Shouting at Nomads

[Foxglove]

Breaching the atmosphere of Planet Malta, Geneviève was glad that everything had, in the end, had worked out fine. She had received a message from a friend that she had, frankly, not believed she would see again. Apparently, she had gotten into trouble, and being that Geneviève had been relieved of her position within the CID recently due to internal political changes, she found herself with more free time on her hands than she would have liked. She had found Nesrin drifting through Omicron Kappa, in a Dromedary. She was painfully aware that she wouldn't have been able to help her if Nesrin hadn't said that fuel was needed beforehand. Although the engine wasn't really fond of pure deuterium, they had made it back to Malta, which was pretty much the only place where Geneviève would know where to take a friend that had no credits to buy even a small room on Barrier Gate. Gen had a bit of land that had been gifted to her by President Martelli before. It originally belonged to Rosa Veraz, the previous owner, before she betrayed the Nación. Gen was aware that she could not legally procure land, since she was not a pureblooded Maltese. Technically, she counted as slave, and those could only be gifted possessions by their masters. If someone were to examine closely what she had, the question of who her master was and who gifted her the property would arise, and given that she was technically working for Enma Loyola, and not Cristina Martelli, there would be a problem. Thankfully, nobody had bothered up until this point.

Cardamine fields on Malta.

Looking at the sensors, she knew that the Dromedary of Nesrin was behind her. The girl was following her as she had intended to, which was good. Causing wanton damage on a world that was so absorbed in their little games of 'I have more than you' was not a recipe that would endear them to the neighbors. Descending below the clouds, Gen led Nesrin for a good ten minutes to the dayside of the planet, somewhere around the equatorial region. Given that Malta might have been a better choice than Crete when it came to hospitality, it was still a really warm world, and temperatures around the equatorial regions, especially during summer, could sometimes climb up to 70°C in the sun. It made Gen wonder how that would work with the fact that the interior of Nesrin's ship was probably very cold, given the hours upon hours that it had drifted through space without life support. It made Gen wonder just what the hell Nesrin was made of. Going further down, they flew overhead of miles and miles of Cardamine fields. A lot of Malta's surface simply wasn't used for housing, forest, but simply the production of the backbone of their infrastructure. There had been efforts to change that, and drive further the industrialization, but the Maltese were a stubborn folk, and thus what could take only a couple of decades would probably take another century before it was accepted. It was almost immediately apparent that the Cardamine fields often surrounded estates, as the families running them usually lived next to their properly, together with the slaves they employed. Some of these compounds had rather impressive sizes, some even reaching sizes of cities or big townships. Towards one of the latter were they headed right now.

It was immediately apparent that there were no such thing as landing pads, or at least not for Geneviève, who was simply steerind her ship towards a really rocky patch north of the assortment of buildings. She didn't seem to be the only one who got the idea of simply placing ships in the middle of the savannah, as an assortment of other ships of the small variety was already there. Touching down required a degree of patience, as the computer would need to make sure the ground was actually strong enough to support the ship, given that it was not completely even like on landing pads, but Gen had enough practice to manage. With the ship landed, she opened the hatch to climb out. The bloody helmet of her flight suit wouldn't budge off her head, even after she had undone the straps. It was too small, she just noticed, but she had been in too much of a hurry to notice. Seeing Nesrin hover her ship a few dozen metres off, she figured she'd manage.

Now if only that bloody helmet would come off.

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