“Hey, Clayton,” Henry Nicholson whispered from his rack. He turned his head toward the other man in their shared quarters. The man just grunted, doing his best to stay asleep. “Clayton, come on. This is important.”
“What do you want, Nicholson? I’m trying to sleep.” Well, that was fair. They had another 24 hour shift in the labs in just a few more hours, and time spent sleeping was invaluable. Still, something was bothering Nicholson.
“Just listen!” Nicholson’s eyes expressed a slight sense of paranoia, which was not in small part due to the nature of the dream from which he had just awakened. Silence followed.
“I don’t hear anything, Nicholson. What am I supposed to– Wait.” Clayton sat up and looked at Nicholson, who gave him a ‘told you so’ look. “What happened to the engines?” The engines were loud enough to be an annoying sound wherever one happened to be on the Leviathan. Their silence could not be good news.
“I don’t understand. It’s Tuesday. What are the engines doing off?” In order to avoid being spotted as unusual, the ship remained in constant movement all days but Saturday, which was a work-free day for the Thorlinthians. That meant any movement on the sea for anything other than storm avoidance was not permitted on Saturdays, so even the Leviathan stopped, again in an attempt to avoid detection. This had been the pattern for four straight years, since the ship had headed out into the ocean and faked its own disappearance.
So why were the engines silent? This could only mean one thing: Thorlinthians were onboard. “How many do you think there are?” Clayton asked with a worried expression.
“If we’re very lucky, a lot. If we’re very unlucky, one.” Clayton’s eyes widened at this comment.
“You don’t think they’d send a Dragon Rider here, do you? I mean, they’re for taking down government facilities and being highly visible. Nobody even knows we’re still out here except top tier Resistance members…”
“I don’t think they’d send a Dragon Rider, no, but before we left, there had been stories on the radio about a Valkyrie called the Angel of Death. She doesn’t have a copilot, though. Some say she died, and others say she’s just that good. Either way, she’s supposedly been taking out Top Secret facilities single-handedly since Phoenix Day seven years ago. If there’s not a raiding party here, it’s got to be her. And if we’re very, very lucky, we won’t all die.” Nicholson grimaced at the thought as he sat up and began to dress. Clayton was doing the same.
“Well,” Clayton said with a slight, half-hearted smile, “I guess we’d better make sure we send as much information back to the Muffin Man before that happens, then.”
Nicholson nodded, and they both headed out. When they got to their lab, they immediately started the ERT protocol, which released a virus that would hack all the other computers on the ship and send their data to the Muffin Man, the leader of the Resistance. They didn’t know what all was being researched there, but they knew it wasn’t all oxygen production. They had heard rumors of a secret weapon being developed in the area beneath the lab decks, which could only be accessed through special hatches that remained closed at all times. The people down there must have their own way of getting food.
“Hey, Clayton,” Nicholson called out from one of the computers. “Why is he called the Muffin Man? You’ve met him, right?” Clayton nodded.
“It’s got something to do with his name. Before he joined up, he was CIA or Secret Service or something like that, but he was declared dead when all those organizations were taken out by the Dragon Riders. He’s still got a pretty nice scar from it, too. Anyway, if he uses his real name, they’d probably figure out he was alive and start looking for him, so he calls himself the Muffin Man.”
Nicholson made a sound that made it clear he understood and dropped the subject. Everyone knew the Muffin Man, which was kind of the joke. Since it was a children’s rhyme, you could ask anyone if they knew the Muffin Man, and they’d respond, which was also normal. What was not normal was that instead of replying with Drury Lane, a local who was part of the resistance would say the location of the nearest Resistance safe house.
“Talking about the Muffin Man always makes me so hungry,” Nicholson said, patting his belly in a way a larger man may. It was a habit he had gotten into before Phoenix Day, and his weight loss over the years hadn’t been able to end the tic. It was an amusing sight on such a thin man, but it reminded Clayton how much things had changed since the Thorlinthians arrived.
“I heard they legalized a standard trade system a couple of years ago. Apparently the trade freeze was just to stabilize the world economy. I wonder what else is legal again.” Clayton didn’t actually care what was legal anymore, but it was a common topic of conversation.
“Clayton, you’ve been using that line for two years now. I haven’t heard anything you haven’t heard.” Nicholson wasn’t in the mood to talk about the Thorlinthians, which was understandable. A few hours passed without much more conversation.
“Wow,” Nicholson said, surprised. “That’s everything. I guess we may as well go get something to eat since we aren’t dead yet. Maybe there’s no Thorlinthian here, after all.” He chuckled, hopeful.
“Yeah,” Clayton agreed as they headed out of the lab into the passageway. “Maybe they’re just performing maintenance on the… engines…” They stopped in the middle of their walk to the galley as they looked first at the open hatch, then at the blue-haired woman pointing a pistol at Clayton.
The woman, haggard and beaten in appearance, speaks in a voice that seems to have taken a few blows to the vocal chords, “What is this place, who are you, and where are we?”