The Maze of Madison (scifi story): Chapter Fifteen - An Unexpected Companion

Chapter One: So it Begins
Chapter Two: Into the Dark
Chapter Three: Confounded by a Lock of Stone
Chapter Four: The Ponderous Path Home
Chapter Five: Fleeing the Immolation
Chapter Six: Weathering the Firestorm
Chapter Seven: An Aftermath of Exhaustion and Cinders
Chapter Eight: The Bitter Cold Night That Lasted a Month
Chapter Nine: Deals with the Dav-Vel
Chapter Ten: The Dav-vel's Due
Chapter Eleven: Without a Solution
Chapter Twelve: With Potential
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen: An Unsettled Union

Chapter Fifteen: An Unexpected Companion

Gates, fences, walls and domes had only certain amounts of utility on exoplanets. They might have kept out the large animals or their alien equivalents. They might have kept out some interactions between microbes and parasites, though that was definitely not the case with Escheria. That world's ecology was far too insidious for mere domes, walls, fences and gates. On most worlds, they were helpful. Nowhere humanity had tread was the world exactly eden or perfectly compatible with Earthlife. The closest was Escheria and that was half the problem. The other half was normal Escherian ecological interactions were not the same as normal Terran ecological interactions whatsoever. Not even the highly advanced drones and bots and lasers and microwave weapons could have saved the Americans of Escheria from the hell they went through. But they had made a huge difference on Jefferson. The say was true on Madison. And Franklin. And Adams. And amongst the worlds of China and India and Europe and the rest of Earth Nations spreading themselves out amongst the stars.

Yet, no matter where they went, the peoples of Earth, no matter what new and brilliant technologies came out of India and China and Amerca and Nigeria, no matter what they created to protect themselves from the frightening alienness of the worlds they now claimed, none of that was any protection from the one thing that came with them. None of those would have or could have saved humanity from itself.

Or from the snooping intervention of little sisters.

Tobias, Tristan and I had met at the gate out of the settlement. We had tried to be discrete in our discreetness, or at least as discrete as we could be while we were attempting to be discreet. All of us had avoided each other for more than a day. All of us had merely tinked at one another only. Albeit in Tristan's case, it was like he opened a firehose just to say 'hullo.' All of us had gathered we needed and brought that to the gate.

In Tristan's case, he'd been preparing for some time. It took him a bit longer without help and, to be honest, he was our cybernetic centaur: he integrated with a purpose built four-legged bot he could sit in and it would encompass up to his waist. We named it that because he looked like one when he was integrated with it. However, the bot could become bipedal as needed, but it could not carry cargo then. It even had its own robotic arms. All controlled through Tristan's booster.

Tristan had made sure his family didn't know about it. Or about what he had taken to it for cargo. Tobias and I had dropped off our own necessities. Tristan had insisted on loading them himself. Which he did. Very quickly and efficiently: being mentally linked to a centaur exoskeleton generally helps. As well as having the mental agility and flexibility to interface with four arms as well as four legs.

And yet, Tristian's little sister, the kiddo that had taken care of her older brother, stuck up for him, made sure he was okay and loved him to death, had still figured out something was up and where it was going to go down. There she was sitting on top of the gate, in her obnoxious 13 year old barely a teenager and let me check that ID card again, please, trying to act far too cool for her own good.

Discretion, drones, walls, gates, robots, encryption, direct brain to brain contact, none of that was any good at protecting against the snooping of little sisters.

Because there she was. And she was unforgivably quoting Monty Python.

With wildly inappropriate, constipated visual imagery.

She was obnoxious and gross and had us caught. She was simply Cecilia. She could have been no other because she would have screwed that up. No one else could have been her because they could not have even aspired to even been a mockery of her. Cecilia was...Cecilia.

And she made me grind my teeth.

She hopped down from the gate - without getting hurt - no small feat, but that might have been because of the size of her toad hoppers and walked right up hugged her brother. Then she got into a staring match with Tobias who gave her the dirtiest glare short of a latrine until she moved so close their noses were almost touching and then she kissed his nose.

I was sure I was steaming so much that any and all frozen forms of water near me had melted within a 3 m radius. They had converted, flashed to steam and burst away. I am sure you would have seen the effect: Immie companies would have loved it and over used it to death and into zombiedom.

Cecilia sauntered over to me, almost stomping in her thick heeled Frankenstein boots with her long coat of smart and gave me a smirk. Then she winked. And commented that I was cute when I was mad. Could I get cuter still?

The little twerpette!

Never mind she was as tall as I was.

That made it worse.

She loved her brother. He might have been adopted, but she fiercely loved and protected and cherished him. Cecilia had never, ever been jealous or unhappy with Tristan. She had always been right by him and had always been there for him. Since the very first day he had been adopted by her family.

She was making it plain that she was in no way, no how going to let her precious older brother off with two troublemakers like Tobias and I. Uh uh, no.

She ran her hand over her cross cropped hair and scratched the back of her head. She took a deep breath, exhaled and pretended not to choke a bit on the smoky ash still in the air. She stretched, dramatically, and then through her bright black eyes and her perfectly thin arched eyebrow asked where we were all going.

Including her.