching the bag. She watched herself care for her fingers, gently cleaning them and binding them in the healing balms. But she couldn't remember a moment of it, not until she awoke from her dreams, and heard her mother calling, Fleming, can you hear me?

After Athena's debrief and later, the vid replay, Fleming sat motionless on the bed for several minutes, ravelling through in her mind what she'd heard and seen. She looked at the exterior vid display, and saw Ixtil on his rise, crouching down in his usual protective watch, his head motionless except for the occasional left right shift as shadows moved over him and rain bands fell. His wings were arched around his body in their protective sweep. Both hands were spread, fingers touching the ground, and she knew she was surrounded by her Angel's silver threads.

Where, Ixtil? Show me on your body.

Fleming slipped off the med bay couch and faced the mirror. She let the gown drop and stood naked, studying herself. She stood motionless for a minute, two minutes; the only movements her gentle breathing, the slow in out of her belly, and the shift of her eyes as she gazed upon herself, left and right, up and down.

She raised her left arm, and began to unravel the bandages from her hand and her fingers, silently turning, turning, turning the bandages away from her skin. When finally her fingers were uncovered, she brought them close to her face, examining them closely. She stretched them wide and held them like that, her four fingers and her thumb spread wide, her little human hand. She raised her right hand, and curled its thumb to the palm. She slowly brought those four fingers up, and laced them within her five.

Fleming held herself like that for a moment longer, then smiled. She kissed the tips of her damaged fingers. They weren't damaged any more, because she'd held hands with an angel.

She looked down at her body, and held the soft curve of her belly in the palm of her hand. She wasn't sure if it was a trick of the light or a shadow, but it seemed like her hand was held by four fingers, covering the gentle swell of her there.

"Report, Athena. How much food stock do I have in the capsule? How long can I survive?"

Athena paused momentarily before replying, her deep layer processors almost instantaneously correlating her primary and secondary mission files with the biomed monitoring data she'd compiled on Fleming, the first day after the descent, and later, before she'd shed the suit. Athena rapidly spooled through an overall mission risk assessment before answering.

"I predict 300 days, Fleming, with a predicted range of plus minus ten days. Depending upon the predictability of your food intake and nutritional variation."

"300 days, huh? Long enough then, Athena, don't you think?"

"I think so, Fleming. Yes, I think so."

"We'd better tell Ixtil then. I think I'll need images, to explain."

"I think he knows already, Fleming."

"Hmmm, maybe he does."

Fleming looked down on herself once more, and smiled. It was a shadow, the faintest shadow from the curve of her belly.

"Athena, I've been meaning to ask you. The mission vid when we returned. The time stamp clocks, there's an anomaly. The system clock shows your QMR shut down for about a minute, just before we emerged from the storm." Fleming bent down to pull warm clothes up her body. "What was that all about, Athena? What were you doing?"

There was a long pause as Athena profiled her secondary mission files, correlating her own data sets and quickly interrogating cultural data files to find a suitable response.

"I think I'm blushing, Fleming."

Fleming glanced up, something triggered by the emotional cascade Athena had chosen to use in her reply, as well as her words. She raised an eyebrow.

"Is there something you want to tell me, girlfriend?

* * * *

"Jonah to Prep. Drop in one-twenty minutes. Systems are go." Flight's voice echoed around the empty corridors. The rescue mission was finally on, the Vonnegut's crew filled with a desperate tension.

Jonah stood naked on the vac platform, the same one Fleming had stood on ten long months before. Like Fleming before him, Jonah was rehearsing in his mind the landing routine, oblivious to to the slide of Ballard's clippers over his skull, and later the smooth slick of her razor over his skin, removing every bit of hair from his finely toned body.

Whereas Fleming had been a "weight optimised" payload, to use the pared back language of the mission planners, Jonah's mission was planned as a much shorter affair. To land as close to Descent as possible, taking into account the blast zone of the Drop descent and ascent rockets, with the shortest ground distance between the two capsules; recover Fleming, put in place the tuned laser comms transmitter to link with Athena, and leave.

Fleming was still alive.

Flight had revealed, in a secret eyes-only briefing, the minimal information the station had gathered since the catastrophe of the comms balloon failure was understood. He explained how, within the first two weeks, the station had been able to deploy a small geo-synchronous satellite with an array of high resolution, high magnification optical receivers, kludged together from one of the deep space telescopes. This equipment had been placed directly overhead Fleming's Descent capsule, and placed into a continual surveillance mode.

Due to the thick, impenetrable atmosphere of Titan, it was not possible to deploy cloud piercing infra-red optics, nor was radar surveillance possible. Site evidence could only be obtained on those extremely rare occasions when the constant cloud thinned or lifted entirely, and planet light from Saturn was at the right angle. Direct radio comms were also impossible due to layers of RF interference.

Jonah was shown seven images which had been analysed in every way, by every expert. The images showed a series of incomprehensible, impossible events. Nothing he saw was remotely feasible, but there was the evidence, before his eyes.

The first image showed the circle that was Descent, at the end of the long arrival blast path which revealed the skillful way Fleming had skittered above Titan's surface, seeking the best landing spot.

"The rocket specialists have measured the landing profile. She cut it close, your Fleming. They reckon less than a minute's remaining fuel, maybe lower - twenty, thirty seconds."

"That's typical Fleming," Jonah replied. "She likes that fine edge. 'If you're going to cut it, cut it close,' that's Fleming."

"Here are the close-ups."

Flight brought up an enhanced image of the top of the capsule, showing the open balloon deployment hatch.

"We know the balloon deployed, we can see the burn of its launch rocket on the capsule's hull. We think these," he pointed to a pair of parallel lines down one side, twisted on the other, "are a make-shift ladder, going from one side of the capsule to the other. We speculate," Flight paused, and scratched his head, "we speculate that Fleming deployed, climbed to the top of the capsule, climbed back down, and left the ladder in place. It's not clear why, and the balloon guys don't understand why the deployment hatch was left open. This is consistent, the hatch remains open."

"What's that?" Jonah asked, pointing to a circular object a short distance away from the capsule. "Looks like a big, symmetrical rock. But all the other boulders, they're all irregular."

"That, we don't know. It's in the same place in later images, gone in others, and I'll show you something else, later. One at a time, please, Jonah. None of it makes sense, but there's something happening down there.

"Next. This is something that shouldn't be possible, but there it is."

The shadows were different, but the scene remained the same. The capsule sat where it always sat.

"That's not possible!" exclaimed Jonah, "How..."

"We do not know. Somehow, Fleming's recovered the three parachutes, and she's made a bloody tent down there."

"Don't be fucking stupid. She couldn't lift the parachute packs when they were up here, and weighed fuck all. She's got fucking balls, I'll grant her that, but she's not Superman. How the fuck?"

"We don't know, Jonah. Somehow, she's dragged three parachutes twenty miles, become a master seamstress, and made a tent."

"Jesus." Jonah looked at the evidence before his eyes. "The round boulder..."

"That's right. It's gone in this one. But see, how the ground seems to be worn smooth?"

"Yes...and look, that's a track, going from the end of the tent over to the clear space. What the hell was she doing, going back and forth to the same place?" Jonah looked confused. "I thought the exploration plan was three-sixty. She's just going back and forth. To a boulder?"

"We speculate," Flight said, slowly, "that Fleming was well off mission, even at this early stage."

He continued. "OK, this is where it gets strange. Stranger than it was, anyway."

Flight displayed a third image. "This one. This one's the clearest of the lot. It's a composite, taken over an hour, a little more. The optics guys have analysed over twenty frames, it's like a little vid. Do you want it frame by frame, or continuous run?"

"What am I going to see? I'm not going to like it, am I?"

"It's a benign message, but the first evidence...of something."

Flight ran the images. Jonah saw how the parachute tent had been torn away from the entry hatch, and lay flapping in a steady breeze.

"We know there was a major storm, shortly before that image sequence was taken. A major weather event. The lightning counters detected well over a million separate flashes, over several hundred square miles. It was the biggest single weather event we've so far seen. So, the tent cover could have been torn away by the storm..."

"But Fleming's inside?"

"Based on later imagery, yes. Or if she wasn't inside, she was safe."

"The clear space..."

"Yes?"

"What's that, inside its perimeter?"

Jonah could see from the straight down vertical image, right in the centre of the circle, a blocked rectangular shape. Based on the image scale, it was just under ten feet wide, the same colour as the curious boulder seen in the earlier images. He also saw that the ground circle was in fact a slight ellipse, perfectly aligned with the capsule, with the narrow side of the ellipse facing the hatch.

"Don't look at the shape, look at the shadow."

And Jonah saw, in a series of five images taken five minutes apart, the long shadow of the artefact, a long black shadow, connected to the base of it.

"The optics guys have measured it, measured the movement of the shadow in that time, done the geometry."

"And..."

"It's made up of two distinct parts. The base is just under seven feet tall, wider at the top, narrower at the base. If I didn't know better, it could be statue of a man." Flight scratched his beard. "But the upper half, what cast that shadow? We don't know. Two symmetrical shapes, rising just over ten feet from the top of the taper, and about the same wide."

"Does it move?"

"Nope. There's an hour's elapsed time in the imagery. Its shadow moves, we can see shadows of cloud moving on the ground, but whatever it is, it's completely motionless. It could be carved from a block of marble. That's about how big it is; that David statue on Terra, the same size, roughly."

"The last image..."

"Yes."

"It's fucking gone? Just like that?"

"Yes, just like that. Gone."

"What the fuck has Fleming got down there?" Jonah looked across at Flight, fear in his eyes. "I don't want to see the rest, just tell me."

"Okay." Flight had analysed these images so many times, examined the experts' cold hard facts over and over; but he still had to decouple every image of the tiny Fleming that was ever in his brain - her wry smile, that sparkle in her eye every time she got one over on him (which was often), the way she damn near broke his back every time she hugged him, Fleming's heart the size of a mountain.

"We speculate..." Flight cleared his throat and began again, "we speculate, that Fleming and this thing, whatever it is, are interacting. We don't know how or why. The remaining four images, captured over the last nine months, all show the same. The capsule remains as is, the tent way to the main hatch has at some point been repaired. The path from the end of the tent to the cleared ground is now well worn. We are convinced this is Fleming, deploying regularly and going within the boundaries of the clear space. There is some ground evidence of something bigger moving the other way, towards the capsule, into the tent."

Flight paused, looking at Jonah for confirmation to go on. Jonah nodded, he had to know what to expect.

"The last two images show evidence of ground drilling, in a regular pattern around the capsule, and we can see cable runs converging on the equipment node in the base of the balloon hatch." Flight again paused, looking down at his hands resting on the desk.

"We speculate...that Fleming has constructed a communications array of some sort. Why it's ground based, we simply don't know. What she intends it to be used for, we don't know. Whatever her plan is, though, it suggests Athena remains functional - the capsule interconnection only make sense if the computer remains active. We think Fleming is connecting Athena into some kind of ground based sensory array." He paused. "A communications system. We speculate...but have no idea how she did it, or even if she did it, that Fleming recovered the balloon's comms link, which is highly configurable, from ELF to VVHF."

Flight pondered a long moment. "We keep in mind, throughout our speculation, that it's Fleming down there. She was selected for a multitude of very good reasons, which she is clearly exhibiting. She is unpredictable, and thinks beyond the square. Beyond the cube, in fact."

Jonah sat silently for a long minute. Flight remained silent, the only visible emotion a twitch in his jaw.

"Show me the last image, please, Flight."

Without a word, Flight brought up the last image onto the screen. Jonah saw it had been captured a week earlier. The capsule remained unchanged, centred now in an array of fine lines, radiating in a circular web around its base. The tent was whole, unbroken. The clear space, the small rise overlooking Descent, was empty.

"What's that?" Jonah asked, pointing to a dark shadow, some distance away from the capsule.

"It's an anomaly. Nobody yet has a suggestion."

"It looks," said Jonah slowly, "like the shadow of an eagle. That's what it looks like, the shadow of a bird, high up."

* * * *

In the Prep bay, Ballard completed Jonah's full body shave, and reached for a hot wet cloth to wipe him down. Her hands were slow as she lovingly wiped the heat down over the fine muscles of his back, down over the firm tightness of his ass, down his long legs. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she wiped up his legs and firm thighs, up the sides of his body and over his chest, then down over his hard gut, finishing with a hot cradle of his cock and soft balls.

Jonah stood, his hand gently resting on Ballard's head as she held him cupped in her warm hands, holding the core of him, just as she'd held Fleming's core.

Ahh, Jonah. That's sweet.

"Find her, Jonah, bring her back."

Ballard completed Jonah's prep, and, when she was done, signed off her part of the mission log. She was a methodical woman, and kept her mission files in a simple structured sequence.

She entered the details for Pilot 02 - Drop - Jonah Cain, and saved them below the first entry:

Pilot 01 - Descent - Eve Fleming.

* * * *

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

© ElectricBlue66 2018