The Cardinal Directive: Mission Log #2
Missing persons report
>> ... Input confirmed.
>> Continuing to Mission Log #2The camera clicks on to the sight of a large dirt paddock, a wispy layer of fog clinging to the air. Dew glints off the scales of Alison’s dragons as they eat their breakfast, a stablehand chucking another bucket of chummed meat onto the pile and giving a curt wave from across the yard.
Alison returned the gesture, though she said nothing.
The biodome overhead made the sky look blue even this early in the morning, like pictures she’d seen of the skies on Earth. The scent of biodome-generated rain still lingered in the air from the night before, mingled with the familiar odor of the dragon barns.
She leaned on the metal bars of the paddock, perching the camera on the rail and tapping her fingers gently against it. “So… looks like Solena and Garrett must’ve camped out there somewhere. They didn’t show up to the harrier’s quarters last night, at least.”
The sentence lingered in the air for several seconds, suspended on the gentle ambiance of the barn. It reminded her of home.
“I saved them some beds last night, but… well.” Alison shifted her weight to the other foot, huffing. “Garrett’s always been a worrywart. I figure it got dark and he slumped over like a wet towel until Sol was convinced to make the rest of the trip in the morning.”
Her eyes followed Oreo as he finished the food in front of him and began snuffling around Dozer’s share. Dozer cut a much bulkier frame than the bird-like Oreo, and he’d only get bigger if he kept eating like he did. She got the sense he didn’t like being smaller than his running buddy, Moose. He’d always been the biggest until she came along.
“For the best, maybe. You can get a couple of hours out of a sled after dark, but if you run out of battery before you get to a biodome, you won’t have anything to power your heaters for the night. Solena’s done some really dumb things, but she’s not stupid enough to challenge nature like that. People have died to less out there.”
It took a few seconds for her own words to settle in, a deep-seated ache opening in the pit of her stomach, like tearing the stitches on an old wound.
"I... don’t know why I’m putting this on camera. I guess… that makes this mission log two—”
— She was interrupted by a loud snap and snarl just as she tried to start the log’s intro to get her mind back to the present. There was a brief confrontation as Oreo attempted to swipe part of Dozer’s breakfast and was promptly lunged at. Oreo was knocked to the ground, squirming around and wailing loudly.
Stablehands rushed to get Dozer away from him, but Alison whistled sharply. “Hey — Hey! It’s alright! Dozer didn’t hurt him. Bird-brain’s just being dramatic.” Dozer had already gone back to munching on his breakfast, ignoring the noise.
Oreo stopped screaming, flopping over onto one side and arching his neck back so he could see her. With renewed vigor, he stuck all his legs in the air and shrieked, wriggling in the sand.
“I know you’re faking, buddy. You don’t get extra food for provoking Dozy. I know you know he’s food-aggressive.” She turned her attention to the workers, glancing nervously at each other. “He does this to every stablehand he doesn’t recognize. Sorry.”
The feathered menace gave one last attempt, tucking in one leg at an odd angle like it’d been injured and squawking in distress, but after a few seconds, he finally accepted that the jig was up. He stood, shaking the sand off with a pointed look at Alison.
She put her eye up to the viewfinder on the camera, aiming it at him.
“Well,” she said, speaking to the camera, “while we’re waiting for Solena and Garrett to get here, it’s about time you’re formally introduced to the rest of the crew. This is Oreo. He’s the resident hot mess, at least when Solena’s not around.”
She slowly turned the camera to the lithe dragon beside him, a copper-toned creature with a muddy pattern along her back and a few out-of-place turquoise scales. She had no horns, but she did have large, sharp ears like a canine. She made a series of quick whining sounds as she sniffed around her food, either excited or distressed — it was hard to tell. “That’s Basset. Great tracker. Smart. But real noisy.”
Next up she panned to the twins — a pair of smaller wine red dragons with bright golden horns. “Port and Starboard. Brother and sister. Identical in almost every way. I’ll be honest, I really can’t tell them apart. I only know which one is which because they always line up the same way when we hitch up. Port on the left, Starboard on the right. I think.”
Dozer had begun muscling over into what was left of their share, but they quickly shut that down, hissing and making the scales around their necks raise like two oversized cats. Dozer, though easily two thousand or more pounds of blue scales, ram-like horns, and a dangerously hooked chin, never failed to spook when the twins worked together. He instead shifted over to Moose’s share next.
“Dozer, well. You’ve seen Dozer. And that one is Moose.” She angled the camera up to get a better view of her. Moose was tallest of all the dragons on her crew, and packed just as much muscle as Dozer did. Alison had met people that said Moose looked “funny”, with her big, rounded ears, goat eyes, and long face. She’d been called all kinds of things, not the least of which being “a sock puppet dragon”.
Alison couldn’t say she didn’t see it to some degree, but that had never made her like the big gal any less. Moose, in response to Dozer’s approach, simply speared her food on one of her long, straight horns, and carried it away to a different part of the paddock.
“Moose is the newest on the team. She belonged to another harrier before me, but… there was some kind of accident, and she was the only one that came back. I had an open spot on my team, so… here we are.”
“Some good stock dragons you’ve got there.” A voice behind her startled her, quickly pulling back from the camera and whipping around to see who it was. Part of her was hoping it might be Solena or Garrett, but no luck there. It was a well-dressed man in his late forties, sporting a black cowboy hat and sharp blue eyes that watched her over a pair of tinted glasses. He smiled. “Harrier-class supply runners, I’m guessing?”
“I — yeah. Yes. …How long were you standing there?”
“Long enough to see you care a whole lot about your crew. We like that in our harriers here. Sign of a good heart. Listen, ah, I’m looking for a few harriers in particular — should’ve gotten in last night. Reyes, Kheely, and Emerson. Don’t suppose you’ve seen them around?”
She looked him up and down, squinting. “Depends on who’s asking.”
The smile never faded from him as he leaned on the paddock bars next to her, too close for comfort. It was an expression he had clearly and meticulously practiced. He extended a hand. “Vance. Vance Creed. I’m what you might consider the sheriff around these parts.”
Alison knew immediately that he didn’t have a badge. Nothing official, at least. His kind was prevalent in cities and towns this far out in the Red. They thrived in areas too far from the reach of Mars’s “official” government to be reliably policed by them. People with influence and inflated egos had a knack for seeping into the political structures of outlying places like Copernar. Alison had done this song and dance more times than she cared to count.
She didn’t take his hand.
“Can’t say I have, Sheriff. And even if I did, mission details are classified for the sake of all harriers and their safety. I can’t help you.” She gave a tight-lipped smile and nod to send him on his way, but he didn’t move.
He stared at her, that shark smile ever-present. “I saw your file, Alison Kheely.”
Her jaw tensed slightly, but she didn’t say anything.
“Some people had some very nice things to say about you. Others… not so much. But I think we could be good friends. This far out in the Red, it’s good to have friends. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Alison did her best to remain stone-faced. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.”
“Me? No, no. I’m not selling. I’m trading. You see, you and your team’s tardiness have… upset some players in the area. Young upstarts, so eager to prove they're not meant to be trifled with. People with tempers who can make your life a lot harder if they want to. But I happen to have a few ins with them! I can talk, pull some strings, convince them you’re a good friend to have too. Rumor has it you have a particular skill they’d be very interested in.”
She already knew what he wanted in return. “The point stands. I’m not trading. I don’t need your protection.”
“What, you think that dinky little thing will keep you safe?” He indicated the small badge on her belt. “That might protect you fine in government territory, but we both know it’s next to useless out here.”
Harriers were protected under many official laws. The penalty for disrupting one in any way was high, and they had complete diplomatic immunity to perform their job. She had government-issued permission to sic any of her dragons on this man if she felt her life or cargo were threatened. The law would absolve her of any punishment or guilt, even in the event of his death.
But none of that mattered to people who didn’t follow the law.
Instead of either of them, the next voice that spoke came from Alison’s radio. “This is Copernar Tower to Alison Kheely, come in Kheely, over.”
She stashed the camera in one hand, pulling the radio up to her mouth. “Kheely to Tower, reading you loud and clear. Over.”
Vance Creed attempted to continue with his persuasion but didn’t get out much. “Alison — can I call you Alison? — Alison, look…”
Copernar Tower drowned him out. “I’m sending you on a time-sensitive mission. Hitch up as fast as you can. I’ll explain on the way.”
Alison frowned, setting her shoulders. “If you’d excuse me, sir. I need to be going. I don’t have time for —”
— He snatched the radio out of her hands with practiced ease, pressing on the call button himself. His sickly-sweet smile radiated in his speech. “Good morning, Tower! It’s Vance, I’m sure you remember me. Me and the lady are having a little talk, so I think you can wait while we finish up, huh?”
After a moment, Copernar Tower answered. “Harrier Kheely, please inform the sheriff that, with all due respect, under the MHSL pact, unauthorized breach of harrier comms channels by civilians is strictly prohibited. Seeing as I have both of you on camera, I would also advise him to unhand your radio or face charges. Two rangers are coming later today, and they would be more than happy to take him in. Over.”
The slightest twitch pulled at his face before he slowly returned the radio to her possession. They both located the camera, staring directly at them from the side of the barn.
She took the radio back from him, staring him down. “Copy that, Tower. I think he got the message.”
Vance stepped back, brushing himself off. “Bringing back even one hovercore could make a world of a difference, Kheely. Just keep it in mind out there, hm?”
She didn’t give him the luxury of an answer, turning on her heel and making her way towards her sled.
“Thanks for stepping in there, Tower. I appreciate it. Over.”
“We protect our own, especially from people like him. You’re not going to be happy to hear my voice for much longer though. Over.”
Alison’s heart sank. “I was worried you might say something like that. What’s going on?”
There was a small pause before Tower’s voice came again. “It’s… It’s about your team, Kheely.”
In a matter of minutes, Alison was swinging onto her lochsled and taking off into the desert.
She hadn’t gotten suited up and set off this fast in a while, and she didn’t miss it. Her stomach sank with the weight of an anchor as she and her crew cut across the desert for the labyrinth. For the last known location of her team.
She’d put the camera on the rail of the sled, only vaguely aware of its existence anymore.
Oreo seemed to have sensed her distress. Really, they all had. They rarely ran this fast for her, even on good days. Today though, there was tension in the air, and they knew it.
There was always the possibility that nothing was wrong. There was a slim chance that all this fuss would be over nothing. They broke their radios and hadn’t been able to call in. They accidentally packed their radios with the tents and couldn’t hear the transmissions. Something. Anything. But flimsy hopes wouldn’t save them if they were actually stranded and missing out there.
The far more likely option was that she was running out of time. It was already going to take almost a day to get back there, and she had no way of knowing how little oxygen or other supplies Solena and Garrett had left.
Garrett always packed extras of everything. He had this nervous habit of switching out O₂ containers before he went to bed — he was terrified of waking up suffocating. It’d happened once a year or two back. There was a good chance that he’d packed extras for this mission too, or if nothing else they’d still have his half-empty O₂ canisters from the trip over.
That was if they had their lochsleds though. Several reports had called in over harrier class dragons wandering the area. If they’d gotten separated from their crews... she could only hope that they hadn’t also lost their sleds.
The sun traveled across the expanse of the sky just the same as they traveled the endless stretches of the desert. She passed the lochsled graveyard in the distance sometime around sunset and finally made it to the mouth of the labyrinth just after the sun disappeared on the horizon.
The violet glow would linger for some time, but the temperature had already begun to drop steeply.
She pressed on her radio. “Alison Kheely to Copernar Tower. I’ve made it to the labyrinth. I can see tracks heading in. Fresh ones, no older than a day. Over.”
Copernar Tower answered over a crackling signal. “Copy that, Kheely. Find a place to set up camp and wait for backup. The nearest backup I could find won’t get there until tomorrow morning. Over.”
“Tomorrow morning?” She asked aloud but didn’t think to press down on the button, shaking her head incredulously. They were wasting time. She set her jaw, steadying her gaze on the sloping descent into the labyrinth. She pressed down on the button. “I’m going in, Tower. I’ll report back in a few minutes. Over and out.”
“Negative Kheely, I repeat that is a NEGATIVE —” Alison had already called for the crew to start moving, consuming Tower’s voice in static until it cut out entirely.
She’d already begun shaking from the cold, her own breath fogging up the glass of her helmet. She could see her dragons’ breath as well, little puffs of smoke as they jogged down the slope and into the canyon proper. Its walls rose tall above her, quickly blocking her sightline of the surrounding area.
They followed the winding path Solena and Garrett had taken before her, clear claw prints stamped into the ground ahead of them.
Thirty agonizing minutes later, she was beginning to consider if this had been a mistake. Her battery could only last so long after dark. As far as she went into the labyrinth, she’d need to make back out to report to Copernar Tower.
She’d almost turned around when she stopped.
At first, it didn’t register in her brain what she was seeing.
She halted the sled, getting off and walking slowly over to the next bend in the crevasse. She knelt down, scooping up one of two broken harness chains between her fingers and tracing them back to their source.
Two sleds. One had been snapped in half like a toothpick, a large boulder crushing the cargo carriers. The other one had its solar panels torn off, and scraps of its metal hull led up to it like a bloody trail. The name “The Crone” was still visible on the second one. Solena’s sled.
All the blood drained from her face in an instant. She scrambled towards the sleds, but there were no bodies. Most of the supplies had been taken, other than the stuff the rock had crushed in Garrett’s sled. The emergency supplies from both sleds were gone.
The kits carried all kinds of gear. Stuff for patching up helmet breaches. Emergency blankets. Extra radios. Flare guns, one each.
She was almost relieved – they must have crashed somehow but took their things with them when they left. Maybe they used their climbing picks to get themselves out. She looked around quickly for any sign of damage to the cliff face, but she saw nothing.
Her eyes instead caught a half-crunched camera some feet away from Garrett’s sled, and something dark staining the walls and ground near it.
Alison had all but forgotten about the chill, but she shook all the same as she picked up the camera and turned her flashlight on.
The dark stains were red. Dried crimson.
She stared in shock, unable to move.
Blood. It had to be. But there were no bodies here. Hardly any supplies. Blood meant a suit breach at the very least. A suit breach could kill you in seconds. Her mind ran over a thousand scenarios, trying to justify the amount of blood lost versus how fast you could repair a breach.
Her radio buzzed to life, Tower’s voice just barely coming through. “Copernar Tower to Alison Kheely, come in Alison Kheely. I have a contact in the area boosting my signal from a repeater tower, but I’m not sure how long it’ll hold. Do you copy? Over.”
Alison’s throat and lips were dry. She could hardly speak. The voice that came didn’t sound like herself. “...Reading you, Tower. Over.”
There was a sigh of relief, or maybe just exasperation. “Are you still in the canyon? Have you seen anything yet? Over.”
Alison stared at the remains of the two lochsleds for several seconds without responding. The blood on the canyon wall. On the sand. Tower would write them off as dead if she said anything. She tucked the exposed guts of Garrett’s camera into her bag, taking great pains to control her breathing. “N-Negative. No sleds, no dragons, no supplies. There are tracks, though. Leading further in. I – I can keep following them, I think. O-Over.”
“Negative, Kheely. Like I said before, you need to get out of the labyrinth and find somewhere nearby to shelter for the night. You can continue the search in the morning. Over.”
There were tears welling in her eyes, blurring her vision. “It— The labyrinth will be full of fog in the morning. I’ll have better visibility if I just go now.” Her voice shook more than she wanted it to. “…Over.”
The radio operator was unyielding. “Negative, I repeat, negative. Harrier Kheely, find somewhere nearby to shelter for the night. You’re no use to anyone if you go missing too. Do you copy? Over.”
Alison didn’t respond. She could do little more than stare at the scene in the canyon.
“Copernar Tower to Alison Kheely, do you copy? Over.”
Still, she didn’t answer. Her eyes traced the tracks to where they disappeared around another bend. It didn’t make any sense. If they were attacked — if they were in danger, why not come back out of the canyon? There were only footprints leading further in. Nothing leading out.
The radio clicked to life again, but this time it was quiet for several seconds before the operator spoke. Her voice was softer than before. “Listen, Kheely. …Alison. My name is Tala. You can call me that if you want. When I was your age, I used to be a harrier too. I know what it’s like to have people go missing, especially friends. I know you’re scared for them. But if you go running in there without a plan, you’ll go missing too. Or worse, you’ll die of hypothermia. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. And if they were here, I’m sure they’d tell you they wouldn’t want it either.”
Alison’s nose burned, a headache growing in her temple as she tried to hold back her tears.
Tala continued. “I’m getting a very weak signal from you, but I think it’s accurate. If you take the passage to your left, you should be able to find a way out and camp under a ridge there. Please, Alison.”
She took a deep, slow breath in, nodding to herself. Wherever they were, they couldn’t be far, but she wouldn’t last much longer in the cold like this. “Okay. ...Okay. I’m heading out now. I’ll come back in – in the morning. Over.”
They followed Tala’s directions and soon found the ridge she’d mentioned. It wasn’t too far from the labyrinth, just a little plateau of rock she could set up on. She’d have a good view of the canyon in the morning, even with the fog.
She hoped.
Alison got Oreo to unhitch the crew, unable to reckon with the tiny pins herself anymore. Shaking profusely, she set up the heater panels and built her tent atop them, sitting down and waiting for the heat to kick in.
Her breath continued to fog her helmet.
She was dimly aware of her crew shifting restlessly outside, but her surroundings were a blur. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. The smashed lochsleds. The blood on the rocks. The damaged camera.
She slowly pressed down on the talk button once again. “Tala? Are you there? Over.”
“I’m still here. Is something wrong?”
“You… said you used to be a harrier. Why did you stop?”
There was a long pause before Tala spoke. “…well… I don’t know about you, but… in my time, the only people that really got into the harrier business were people that were already busy running from somethin’ and... figured they’d just pick up and keep running as long as they could. Trouble is you can only really run for so long before whatever’s tailing you catches up. The Red takes its pound of flesh, one way or another.”
“One way or another,” she echoed quietly to herself. She let a second pass before she responded. “I’m sorry. For going in there like I did. I… kept thinking they’d just be around the next bend.”
“It’s... alright, Alison.” Tala sighed. “Get some rest, Kheely. Help will be there in the morning. Over and out.”
“Over and out.”
Alison set the radio down next to the rest of her supplies, letting the silence sink in all around her. The heaters were starting to warm her up through the bottom of the tent, but her hands and legs were entirely numb anyway. She felt like she was going to throw up.
She laid down, but her eyes never left the direction of the canyon. The direction of the broken lochsleds. The broken camera. The blood on the canyon walls. She refused to let herself cry until she knew for sure what had happened, but that didn’t make it any easier.
These things... happened sometimes.
As harsh as it sounded, it was the reality of the job.
People would just leave one day, and you’d never see them again. Sometimes you wouldn’t know for months that they weren’t coming back – not until you found yourself back in that area again.
Sometimes it was a crash. Sometimes it was a suit breach. Raiders, even.
Sometimes you’d go the rest of your life never knowing.
Knowing was its own luxury of a curse.
Every harrier she’d met had seen it happen at least once.
All she could do now was hope. Hope that the blood on the walls wasn’t theirs, or that by some miracle it wasn’t blood in the first place. Hope that they’d made it somewhere with their supplies. Hope that they were sheltering somewhere too. That they’d found any kind of warmth to keep them going.
She picked up the radio again, tuning it to a more local signal and speaking quietly into the radio. “...Solena? Garrett? I... I know... Chances are you can’t hear me. Especially if you’re down in the canyons still. But... But if you can do anything to let me know you’re out there, I’d really appreciate it. I just… would really like a sign. Anything. Radio response. A big campfire. One of the flares from the emergency kit, just — some kind of signal that you’re still out there.”
She waited, her words suspended on the static. Watched. Listened.
But nothing came.
Not over the next minute, or ten, or twenty, or thirty.
Alison finally just swallowed hard, setting the radio aside once again and settling in for a long night ahead.
Forgotten on the handrail of the lochsled, the camera continues to record as the night passed quietly by.
The footage is mostly innocuous – it catches little more than shooting stars and Alison’s restless shifting in her tent for the first few hours. As the battery slowly but surely dwindles, it begins to look as though the night will pass without incident... until subtle movement marks the right-hand corner of the screen.
Without night vision, there’s nothing much to make out. Shadows move on shadows, nothing more than a shapeless blur that shifts along the edge of the plateau. It moves out of frame, but the sound of slow steps disturbing the desert grows.
There’s a soft click.
Something brushing against the microphone.
The camera shakes, prodded by the unknown intruder.
Footsteps circle the sled, the dark blemish against the land reappearing at the other end of the camera and slinking low across the ground towards Alison’s tent. An appendage extends from the mass, disturbing the entrance of the tent, but it doesn’t get a step closer.
There’s a soft pop in the distance as a bright light shoots into the sky, a flare arcing up from the depths of the labyrinth.
The entire sky turns bright orange for several seconds as it flies, clearly silhouetting... a body. Human, or at least, distinctly humanoid in shape, but the way it moves is entirely unnatural.
The creature startles, standing alert for several seconds before homing in on the smoke trail and diving out of view, back towards the labyrinth from which it emerged.
The light fades as the flare falls once more, vanishing into the darkness of one of the crevasses. Alison stirs within her tent but does not appear to wake.
Silence and darkness return to the desert.
The camera catches nothing more before it runs out of battery.
>> END OF MISSION LOG #2
So much tension and build up, can I get log three already??
So ready for Log 3! What happens next!?