Ceteroquin: A Carved Metallic Rose
This is the ninth part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.
The next morning’s “regroup” felt in a sense like a continuation of the one the evening before, because for most of them it was. The officers had laid low and had nothing to report. As for the rest of them, well, they’d followed Frank Mario’s suggestion, with predictable results.
Judging by all the furtive looks, possessive stares, not to mention the overt shouting and finger pointing about who had been in which room at what time and why, the Captain could only imagine what had gone on. Whatever it was, there was little he could do about it. He couldn’t put unrealistic expectations on the group. How else were they all supposed to act under the circumstances? The officers had the benefit of business to transact, relieving them of the tension and apprehension of having nothing to do while waiting for something terrible to happen. He got it. He just hoped they could all hold it together long enough.
*
For that night’s meeting, several among the group had to be roused from bed – where, for once, they were all actually sleeping. Immediately following the morning’s meeting, they’d gone off to run their pop-up marketplace, and there had been no time for sleep. None of them, not even Frank Mario, had been able to find anyone around at any of the bars or casino floors willing or able to sell them more drugs to keep the whole thing going.
In the midst of trying to sell their merchandise (and themselves as being an exuberant and delight-filled artistic troupe), they all crashed. It was very unpleasant, but not worse than that. Just unpleasant. Just a bad time. As soon as they could, they all passed out hard.
Now everybody was disoriented and foggy, unsure if the four or five hours of sleep they’d just had would be enough to propel them into another night of more of the same.
That wasn’t all they weren’t certain about. Now they’d come to arguing rather loudly as to how many days and nights they had actually been there.
“This is the second night,” Molly insisted. “It just seems longer because we stayed up all night last night.”
“You’re crazy!” Frank shouted back. “It’s been four days and this is the fourth night. Are you nuts? What the hell, girl?”
“What?” Melissa shrieked, jittery and frazzled. “You’re both wrong. This is the third night. I can count them all off.”
But both Molly and Frank had counts of their own. Jason and Nick and the Doctor mostly looked on with ambivalence, only occasionally contributing some fact or recollection. None of them could be entirely sure who was correct.
The officers fortunately had maintained an accurate count of the number of days, nights, and indeed hours they had spent thus far on the Blue Striper – and could actually agree about it. Having neither the time nor the patience to deal with the others, they left them to work out their own (apparently myriad) struggles and focused on the task at hand. If what he was gathering about Molly’s unusual activities palpably tugged at Ben’s attention, he put in the extra effort to block it out. It wasn’t really his business, he reminded himself. Even if there were an issue, it could be dealt with later.
It would have to be.
What they presently found so enigmatic about the day’s events was how typical, practically textbook, they had been – just as with the events of the day before. In late morning, they had traveled by vacuum tube to an area of the Striper that, while not particularly far in terms of perceived distance or travel time (which could sometimes be hard to pin down when it came to vacuum tubes), was clearly outside of the touristy areas. Emerging from their transport, the “landscape” they found had a distinctly local character, which is to say it was fairly shabby. Those who lived and worked in this area did not appear particularly prosperous.
They had walked to a particular intersection and occupied a bench. Before long, an old woman emerged from some dingy alleyway. She smelled as though she’d been making stew – manually, making stew – all day. Perhaps she actually had. She produced a cloth roll from within her garment and opened it before them, revealing various trinkets which she tried half-heartedly to sell them, before smoothly dropping the promised message.
She spoke a few coded sentences, then repeated them. Ben bought a carved metallic rose from her. “For Molly,” he said. Then she left. They passed an hour or so exploring dirty shops and eating surprisingly decent street food before returning to the hotel.
None of them could say what, exactly, they had been expecting, but all of them had expected something different. It was still too neat. The message had neither been contradictory nor complementary to the message they had received the previous day. Just different.
None of this was inconceivable, but it was confusing given that they’d all been expecting more of a…trap. There was also the fact that they’d only been told to expect one contact followed by one rendezvous.
They just couldn’t see it, whatever it was.
All the Captain said that night to the rest of the crew was a gentle suggestion to skip the uppers and to try to get their shit together at least a little. Neither Laura nor Ben said anything to them at all – aside from Ben handing Molly the metal rose.
She had smiled at him through the mist of addled eyes.