Ask stupid questions, get handed funny answers. I laughed all the while typing this little interlude. Back on the surface, we get a short glimpse into what Kira’s been up to. Being one of her, that’s quite a lot.

The last line illustrates that being a human at the mercy of demi-humans in an autocratic political system does have some drawbacks.

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

Kira heard the crack of rock breaking and looked just to see Alicia’s head vanish into a hole.  Quickly but carefully to the edge, she looked down. 

“Allie!” she shouted, pulling out her flashlight.  Nothing.  She turned it on.

Straight down at least five meters then a bend to the west.

“ALLIE!” Nothing.  “Dammit.”

She stood.  The rest of their team was at the cave’s mouth.  Four men, two women.  Too far from any town for signal, they did have their own transmitter and generators.

“This is an emergency,” she announced in Russian, as the six were all nationals of that empire.  “Princess Alicia is lost down a hole.  I need you to get satcom access in less than one minute.  You will find the longest length of rope or cable we have.  You will attach a camera/mike to it.  Y’all have five minutes.  I know there’s no one else in our immediate area, but there are always independent miners about.  You last three will begin to physically secure this area.”

“Connexion established, Ma’am,” the communications woman announced.

Aqua, she thought.  And was somewhere else.

In what appeared to be a Mediterranean villa in either Palermo or Capri, Kira beheld a thin man in a formal black tuxedo.  Black hair slicked back.  But yellow eyes, and slitted, like a cat’s.

“I sense your urgency.  Let us play dangerously,” he said to her, raising his right hand and taking off a white glove.  He lowered all but his index finger.

Oh, boy.  I hate this part.  Her image in his construct reflecting what she was wearing at the cave mouth, she removed the glove from her skinsuit and did the same, touching her finger to his.

“Guh!” she shouted, falling down into the Martian dust.  The Russians were startled.  “I’m fine!”  I’m not.

In doing that, she conveyed everything she knew about the situation in an instant.  But that level of data transference, even for a demi-human, was painful.  Sometimes, fatal.

There will be no way to maintain a live connexion down that hole, Aqua now thought at her.  An autonomous ES with a motor is being assembled in Ekaterinberg.  That, and transport to you, will take three hours.

Three hours!  Is there nothing I can do?

Pick a stout fellow, load him up with food and a good medical kit, and volunteer him to go down after her.

No one would volunteer for that…!

You are volunteering them.  This is a hard world; they are hard people.  You are a hard person.

Dammit.

Understood.

Catching her breath, Kira looked around.

“Mikhail Zhukov?” she called, waving him over.  “You’re about to be a hero…”