Old Flames: Liaisons
Posted on 12 Feb 2024 @ 10:59pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: Loki III, Admiral Madison Indri's Ranch
Timeline: Day 23 Late Afternoon - Following "Old Flames: Accidentally Briefed"
1947 words - 3.9 OF Standard Post Measure
Gordon waited for a time in the large reception hall of the ranch, a big open room which was naturally self cooling due to the construction materials and design. An Obsidian girl had brought him an iced tea, steeped with some local herbs of their own and something of a berry flavor he couldn’t place, though it was pleasant and very refreshing. It seemed he had missed a midday meal time as there was a clean up activity in the nearby kitchen with older children clearing and washing.
There were a few younger children working at the table, under the tutelage of a grandfatherly Romulan man, who was undoubtedly one of the many displaced refugees from Hobus. Such were common on Indri’s ranch, Gordon was observing. He wondered how their kind had fared on the planet when the Obsidian Command had essentially winked out of existence. It must have seemed an act of god for it to have disappeared from the night sky, taking its solar radiation umbrella with it. If they hadn’t already lived on the Ranch, it had to have become a refuge for them in the polarization of the city and many of the tribes. The compound was as much an Outreach as it was a Ranch. A Mission. The Admiral had founded a Mission.
Eventually Maddi reemerged from somewhere further within the building and spot checked the teens working in the kitchen. While they didn’t exactly snap to like a bunch of first bar Academy students, their heckling and murmuring died down and they gave her quick responses as to if the stew kettle had been regreased and how long the relish had been left out and if they had pulled any more tubers out of the root cellar.
Not wanting to miss his opportunity for an audience with the ever moving Admiral, the Ambassador abandoned the rest of his drink and started to trail after her as she exited the kitchen and stepped out to the back porch.
“Did you have any success?”
“I won’t know until tomorrow.” Taking it from a peg on the back wall, she put on a leather hat with bird quills. “I had to send a couple runners to the outskirts with enough mixed salt to get their attention.”
“Mixed salt?”
Maddi frowned but didn’t explain as she strode down the back stairs and started down one of the swept paths bordered by uneven rocks and the cacti and spiked leaves of dry gardening on either side. “Don’t worry about it.”
Pulling his shades back out of his pocket to protect against the setting sun, Gordon picked up his pace to match step with her. “Drugs?”
She laughed. “Not everything is a metaphor for drugs.”
As they rekindled an old debate over song lyrics, Gordon smiled. “No, I’m pretty sure Soliloquy for Forgetting is entirely a drug metaphor.”
She smacked him in the shoulder. He knew it was her favorite song since the war. “It is not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because! The artist said he wasn’t writing about drugs!”
“I drew the last of pain when I drew you in my veins? I mean, clearly. He’s not even trying to hide that one.”
“Shut up. Don’t ruin my song.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just want to check on the Chuchaki,” She pointed ahead to a long stable carved out of stone and shaded over by scrubby trees. “Since I sent a couple of the regular hands out as runners.”
“Ah yes. To the West towers. With the mixed salt.”
The prompting wasn’t enough to get Maddi to divulge further. Gordon decided he needed to do a little more to warm up his subject. “What’s a Chew-Calky?”
“Really? All of your reporting and you’ve never been on Obsidian?”
Gordon held up his hands. “Even I haven’t seen everything,” he had to admit. “Although I’m starting to get some ideas for my next biography. I doubt my subject is going to be especially forthcoming about her endeavors since last we spoke, however. I only regret not maintaining more regular communiques.”
“I got your letters, Gordon. I just didn’t have anything new to tell you.”
“Nothing new? Even leaving out the refugees and the trade in sentients and the mixed salt, you couldn’t have begun with ‘I bought that Loki III dinosaur ranch Leon used to kid about retiring to’?” She didn’t react, her lips drawing tight, so Gordon added with a big intake of the dry desert air and a sigh. “I can’t believe you actually managed to get the Obsidinites to release you the land. How did you manage it?”
“There was an open clause in the land grant cooperatives south of here. The moisture farming ones.”
“I drove past those, the containment field plots?”
“Yes, a few years ago the council was a lot looser in their interpretation of the laws granting outsider settlements and cooperatives. It still took some doing to find a loophole, but they weren’t combative about it. I was able to pick up this Ranch from a friendly fellow looking to retire to Kalara. We secured the rights to make the sale through some of the language that granted the farming cooperatives shared access with the Federation. Technically, he still has a small share in the Ranch, which I pay out to him twice a year. Some of his children and grandchildren come and work for me.”
“Leon would have absolutely loved this.”
Madison didn’t respond to that. Thankfully the path curved around to the front of the stables. Here the smell knocked Gordon back momentarily. There were young men, Romulan and Obsidian, and a couple young women, mucking a row of stalls and flushing muddy watering troughs.
Maddi was calling out their names and waving, asking if the Chuchaki cows had been milked yet. Yes, it was nearly finished. And she asked if the brushing hadn’t been done, they looked matted. No, it hadn’t been since last week. Maddi looked very displeased, but she knew they didn’t always have enough hands to keep up with everything and she’d been skimping on hiring to get through the season. She pointed at a couple of the stall muckers and told them to get up earlier and make these animals presentable tomorrow. There was a good deal of 'yes ma'am' and 'Of course, Admiral' in acknowledgement.
All the while Gordon was taken by the animals themselves. They had the look of buffalo to him, their horned heads and long, shaggy fur. Looking to make himself marginally useful on Maddi’s crew, he busied himself brushing one of them in the stanchions as it grazed from the feed crib, setting himself up closest to where Maddi was managing some cleaning off riding tack and pointing out what mixture to add minerals to the feed.
When she and the boys were done with the heavy lifting and sifting and she returned to folding saddle blankets and cleaning leather, Gordon eventually broke the silence with what he really needed to know.
“Maddi,” He asked as he tucked his sunglasses back into his pocket. “What do you know about ‘The Artifact’?”
“Nothing.” Madison said it so quickly and with such finality that Gordon knew it was a shut down, not a denial.
He decided to press a little. “I only ask because I need your help. The Korinn situation, as you know, is precarious. If I could acquire some reliable contacts in the Romulan Free State, I might be able to advance awareness and open discussion with the Northern Systems, which would strengthen security in the region against the new threat. It might be enough to gain Federation support for annexing Korrix and being able to offer full defense. I only need some of the scientific analysis from early discovery of the Artifact. As I understand it, It’s supposedly all above board by now, having made the rounds in practical applications, but I can only find the subsequent papers. The originals could go a long way towards my making a few new friends.”
Maddi was still quiet, but Gordon assumed she was listening. Although she hadn’t stayed for long for the conference, at his behest she had come to attend a couple days of the testimonies and he knew she was aware of the dire situation. “I had thought you might stay longer for the conference and help me formulate more of an angle on this.” She had left without telling him, but he couldn’t especially blame her… it was true that he’d been tied up in deliberations with Admiral Harshman and the rest of their respective parties. He hadn't been able to break away for much personal time when she had chosen to show up during the peak of the testimonials.
“I have responsibilities here,” Madison said.
“I suppose this is why you can’t get away to liaison with old friends like you used to.”
She glanced sidelong at his referencing their past affairs. It wasn’t an unpleasant look, but Gordon understood now that it hadn’t been due to a fault of his that she had stopped seeing him. It was as she said now. She just had new responsibilities which she had decided not to explain to him, opting to let things cool off between them instead.
“It’s hard to get a sitter for the place,” she confirmed, more interested in this subject than the previous one. “I can set things up for a few nights before it starts falling apart around here. Can’t go gallivanting around all the time.”
“I would have come years ago, if you had told me. I only found out from someone else in the Exterior Department that you were going to be nearby when I got this special assignment. Seems you’re a hush subject around here.”
She had her reasons, not least of which being that Gordon tended to publish about everything he learned eventually, and he had something of a following, even if they tended to be academics and erudites. She needed to draw attention like she needed an infestation of sand fleas.
“Eh. I left off telling anyone, Gordon. Besides. You’ve got family. You don’t want to waste away in the desert with an old bird like me.”
The Chuchaki grunted and stamped, turning its head to look at him and project its horrible breath. Gordon put down the brush. He wasn’t getting far with the smelly, matted beast anyway. Maddi turned to heft a saddle over the rail and he caught it and took the rest of the weight off for her. As she turned to reach for the next one, he put a hand around her waist as if her twisting motion was a dance and Maddi smirked at him, letting him fold an arm around her.
“I’ll waste my time how I like,” he said.
She let Gordon push her hat back and touch his forehead to hers as he hummed the chorus to her favorite song. They swayed. He folded his hand into hers, aged and calloused and lovely, and kissed her knuckles where they meshed with his own.
He murmured in her ear, “It’s still about drugs.”
She swatted him and Gordon pulled her closer.
“Don’t ruin this. Shut up,” she said.
“Make me,” Gordon taunted.
Maddi kissed him. There was no better way she knew to stop Gordon Stillwell talking.
