El-Esk - The Senescent Wanderer
Mood: Contemplative/Murderous
El-Esk had fought, and nearly killed, the ageless Sam Davis in high orbit around Angeldust. She’d sown old-style nukes in amongst the debris of the orbital band - laughably primitive, and almost invisible to skin-borne sensors. He’d been chasing her on the orders of the House Council - had been overconfident, swayed by past experience. He’d not expected the one-two punch - the triplets clusters of explosions detonating like leviathan shaped charges. He’d leapt away when a hypersonic gout of molten metal had lanced through him, gouging out a gaping, hundred metre wound.
She’d not been able to track him.
El-Esk had fought alongside Sam, when he’d just begun his integration into the first of his ship-bodies. They’d gunned through Taygate, burning out the last remnants of the Transgress - the fundamentalist, human-first whackjobs who’d been pursuing the tail-end of the Majid exodus. The fuckers trying to finish off their bastard machine-genocide - a government of xenophobes and luddites. El and Sam had been free agents, then, acting on their own auspice - their own outrage. Acting alone, they’d brought that state low.
El-Esk had fought in the street battles in the domes of Tharsis Montes, back in the early Martian decades. She’d been there with Suzy and Carlos, marshalling her students, driving the protectorate forces back to their beach-head at the base of the 'spire, and then back up the thread to phobos and their waiting ships. They’d sent them packing.
And before that, El-Esk had lived with Sam and Kat and Ed, back in that old house by the old highway.The old weatherboard monstrosity covered in graffitti and tangled jasmine, back in the summer when it all went wrong, and the collapse precipitated out all that pent up fury and frustration, and suddenly there were pitched battles between the socialists and neo-fascists and islamic-universalists and the red-greens and the pink coalitions… and the state police - the worst gang of all. The summer they’d 3D-fabbed together a sort of tool-kit for dissent - the gas-mask and the composite riot armour and the less-than-lethal sabot-launcher - and driven them all out, and the house became the House, capitalised.
All of this should tell you two things; El-Esk was old, and El-Esk hated authority.
‘I hate people who try and force their will onto others,’ she’d told me, once. ‘And I’m going to make damn sure I stop anyone I find from doing that…’
I didn’t point out the irony. Just like I wouldn’t point out the irony in a House ship moving out against Government forces. Still… this was Charibdys, and we were a long, long way (try centuries) from the nearest House system. Authority, when you come down it, is Authority, whatever the name, and Esk was spoiling for a fight.
It wouldn’t ever be as bad as her feud with Sam, but it would still implicate us in a new conflict - a new set of combatants and antagonisms. Most of the crew are dilettantes - little magpie men and women gawking at baubles, shipping out for the prestige and the sex-appeal and the stories. But there’s a few I like - that I wouldn’t want to see flatlined.
I hope (I trust) that she know’s what she’s doing.
No Shopping - Its one day out and we can eat, refuel, whatever, when we return. If we return… Also I’m still not sure if I’ve ever seen El-Esk eat
Mission 4 - Break the Line
