Chapter 27 Lucky Numbers by Ducky

Icarus and Verity worked at the glowing blue screens together all night, taking their alternate shifts sleeping. Verity squinted at the papers laid out before her. In the dark of the early morning, the bare light bulb hurt her eyes, but she kept working. There had to be a way to make this happen. Getting off Diamondus was their only hope. Getting to Carrotus was her only hope.

Icarus, hunched over a cup of coffee, slid a stack of papers onto the floor and shoved his paws into his eyes, rubbing tiredly. "It's going to work," he said. "I've got it."
Verity looked up from her computer screen. "Tetracolyhydroxide," Icarus garbled.
"Gesundheit," Verity offered, "That's a mouthful."
"It's the stuff we need. It's a composite, completely blocks magnetic pull to and from any magnetically attractive material. It was apparently first used- and made 'famous', if you will- in the craft that broke the land speed record on Medivo in 3761." Icarus muttered this from the dark, shuffling printed pages. "Of course," Verity concurred. "Medivo has an iron core. It's molten, but the magnetics are much stronger than on, say, Carrotus, with a molten rock core. If the craft was demagnetized, it would practically float on the surface of the planet."

A sleepy Naomi entered the hull of the shuttle. "So where do we get enough of this to coat the shuttle?" Icarus shook his head. "I have no idea. It says on this site that it's a ...controlled substance... wait, that can't be right." He clicked, frowning at the screen.
"Tetracolyhydroxide is also used as a--"
"-- hallucinagen," Jesse said, coming into the room as well.
"Um, what he said," Icarus finished.
"The form used as a drug is the purest form of the composite," Jesse said sitting down beside the screens on the opposing side of the room. "Plus, because it's illegal, probably the only form you are going to be able to get. Govermental consent and all that crap- they require permissions signed by sixteen heads of state and four federal vouchers and what have you, to use for strictly monitored experiments and designs. The ship that broke the last land speed record on Medivo was confiscated."
"I remember it, " Verity said, suddenly distant. "I was only a little girl. Six maybe."
"I didn't know you lived on Medivo," Naomi said gently, but Verity shook her head, "I left twenty, twenty-one years ago, when my parents died." she changed the subject abruptly, turning to the white rabbit. "You seem to know enough about it," she said, her forehead creased.
"A hit is a liquid gram," Jesse continued, uncomfortable under Verity's vicious green stare, "and a hit costs about as much as Queen Eva's diamond. Rest her soul, " he added in reverence. Looking around the cockpit, he concluded- "I'd say you'll need about two gallons to paint this ship."
There was a small silence. "So um... can you get it for us?" ventured Naomi.
"Yeah, sure, no problem." Jesse smiled, the first time they had seen his face without sadness shrouding it.

Later that afternoon, Verity stayed alone to watch the ship while Icarus and Naomi went to buy supplies. Jesse was still gone, having galloped off as soon as the sun came up to find what they needed. Verity was still disgruntled at Icarus's choice to bring that white rabbit with them. She would never be off her guard. But he was right in that ...Jesse, as he insisted upon calling himself, was well acquainted with the illegal side of this area. He'd found them what they needed, all right, and it was thanks to Naomi not exactly being the worst off in monetary terms that they were almost ready to try again. Carrotus or bust, there was only one problem.

Sitting in the small cockpit of the shuttle, she gazed out the tinted windshield and shoved her hands into the pockets of her scuffed leather jacket. In one pocket, she touched the vial that she carried with her to this day, still the same six drops of poison. Give me sign, she would say at night, when she was young, that I can end this now. In the other, she delicately fingered a soft, worn page. There was a name scribbled on the blue-lined notebook sheet, faded with the year that it had traveled with her, but still clear, her mentor's handwriting familiar forming the unfamiliar name.
"it's your choice, Verity," Eddie had told her that night in the back room of the bar.
She missed the bar, missed bartending. What had happened to that? She remembered smiling at the familiar faces and asking carefully selected questions of the unrecognizable ones.
She remembered Raphael entering the bar and the thrill she always felt when she saw the tabby cat's face looking back at her. There was a thrill of anger and hate coupling with the love now when she saw Raphael's face in her head, just as she couldn't look at the face of the white rabbit insisting that he was not Jonathan. Verity admitted deep down inside her that he was too young, that the rabbit who blasted the cavern into Eddie's chest had been at least ten years older than her.
But that changed nothing, and she clenched her paw around the paper in her pocket.
"He'll make you into a machine," Eddie had told her.
"You'll never have your own life back." She withdrew her paw from the pocket and looked at the crumpled paper. "Are you willing to give up your soul for what you believe in? Don't think lightly on this, Verity." But Verity's decision was no longer based on choice and it was clear as the war waged what she had to do. She unfurled that paper and read the name, though she had long since memorized it. "He's a vampire," said Eddie's voice in her head, "If you let him bite you, you'll have it all. You will be able to do what you want. You will have the power to change this world. But you will also spend the rest of your days with the devil himself living inside you, and even if you end the war, you will fight him for eternity. I'm giving you his name because you are the only rabbit I have ever known who I know has the strength to face off against hell itself."
Louie Greenthorpe. Verity stalked to the back of the ship to clean her RF for the sixth time that day.

Naomi and Icarus walked through the village, paws clasped, but without speaking. As the days passed there seemed less to say than when the black rabbit had first seen the love of his childhood laughing in the bar that night.
She spoke eventually- "Are we doing the right thing?"
Icarus nodded without hesitation.
"I'm sad when I think about my father," Naomi said, "Even though I know this is better, I wish it didn't always have to be one way or the other. I wish we could be happy all together. When I go back, how do I know he'll even look at me? I just don't..." she stopped as Icarus pressed his cold paw to her lips.
"I knew your father well, “he said, caressing the soft fur on her worried face, "and you are his daughter, Naomi. He loves you."
He held her paws with his and leaned down to her. "But so do I." He looked into her eyes.
"We're so young, Icarus," Naomi said into his ear.
"The war will make us old soon enough," said Icarus, and wrapped his arms around her thin, muscular body. "We are ageless now." On tiptoe, Naomi placed her lips on his, warm and deep. He closed his eyes as he kissed her, but even so a tear escaped them to slide down his cheek.
When he kissed her he relived every moment of their past and every dream of their future, and there was more pain than possible to take, but when he kissed her, at the same time he knew he could bear it and with it whatever the future might bring.

"Be careful with that, little man,” said the burly, tattooed lizard, slouching over the filthy counter housing a glass cased selection of plastic explosives. "I don't know what you're planning with all that tetra, but I hope to hell you're not using it all by your lonesome." He raised a hairless eyebrow.
"its metal, Reg,” Jesse tossed back, "there's more to do with this than funnel it into my brain through my eyes." He gingerly hefted the canvas sack onto his shoulder, feeling the mercurial liquid fluid heavily inside the temperature controlled canisters.
"I guess I probably won't be seeing you back for a while, then."
"I hope not." Jesse flashed a grin. "This should cover our debts." He tossed a small, rattling plastic container onto the wooden counter. Reg's scaly forehead crinkled as he pried off the top. "The hell..." "Take care of those," Jesse said, turning and opening the door, leaving the lizard, tail twitching, gazing at the handful of white, pastel-tinted Carrotian gems.
As the door closed behind the teenager's slim white back, the lizard narrowed his yellow eyes.
"Hmmph," he grunted, and heaved his beer belly off the counter to reach for the grubby telephone on the wall behind him.

It was late that night when the four creatures assembled in the now-familiar corner of the pub they'd frequented for the past week. A rain was beginning to fall over the swaying sign -Marinated Pearl- as Jesse, the last to arrive, slithered inside. The grainy jukebox drowned their voices from outsiders.
"It's all there," Jesse confirmed, nodding at the canvas satchel he'd dropped at their feet.
"It's going to work, " Icarus announced tiredly. "The anti-magnetic coating painted on the shuttle's hull, antennae and controls will prevent the artificial gravitational pull that's holding us in orbit, allowing a supercession of the 80-kilometer force field that's placed to spray the false imagery into our monitors-
"At least, we think it's 80 kilometers. that's all the airspace outside of a given land mass that a government can hold," Naomi uttered a little bitterly into her cider.
"When we hit the estimated 80 kay barrier, we'll see the planet behind us, and we'll be out of mesospheric control of the Diamondian government.
There's just one problem."
"Security?" Naomi queried. 'They're not going to just let us fly off the planet when they see we're not in the Orbit, right?"
"But even so you're flying an f-wing ST-9063, "Jesse said, "Even the built in weaponry is adequate, with shields and all. My father flew an f-wing when I was young and if we've got a good pilot-"
Verity narrowed her eyes at Jesse, but said nothing.
"Naomi's as good as they come when we're talking about flying," Icarus said idly, and Naomi smiled at him.
"I believe it," Jesse said, "But I'm just saying that we shouldn't have a problem, with a gunner and a pilot, getting out of their- legal - range in enough time."
"Well, that is sort of the issue," said Verity, stirring a vodka and lime.
"Using the tetra to demagnetize the ship prevents all outside impulsion to affect the ship. Unfortunately, it also prevents any similar impulses to escape. In essence it will de-locate the ship, make it near to impossible to pinpoint, and thus when painted, the ship will be like a dead thing, no pull, no weight, no heat.
It'll disable the shields, “she said. "I've tried to figure out a way to technologically delete that side effect, but where computers and guns don't figure, I'm afraid I don't do much good, and if there is an answer out there- I know Icarus has looked too- we can't find it. Even if we place an externally located force field generator on the outer surface of the ship, the shielding will just bounce around because the anti-magnetism makes the ship undetectable. The force will just slide off and deflect into space. "

"Anything else?" said Naomi.
"Nope, everything else is cool." Icarus rolled his eyes.
"Let’s do it then. " Jesse leaned forward over the table. "We've only got one shot at this and I don't know about you all but I'd rather die trying."

"No one's going to die, " Verity said forcefully, exhaustedly, "We're all going to Carrotus."